I had never really pondered this question until it confronted me yesterday in The Times (I know, I know…but it was in a café. I didn't buy it or anything). Essentially, the gist of this article, based on research by Professor Elizabeth Cashdan at the University of Utah, is that driven career-women are exposed to high levels of stress, which cause their estrogen levels to drop and some estrogen to be replaced by androgens. This results in lowered ovulation and can even produce a change in a woman's WHR (that's waist to hip ratio, for the uninitiated, and ladies, apparently we're in deep trouble if our waists aren't roughly 70% of our hip circumference). See http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/features/article6073045.ece for full version.
I don't have a problem with the scientific argument presented – Cashdan is actually studying WHR across cultures, from a decidedly anthropological slant (See http://www.anthro.utah.edu/PDFs/cashdan/whr.pdf.) I do object to way article's author, Peta Bee (also published in The Daily Mail) has twisted the research into a not-so-subtle attack on professional women: the notion that "career women" (is it me, or does that read like something of the back of a 1960s Air Stewardess Barbie box?) are not attractive to men. Their bodies are "straight up and down." Dr. Laurence, a London fertility doctor contributes this bit of wisdom in the article's last paragraph: "It is no biological mystery that so many studies have shown men are drawn to women who are curvaceous and have a narrow waist, indications of health and fertility." The article lambasts Kiera Knightley bodies in favor of the Marilyn Monroe/Jessica Alba variety (poor Keira's WHR is only 80%! She best stop acting, now!), implying that if only women cared less about getting ahead at work, they'd stay home, bathing in estrogen, which according to our good London doctor "makes [women] relaxed, calm and thoughtful, the perfect state in which to become pregnant."
Yet only a paragraph before, this same medical gentleman informs us that a woman's sensitivity to estrogen is determined in puberty and largely unalterable. He does not, however, consider an obvious question that follows. Is a woman's career drive, her sense of competitiveness, a function of estrogen (at least in part) and if so, are less estrogen-rich women drawn to high-powered careers because they're not maternally gifted? Bards in medieval society were frequently scrawny or otherwise unfit for work – they were the only ones who could be spared and only their infirmities secured them time to create songs and poetry. Also, a professional life, in my experience, makes one a better mother – I was inspired by my mother's career and loved that fact that she had an active life outside the home. I didn't feel cheated, and while it's true that I spent my time sans maman with a nanny and not filed in an over-subscribed daycare centre, I have only good things to say about my mother's combination of work and motherhood. I'm not really surprised that the good Dr. Laurence ignores these questions, but I am surprised that Bee does. A bit of cyber-digging revealed that she herself has had a child and that her own life represents a third way unacknowledged by her article. Why doesn't she speak up? Where's the female solidarity?
Equally worrying are the lack of responses posted in reply to the article. Reading it enflamed me, but it doesn't seem to have done much for the readership of The Times. The four comments on offer range from something along the lines of "this is all men's fault. I have to compete with them, so I can't have children" to "all this proves is that women aren't good at being men" (who knew that ambition and professional drive were solely male attributes?) to "I have an hour-glass figure and I ALWAYS get pregnant on the first try."
All of this is beginning to make me nervous – with notable exceptions, English women are the most motherhood-worshipping, career-deprecating, anti-feminist crew of sisters I have ever encountered and articles like this make me fear that a Handmaiden's Tale-esque social experiment could gain ground here with terrifying ease. In a way it already has – the default oral contraceptive in the UK contains double the estrogen of my American pill, which (quel surprise) isn't available here. It must have been designed with "career women" in mind.
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