What is Freedom For?

Up until recently girls were socialized to become wives and mothers, or in the words of the London Economist (sub):

provide comfort and sustenance for their menfolk and children... Any other activity was peripheral.

In Teta, Mother and Me: Three Generations of Arab Women the Christian Arab Jean Said Makdisi describes how she “extricated herself, but only partially” from this traditional culture.

And yes, she is the sister of the late Edward Said, author of Orientalism.

Grandmother Teta was educated in the mission schools of Syria, but

the aim of all this admirable teaching was not the guide the women towards freedom, only to turn them eventually into better wives and mothers.

A graduate of Vassar, Mrs Makdisi returned to Lebanon with her husband to teach at Beirut University College, and found that the Lebanese civil war gave her a “passport out of the isolation of middle-class domestic life.” Echoes of Betty Friedan.

Now she watches her daughters-in-law deftly “juggling family and career.”

The great innovation of modernity is freedom, that is, the release of substantial numbers of people from total immersion in work, principally the struggle of bearing children and supplying the food and shelter to bring one or two of them to maturity.

But the industrial revolution changed all that. Its vast outpouring of wealth eased the struggle of life, and of creating life. We see emerging in the nineteenth century the concept of “voluntary motherhood,” the idea of bearing children as a choice instead of dogged obedience to tradition and the way things are.

But then the question arises: what did you do with your freedom? What is so important and vital for you to do that you should neglect the bearing and raising of children?

It is not surprising that the notion of “overpopulation” appeared at about the same time that the prosperity of the industrial revolution allowed people to become less focused on children and more on their self realization. People could say that parenthood was problematical because more children just made the world more crowded.

But if everyone decides to do something else rather than have children then we get today’s Europe where people are not having enough children to replace themselves.

So the question returns: What is so important and vital for educated, liberal women to do that they should neglect the bearing and raising of children?

That is the question that conservative women writers like Carolyn Graglia in Domestic Tranquility and Jennifer Roback Morse in Smart Sex are raising.

And it is a question that is not going to go away. Because for the vast majority of men and women it turns out that there is nothing more important than having children. The other things that modern freedom affords usually turn out to be self-indulgence and vanity.

If you don’t have children, then you wonder if your life has any meaning.