Time is money. As schoolchildren, we learned that Benjamin Franklin said this. He did, in Advice to a Young Tradesman, Written by an Old One—a self-help manual that he published in 1748, to teach colonial Americans how they, too, could get rich. But the Founding Father was not the first to recognize that time was money. In fact, when the phrase made its debut in print, it was on the lips of a nameless housewife.
In 1739, a Pennsylvania periodical called The Free-Thinker recounted the sad story of “a notable Woman, who was thoroughly sensible of the intrinsick Value of Time. Her Husband was a Shoe-maker, and an excellent Crafts-man,” the author recalled, “but never minded how the Minutes passed. In vain did his Wife inculcate to him, That Time is Money: He had too much Wit to apprehend her; and he cursed the Parish-Clock, every Night; which at last brought him to his Ruin.”
This particular sensible wife may lie forgotten on the wayside of history. But we have all heard stories like hers. To this day, the male ne’er-do-well, who uses wit to avoid recognizing that it is high time he gets his life together, appears as the hero of countless romantic comedies. A regular patron at the bars in many cities, he remains as lovable as he is indecisive. It is his female partner who will become the tragic victim, if she lets him get away with it. When it comes to romance, many of us still seem to believe that planning is a woman’s work.
* * *
Love takes work, the therapists and self-help gurus tell us. It also takes time, and given that time is money, many daters seem understandably reluctant to gamble too much of it on any one romantic prospect.
Lovers today are less likely to be star-crossed than overscheduled. How often have friends complained that they have “no time to date” or “to invest in a relationship”? How many have brushed one another off with the excuse that it was “not a good time” or they needed “time to think” or “to be alone for a while”?
Different people have proposed different ways of dealing with the problem of being too busy to find partners. Some have tried to turn the search into a game. In the late 1990s, an Orthodox rabbi named Yaacov Deyo became concerned that single members of his congregation in Los Angeles were struggling to meet other young Jewish professionals. In 1998, he invited a group of Hollywood friends to his house to brainstorm solutions. What they came up with, they called “speed dating.”
A few weeks later, Deyo invited all the Jewish singles he could round up to come to a Peet’s Coffee in Beverly Hills and brought a hand-cranked noisemaker—the gragger that Jews use during Purim celebrations. He paired the men and women off and instructed them to chat for ten minutes each; after ten minutes he would whirl the gragger. These afternoon meet-ups at Peet’s became so popular that Deyo began using an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the feedback the daters provided about one another and their interactions. Within a year, copycat events were taking place all over the country. But some high-powered professionals say they do not have time for games. They do not have time even to manage their online dating accounts.
They can turn to Virtual Dating Assistants. The founder, Scott Valdez, started the company in 2012 after trying to hire an online dating assistant over Craigslist. In 2015, for $147 per date, or $1,200 per month, VDA consultants would help a client select prospects and plan the details of a date down to what outfit he should wear.
“Online dating’s a part time job,” a banner across their website trumpets. “Let our experts do it for you!”
The question remains: What’s the dater who doesn’t have hundreds or thousands of dollars to spare every month supposed to do?
* * *
Pragmatists preach that love is all timing. You don’t get married when you find the right one; you marry the one you find at the right time. They say this as if it should be comforting to imagine that our hearts follow a secret schedule—that the right feelings will arrive at their appointed hour, to carry us away with whomever we happen to be standing next to on the platform. But what if the person we find ourselves dating at, say, twenty-eight, is not the “right” person? What if we fall in love long before the train is due to leave, or start looking only after it has departed? What if our lives are not on this track at all?
Romantics, on the other hand, insist that there is no use fretting about how or when we will find love. It will happen when you least expect it! It follows from this worldview that when you do find your special someone, you will “make time.” A person in love will do anything and everything to be with his or her beloved. It is equally clarifying and distressing to believe the reverse: If your lover is not doing anything and everything to be with you, it must not be true love.
In 2004, Greg Behrendt, the author of the bestselling self-help book He’s Just Not That Into You, called BS on men who professed to be too “busy” to be devoted boyfriends. “‘Busy’ is another word for ‘asshole,’” he wrote. “‘Asshole’ is another word for the guy you’re dating.” In case the reader has missed the point, he later reiterates this cardinal “relationships rule” in all caps: “THE WORD ‘BUSY’ IS A LOAD OF CRAP AND IS MOST OFTEN USED BY ASSHOLES … Men are never too busy to get what they want.”
Behrendt gained his expert credentials by serving as the sole straight male script consultant on Sex and the City. Given the fixation of that show on dating—and on female friendships that consist mostly of talking about dating—it makes sense that Behrendt assumes a straight woman can always find time to obsess about the men she is seeing. In the end, however, the romantics and the pragmatists are basically offering the same advice. The one tells you to bide your time until the lightning bolt strikes. The other suggests waiting until a moment that seems opportune. Either way, the point is, Stop worrying. Which is another way of saying: Get back to work!
* * *
As advice, it is not terrible, because the thing is, many daters are not just being “assholes.” They really are busy. The ways that people spend their days and make their livings have always shaped how they experience time. In the decades since the era that the self-help experts have in mind when they refer to “traditional” dating, the rhythms of our lives have changed dramatically.
The custom of dating developed under a particular order. It came from an era when life was supposed to divide cleanly into work and leisure. Even the word “date” comes from the idea that there is a point in time when you will meet up with a love interest. So, too, does “going out” assume that there is a world of entertainment, separate from the world of home and work, for you to go out into.
Perhaps this is why today “dating” often sounds like a slightly sleazy euphemism. When a new boyfriend and I run into an ex of his, his vague use of the verb makes me feel hysterical.
“He said they dated for two weeks,” I whine to a friend afterward. “And then he thought about it for a minute and was, like—actually, less! What does that even mean?”
“It means they had sex, like, three times,” my friend shushes me. “Maybe four. Relax!”
A line like I’ll pick you up at six bespoke a worldview. Dating was a departure from work. A kind of scheduled spontaneity, a date was recreation in its most literal sense: a kind of fun that was supposed to reproduce the workforce.
The patterns of “respectable” middle-class dating also implied a trajectory in time. As dating became the main form of courtship, daters implicitly promised each other that the time they spent together was an investment. It earned them closeness they could draw on in the future. A dater might date around awhile, but it was assumed that a couple would either grow more and more intimate, until its members were ready to get married and start a family, or they would break up and restart the process with someone else.
The advent of free love upset this time line. It allowed strangers to cut straight to sex and lovers to cohabit for years without getting married. The number of American couples “living in sin,” without children, tripled between 1970 and 1979. At the same time, the corporations whose rhythms had dictated the pace of labor and leisure for decades were undergoing massive changes. In the Steady Era, large corporations had offered lifetime employment with good salaries and generous benefits. However, during the 1970s, this model gave way. As competitor manufacturing economies that had been destroyed during World War II recovered, stagflation mounted, and corporate profits crashed, more and more companies began to rely on temporary, contract, and freelance employees.
Older paths toward professional development dead-ended. And as employers began to contract more and more services out, time itself changed. All time might potentially be worth money, but none of it was sure to be. As more and more Americans went from being in-house employees with benefits, to being workers who moved from job to job, the future seemed newly precarious. Feeling precarious makes it difficult to fall in love.
* * *
Today, people do not just work differently from the way they did in the era of college dances or high school steadies. They also work a lot more. The 2014 nationwide Work and Education Survey conducted by Gallup found that 50 percent of Americans in full-time employment work more than forty hours per week. Twenty-one percent of the people surveyed reported working fifty to fifty-nine hours per week; 18 percent work sixty or more. And those are hours on the clock. These figures do not count time spent doing the things that many white-collar jobs require you to do without pay—tasks like commuting, checking and responding to voice messages and emails, or creating and maintaining a social media presence. Not to mention the housework that men earning a “family wage” once expected their stay-at-home wives to take care of.
When everyone has so little time to spare, dating starts to feel less like a pleasurable diversion and more like one more thing to fit in. It can feel risky—and strangely intimate—to spend time on someone new.
A columnist for Elle magazine recently confessed having spurned a date for no other reason than that the thought of spending an entire evening with a stranger made her nervous. “I recently declined a dinner invitation because I didn’t think I knew the guy well enough to be alone with him for two hours.” Her feelings are understandable. But they also seem to preclude ever going out with anyone you do not already know.
While part-time workers and freelancers have more flexibility, mostly they have it worse. Not only do they make less money and get few or no benefits. They are also under pressure to make themselves constantly available. A janitor can rarely afford to turn down an extra shift. A massage therapist who gets paid by the hour does well to keep her evenings free, in case a client suddenly throws his back out.
As the freelance worker hears the ticktock of every hour passing, so, too, do many daters fret about the opportunity costs of committing to any given partner. Young women, in particular, are warned to remain vigilant. We are constantly told that we are dating on a deadline. Let down your guard, and next thing you know you may have “wasted years.”
I wasted years with [Name of Lover]. Has a straight man ever said this? Not that I know of, but when a woman does, after a breakup, everyone immediately understands what she means. Men and women alike are taught that female bodies are time bombs. Any time that a woman throws away on a relationship that does not pan out—which is to say, does not get her pregnant by a man who is committed to helping her raise their offspring—brings her closer to her expiration date. At the stroke of midnight, our eggs turn into dust.
* * *
The first warning came on March 16, 1978. “The Clock Is Ticking for the Career Woman,” The Washington Post declared on the front page of its Metro section. The author, Richard Cohen, cannot have realized just how relentlessly this theme would come to dog daters. His article opened on a lunch date with a “Composite Woman” who is supposed to represent all women between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-five.
“There she is, entering the restaurant,” Cohen began. “She’s the pretty one. Dark hair. Medium height. Nicely dressed. Now she is taking off her coat. Nice figure.” Composite Woman has a good attitude, too. “The job is just wonderful. She is feeling just wonderful.” But then her eyes fall.
“Is there something wrong?” he asks.
“I want to have a baby.”
Cohen insisted that all the women he knew wanted to have babies, regardless of the kinds of romantic relationships they found themselves in.
“I’ve gone around, a busy bee of a reporter, from woman to woman,” he attested. “Most of them said that they could hear the clock ticking. Some talked about it in a sort of theoretical sense, like the woman who said she wanted five children and didn’t even have a boyfriend yet … Sometimes, the Composite Woman is married and sometimes she is not. Sometimes, horribly, there is no man in the horizon. What there is always, though, is a feeling that the clock is ticking … You hear it wherever you go.”
* * *
Within months, the Clock was stalking Career Women everywhere.
A staff writer for The Boston Globe, Anne Kirchheimer, reported that “the beneficiaries of the women’s movement, a first generation of liberated young ladies, this new breed of women who opted for careers, travel, independence rather than husband, home, and baby are older now and suddenly the ticking of the biological clock is getting louder and louder.”
One woman Kirchheimer interviewed, a psychiatrist, jokingly diagnosed the affliction from which she and her other single friends were suffering as “withering womb syndrome.”
Statistics did show that the birthrate had dropped precipitously over the previous two decades. In 1957, the average American woman had given birth to 3.5 children; by 1976, that number had fallen to 1.5. Even women who would eventually become mothers were waiting longer to do so. By 1977, 36 percent of women were giving birth to their first child at thirty or older. It was starting to look as if many might use birth control and abortion to put off motherhood indefinitely.
Would this be the way the world ended? Not with a bomb but the pill?
Stories about the biological clock said no.
In 1982, Time ran a cover story on “The New Baby Bloom” that reported that baby boomers were getting pregnant in droves and that anyone who aspired to motherhood had better get on it. “For many women, the biological clock of fertility is running near its end,” the author, J. D. Reed, warned. “The ancient Pleistocene call of the moon, of salt in the blood, and genetic encoding buried deep in the chromosomes back there beneath the layers of culture—and counterculture—are making successful businesswomen, professionals and even the mothers of grown children stop and reconsider.”
Time, Time said, stopped for no one. Women could dress up in pantsuits all we liked, but in the end, our bodies would call us out.
Even if women were now competing with men for high-paying jobs, and sleeping around outside of marriage, these stories said that free love and the feminist movement had not really changed the fundamentals of what women were. Women continued to be defined by motherhood; even the most successful Career Woman would eventually yearn for children.
This may have sounded like a description. It was an order.
* * *
Naturally, dating on the biological clock was stressful. The fact that women had this expiration date meant that they were not as free as men to enjoy a single life or to focus on their careers. Changing social mores and the pill might make it seem that way, but really they were just dating on borrowed time.
In August 1979, Anne Kirchheimer published another story on The Boston Globe’s front page: “Single Searching and Scared.” The opening described a dire dating scene. A male and female friend decide to cohost a mixer for successful professionals. For twelve women, only two men show up, and one promptly gets stoned to take the pressure off.
Kirchheimer said that the odds were stacked against the “typical woman.” “She’s gotten those degrees, the high salary, and a sense of self-assuredness in the male-dominated working world and she’s getting tired of dating around. She may want marriage and children and be hearing that biological clock ticking. She’s ripe for what, in today’s vernacular, is called ‘a commitment.’” But, alas, “if a man isn’t scared off or turned off by those standards then he probably has what it takes to play the field.”
Commentators like Cohen and Kirchheimer warned female readers that they would feel pressure and panic if they put off getting pregnant too long. At the same time, they expressed a set of rather new ideas about masculinity. Namely, that men’s bodies programmed them not to want relationships or offspring. Free of the time pressures that dictated the love lives of women, men naturally wanted no-strings sex. Never mind that as recently as the 1950s most American men had said that they considered marriage and family the cornerstones of personal happiness. Experts of the 1980s seemed to believe that men and women were destined by biology to approach dating with directly opposing goals. A man had forever to play. But if she hoped to catch a worthy partner, a Career Woman had to plan.
By the mid-1980s, baby boomer women had become an army of “clock-watchers.” That was what the journalist Molly McKaughan called them. With the help of two psychology professors from Barnard, and editors at the glossy Working Woman magazine, McKaughan designed and distributed a survey that asked “How Do You Feel About Having a Child?” She received more than five thousand responses. She found that women’s anxieties about finding partners to reproduce with determined how they were approaching their love lives, as well as their careers.
Her 1987 bestseller, The Biological Clock, reported that women who otherwise held widely diverging attitudes were all “consumed by the subject” of having children. A few expressed remorse for having waited too long to begin their hunt for a father. However, most women had recognized early that they had to date strategically.
A twenty-eight-year-old working in finance told McKaughan, “I have planned every day of my life since I entered college, knowing that I wanted to be extremely successful: first in my career, then in marriage, and finally, in my home life with children.”
This Clock-Watcher accepted that to stand a chance of having the kind of life her male colleagues took for granted, she had to plan tirelessly.
“Time can literally pass a woman by,” McKaughan reflected, “if she waits too long.”
* * *
To this day, evidence of exactly how much female fertility declines with age remains hazy. As the psychologist Jean Twenge has pointed out, many frequently cited statistics concerning female fertility are misleading. In an article in The Atlantic, Twenge exposed the shaky bases of many facts handed down to women as gospel. After scouring medical research databases she discovered that, for instance, the oft quoted statistic that one in three women age thirty-five to thirty-nine will not be able to get pregnant after a year of trying came from a 2004 study that was itself based on French birth records kept from 1670 to 1830. The chance of remaining childless was also calculated from historical populations.
“In other words,” Twenge wrote, “millions of women are being told when to get pregnant based on statistics from a time before electricity, antibiotics, or fertility treatment.”
Another problematic element of data on fertility is that, in general, the information we have comes from patients who visit doctors because they are experiencing fertility problems. It is very difficult to assess what is going on with the population as a whole. How many couples are not conceiving because they do not want to? How many are practicing birth control? It is nearly impossible to know.
Strong scientific evidence has demonstrated that the quantity and quality of a woman’s eggs do diminish over time. To this extent, the anxieties of the Clock-Watchers were well-founded, even if the exact time lines proposed to them could be dubious. But most of the vast body of writing about them fails to mention another, crucial fact: Male fertility declines with age, too.
A few famous men who fathered children when they were septuagenarians are often cited as proof that men have as long as they like to play the dating market. Early in the movie When Harry Met Sally, Sally confidently declares to two of her girlfriends that she is not worried about locking down a husband: “The clock doesn’t really start ticking until you’re thirty-six.” However, when she learns that the longtime boyfriend who recently broke up with her plans to marry the next woman he takes up with, Sally becomes hysterical. She calls Harry and begs him to come over to her apartment to console her. He finds her pitching around her bed in a bathrobe.
“I’m gonna be forty!” she whimpers through her tears.
“When?” Harry asks.
“Someday.”
He laughs kindly. “In eight years.”
“But it’s there,” she insists. “It’s just sitting there, like some big dead end. And it’s not the same for men. Charlie Chaplin had kids when he was seventy-three.”
Despite the famous exceptions, the widespread belief that male fertility is invulnerable to aging is simply false. Among couples seeking treatment for infertility, about 40 percent of cases are caused by the “male factor,” 40 percent by the “female factor,” and a final 20 percent cannot be explained. A large and growing body of research shows that sperm counts, and quality, also sharply diminish over the years. The children of older fathers have a much higher risk for autism and other conditions than those of younger ones do. And often “old sperm” simply flail around and perish around an egg they are trying to fertilize.
These facts have been reported occasionally—almost always as news of a “male biological clock.” The need to include the adjective “male” hints at why this data has mostly gone ignored. Our society speaks as if only women had bodies. Our assumption seems to be that reproduction is a female responsibility first and foremost. Anything going wrong with it must be a woman’s fault.
* * *
Female reproductive systems are not actually like clocks. Our bodies move roughly by the month, rather than precisely by the second hand. As anyone who has experienced PMS can attest, the way every four weeks pass does not feel uniform. Yet despite these inaccuracies, the metaphor of the biological clock captured something real and important that was happening in the American economy.
Two kinds of work time were clashing. The nine-to-five jobs that had been common for most of the twentieth century divided life into two kinds of time: on the clock and off the clock. In the 1950s and ’60s, work done on the clock was thought of primarily as male. Women worked at home, providing care that followed different rhythms.
Anyone who has tried to work from home while tending to a child or an aging parent soon learns that you cannot schedule precisely when someone will need you. It is not easy to quantify exactly what you are doing while you wait for an infant to cry out so you can feed her, or to finish her food so that you can clean up. A time-use study would say that technically you are not performing child care during those moments. But neither are you free to turn to other tasks.
It is hard to focus on work you have brought home while waiting for an elderly person you love to need to be helped to the bathroom. Nor does the state of readiness in which a caretaker waits to perform such a task dissipate once she—it is usually she—has done so. The heart does not beat by the billable hour. Is her bruise or cough or weight loss serious? Will he be all right? Worries like these spill over, shadowing the parent long after she returns to her desk.
Many studies have shown that as middle-class women entered the workforce, they continued to do the vast majority of the housework that full-time wives and mothers once performed. Families that were able to afford help hired other women to assist with housework and provide child care for them. These contractors were usually poorer immigrants and women of color, who were expected to be grateful for the opportunity to leave their own homes and children untended.
In an ideal world, having to pay strangers to do the things that wives and mothers had done all along might have led society to recognize the value of that care and honor it accordingly. Instead, it heightened the impression that care was drudgery and did not deserve much compensation.
The rise of a select group of women in corporate workplaces did not do much to change the belief that housework was women’s work. The hysteria over the biological clock helped make it seem natural that every individual had to do her best to overcome the liability of being female if she wanted to have a career. It made the clash between the needs of human reproduction and corporate work seem like a personal problem—a pathology that struck certain women (“withering womb syndrome”). In the process, it distracted attention from the obvious truth that the real problem was social.
In a country that mandates almost no parental leave and provides no support for child care, it is impossible for women who elect to become mothers to participate equally in the economy. The biological clock hysteria, with its image of a time bomb lodged in every woman’s ovaries, made each woman personally responsible for dealing with that handicap. At the same time, the emphasis that the media placed on motherhood told career women that not having biological children was a devastating failure. Many of them bought it. At least they did not opt out of motherhood en masse or organize to demand better maternity leave or state subsidized child care. Instead, they listened to experts who told them what experts always tell women. There is something terribly wrong with you! But luckily, there is also something expensive you can buy to fix it.
* * *
The assisted reproductive technology industry emerged in the 1970s. It started with sperm banks. During that decade, the development of liquid nitrogen had made it possible to transport and store human sperm for extended periods. Entrepreneurs saw the opportunity to accumulate and trade on human genetic material. Following the lead of farmers, who had been doing this with the semen of prize bulls for several decades already, the first banks called the product they sold “stock.”
It did not take long for them to start opening near prestigious universities. Ads joked that they were offering undergrads the easiest gig in the world. “UC Men, get paid for something you are already doing! Call the Sperm Bank of California.” In fact, a sperm donor could not just spend five minutes in a cubby with smutty magazines, take his money, and run. Most banks required the “contractors” they worked with to commit to donating regularly for at least twelve to eighteen months, provide a clean bill of health, and promise to abstain from alcohol, drugs, and sex for days or weeks before each donation. And of course they held the legal rights to keep a contractor’s stock long after he finished coming in.
Originally marketed as a solution for couples who could not conceive, sperm banks soon began appealing to Career Women who could not find partners to reproduce with. Whether you were uninterested in men, or simply unlucky in dating, sperm banks sold you a chance to “do it on your own.” Comedians joked that customers were likely to get screwed in the process. A New Yorker cartoon from the 1970s showed a glamorous woman in flapperish garb standing in front of an Artificial Insemination Clinic. She watches, aghast, as a diminutive bum slinks out cradling a small pouch marked “$.”
In the 1993 romantic comedy Made in America, Whoopi Goldberg plays a forward-thinking professor who used an anonymous sperm donation to conceive her daughter years ago. When the daughter, who is now a teenager, sets out to find her father, she is shocked to discover that even though her mother requested “black,” she ended up with the sperm of a goonish car salesman played by Ted Danson.
“What do you mean he’s white? Like, white white?” Whoopi demands, when the girl breaks the news.
“White, white, white.” She nods in tears.
In fact, sperm banks closely monitored their stock. They allowed their customers to shop for particular traits in a targeted fashion. Of course, you wanted to know the kinds of things you might learn by flirting with someone in a bar, like height, body type, and “dental regularity.” Sperm banks kept computer databases that listed the physical and psychological qualities of each donor. But they also offered information that would be harder to pick up by simply going out on a date with someone, like his ethnic background and SAT scores. Banks kept baby pictures of donors on hand to show to prospective clients.
Long before people shopped online, these databases suggested a fantasy shopping spree on an Internet of Men. The Repository for Germinal Choice, better known as the “Genius Bank,” opened in Escondido, California, in 1980, claiming to traffic only in the spunk of Nobel laureates; it stayed in business until 1997.
Today, a growing number of banks use 3-D facial recognition software to help customers find donors who resemble whomever they please. The aggregator DonorMatchMe lets users search dozens of databases of both sperm and egg banks in order to find the best one for them. (“The best bank to search,” the website says, “is the one with the donor most like you.”) The website of Fairfax Cryobank, one of the largest sperm banks in the industry, recently added lists of celebrity look-alikes next to their donors’ (baby) profiles.
If it was true, as an article in Newsweek said, that women only date in order to answer “the ancient Pleistocene call of the moon” and “salt in the blood” summoning them to reproduce, Fairfax Cryobank would seem to have made dating obsolete. Why slog through drinks with strangers when you could just upload a picture and get down with a Cary Grant or George Clooney clone?
In fact, the industry quickly recognized that women who took longer to answer their “call” than the biological clock allowed them formed a growing potential market. Technologies for extracting eggs, or oocytes, and fertilizing them outside the human body soon followed.
* * *
Doctors performed the first successful in vitro fertilization (IVF) just months before reporters started clamoring about the biological clock. Richard Cohen’s story on the clock ticking for Career Women ran in The Washington Post on March 16, 1978. On July 25, the world’s first test-tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in Manchester, England. Baby Louise briefly became a global celebrity. But if a marketing team had been trying to come up with an advertising campaign to sell a broader population of women on IVF for the longer term, they could hardly have done better than the spate of stories that Cohen launched.
IVF had been designed to solve a specific medical problem. The mother of Louise Brown had been unable to conceive because of a blockage in her fallopian tubes; her doctors intercepted an egg released during her menstrual cycle, fertilized it, and reinserted it into her uterus. By 1981, however, researchers had figured out how to use hormones to stimulate the ovaries of any woman to release many eggs at once. Soon they were selling IVF to women who had no fallopian tube problems at all.
Different national and local laws govern how many embryos a doctor is allowed to implant via IVF. To maximize the chances of a woman’s carrying a baby to term, doctors usually want to use as many as possible and abort one or more of the fetuses if too many take hold. The chances that women who underwent the procedure might have to have abortions, and the fact that the procedure involved discarding fertilized embryos, led conservative political leaders to denounce it.
During the presidencies of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, Christians on whose votes the Republican Party depended pushed for the government to withdraw support for IVF research. They did not have to push hard. Government funding for the sciences was getting slashed across the board. The result was to create a massive market for assisted reproductive technologies that went almost entirely unregulated.
By the mid-1980s, clinics offering IVF treatments were opening across the country. While sperm banks encouraged women to contemplate having biological children without male partners, IVF let those who could afford it buy a little extra time to try to make their plans line up. But it was not a magic bullet for the problems that the biological clock posed. IVF is expensive; today, it can cost tens of thousands of dollars per cycle, and few health plans cover it. It is invasive. There have been few longitudinal studies of how the hormones IVF patients must take affect their bodies in the long term, and the most recent data suggests some cause for alarm. (In the fall of 2015, a team of British researchers who tracked over 250,000 IVF patients from 1991 to 2010 found that they were one-third more likely to develop ovarian cancer than women who had not.)
Finally, the risk is high that if you wait too long, IVF simply won’t work. The most recent report by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, published in 2012, shows that for women over forty, the success rates of IVF are dismal. For women over forty-two, the likelihood that a cycle will result in their carrying a baby to term is 3.9 percent. Go down to the forty-one- and forty-two-year-olds and the number is 11.8.
For a woman who has been counting on these procedures to start a family, discovering that she cannot do so can be devastating. Particularly after going to such lengths, many women who do not become biological mothers may suffer from crushing depression, self-accusation, and regret.
* * *
Studies show that since the turn of the millennium, women have been growing anxious about their fertility at younger and younger ages. In 2002, the CDC’s National Survey of Family Growth reported that the number of women twenty-two to twenty-nine who had received fertility treatment had doubled over the previous seven years, to 23 percent. Conceive, a newly launched magazine aimed at women trying to get pregnant, found that 46 percent of readers were younger than thirty and 73 percent were younger than thirty-five. In 2006, The Wall Street Journal ran a story on women in their early twenties who were already seeking fertility treatments even if they had been off of hormonal birth control for only a few months.
Earlier generations of working women had accepted that both their careers and their love lives would require them to work on themselves. Advertisements and advice books taught them to see this as an exciting opportunity. It would be difficult to make IVF sound as fun as diet fads and makeup and fashions that the beauty manuals of the 1920s or the Cosmo articles of the 1960s touted. It is, rather, a fallback to which a woman can resort, if she has the means. Yet over the past decade, the ART industry has started marketing expensive interventions, to people who may not need them, as a luxury—or a chance to be proactive. Have you frozen your eggs yet?
In contrast to the language of “stocks” and “gifts” that we use to talk about sperm and egg donation, insurance is the metaphor that dominates discussions of egg freezing. Clinics that offer the treatment often use the language of high finance in their advertisements. They joke about “frozen assets” and speak earnestly about the wisdom of “hedging against” risk. Egg freezing is both a choice and an “option,” in the specific sense that Wall Street traders use that term. When she freezes her eggs, a woman pays a certain amount of money—usually between $30,000 and $80,000, plus annual storage costs—in order to be able to get her eggs back for that price later.
Like IVF, egg freezing was developed for a specific purpose: Young female cancer patients who had to undergo chemotherapy or surgery sometimes elected to freeze eggs before doing so. But in recent years, clinics have started offering the experimental treatment as an option for healthy women, too. Indeed, they encourage women to freeze their eggs as early as possible. If you can afford it, why not buy yourself time?
The logic has convinced some of America’s most successful corporations. In 2012, when Google, Facebook, and Citibank announced that they were considering covering up to $20,000 of the cost of egg freezing as a health benefit for female employees, many people touted this move as a miracle fix for the gender inequality that continues to plague corporate workplaces.
A Time magazine cover story on the subject declared that “Company-Paid Egg Freezing Will Be the Great Equalizer.” The reporter quoted a source who worked in tech. “I have insurance policies in every other area of my life: my condo, my car, work insurance,” she said. “This is my body, and arguably the most important thing that you could ever have in your life … Why wouldn’t I at least protect that asset?”
Women who freeze their eggs report in overwhelming numbers that doing so has made them feel “empowered.” Yet many of them seem to be motivated by romantic, rather than professional, ambitions. They say they are less worried about climbing the career ladder than about finding love.
In 2011, Vogue profiled “a willowy 35-year-old media company executive” who had just frozen her eggs. She stressed the benefits that doing so would bring her while dating. “Leah … knew she was coming dangerously close to the age when eligible men might search her eyes for desperation, that unseemly my-clock-is-ticking vibe. ‘Freezing my eggs is my little secret,’ she says. ‘I want to feel there’s a backup plan.’”
In 2013, the journalist Sarah Elizabeth Richards published Motherhood, Rescheduled. The book follows five women through the process. The author says that she herself is overjoyed at the pressure that having done so takes off. “Egg freezing … soothed my pangs of regret for frittering away my 20s with a man I didn’t want to have children with, and for wasting more years in my 30s with a man who wasn’t sure he even wanted children. It took away the punishing pressure to seek a new mate and helped me find love again at age 42.” This makes egg freezing sound less like a tool for workplace equality than an expensive means to prolong the search for Prince Charming.
Evangelists for egg freezing suggest that the ultimate empowerment for women would be to work hard enough to be able to consume conspicuously and wait, dating forever. Can we really trust that good things come to those who plan?
In order to earn their happy ending, the women in these stories must be willing to go to any length to make things easy on the men they get involved with, just as they must in order to succeed professionally. The American workforce is now more than half female. Is egg freezing really the best fix that we can come up with for the problems that workplace conventions created for men cause for women? Is it not slightly incredible that between policy changes—say, health care and maternity leave policies like those in other developed countries—and an experimental “time-freezing” technology, American business leaders seem to think that freezing time is the more realistic fix?
In romance, the final step of planning is to make it seem spontaneous. Whatever she does, a woman on a date must not let her plan show. Richards, the evangelist of egg freezing, rhapsodizes about how the procedure made it possible for her to feel normal on dates. At least it let her feel normal enough to act normal on them. “It’s a buzz kill on dates when you feel compelled to ask the guy sitting across from you, clutching his craft beer, ‘So do you think you might want kids someday?’” she wrote.
The go-getting women who are cited as advertisements for egg freezing use the language of choice and self-empowerment—the same language that Helen Gurley Brown and Virginia Slims used in the 1960s. You’ve come a long way, indeed, when you can afford to spend tens of thousands of dollars in order to make your date more comfortable. But in practice, the only choice that egg freezing gives women seems to be the choice to buy into stereotypes that perpetuate gender inequality. Specifically, to be the one who does all the work of courtship and then hides the effort it costs her.
It is easy to understand why individual women might want to freeze their eggs. But freezing is never a solution to a problem. On the contrary, it is a way to prolong the existence of a problem. Any apparent problem that a society allows to go on and on must somehow be productive. The purpose of the biological clock has been to make it seem only natural—indeed, inevitable—that the burdens of reproducing the world fall almost entirely on women.
Another group of women, who were also receiving a lot of media attention during the heyday of the Clock-Watchers, prove it.
* * *
While 1980s Career Women fretted about fitting marriage and childbearing into their life plans, authorities constantly criticized other, younger women for failing to time pregnancy properly.
Enter the Teen Mom.
Around the same time that the story of the biological clock broke, policy makers and media outlets started reporting an “epidemic” of teen pregnancies. A press release from the President’s Commission on Population Growth and the American Future announced that the rate of teen pregnancies tripled between 1971 and 1976. The number of teens who became pregnant every year hovered around one million for most of the 1980s, then spiked by about 20 percent around the turn of the decade.
In policy circles, and in the press, the panic escalated. Yet almost all the mainstream reports on these shocking statistics omitted one important detail. Teen birthrates were falling. While nearly 10 percent of girls who were teens in the 1950s had their first child before reaching twenty, in the 1980s, this figure was closer to 5 percent. It was actually the rate of teen marriage that was going down.
What was shocking was not that teens were having sex but that girlfriends were not staying with the boyfriends who fathered their children. In 1950, 13 percent of teen births were nonmarital. In 2000, 79 percent were. A culture of increasing sexual permissiveness may have played a role. But the economy surely did, too. In the 1970s, the shotgun wedding option that so many teens had been forced to take in the 1950s was no longer on the table. If a girl got pregnant in the Steady Era, the father could reasonably expect to find a job that could support her and their family. No longer. In a decade of double-digit inflation, stagnating wages, and unemployment, the solution to teen pregnancy was not marriage. Despite all evidence to the contrary, the conservatives who gained political power during the Reagan and Bush years insisted that it was also not comprehensive sex education or access to contraception and abortion. Republicans systematically blocked access to any of the means that have been shown to reduce teen pregnancy.
A consensus emerged that instead the best way to solve the crisis was to teach young women to manage their lives better. And so authorities started telling teen girls growing up in poor households that they had something in common with well-heeled Career Women. They, too, had to plan. Only, for the opposite outcome.
There is a long and troubling history of advocates of birth control appealing to eugenics. In the 1910s, Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, tried to persuade authorities to legalize contraception by arguing that it would stop undesirable immigrants from reproducing. In the 1950s, the biologists who invented the oral contraceptive pill conducted dangerous clinical trials in Puerto Rico; they justified this choice by saying that the population needed to be reduced. In the 1970s, Latina activists claimed that 35 percent of that generation had been sterilized.
Campaigns against teen pregnancy may have been less overtly exploitative, but they had similar aims. While rich women were told that they would never be happy if they deprived themselves of the joys of motherhood, poor women were warned not to have children no matter what.
* * *
In 1980, the Girls Club of Santa Barbara decided that the mostly black and Latina teen girls they served were in dire need of instruction in “life planning.” The board members decided that they had to “raise the level of their consciousness of today’s world as it really is.” In that world, these young women were extremely unlikely to marry men who would be able to support them. They would earn 59 cents to every dollar that their male peers earned, and if they headed their own households, they faced 70 percent odds of living in poverty. To make the most of their slim chance at a good life, they needed to develop a “flexible and aware mentality.” To help them do so, the directors of the Girls Club developed a life-planning curriculum called Choices.
Choices: A Teen Woman’s Journal for Self-Awareness and Personal Planning was published in July 1983. Festooned with pastel flowers, it was marketed as both a textbook and a trade book. When schools purchased Choices, they also received teacher-training materials. Because the creators wanted Choices to be used in public schools, they developed a companion program for boys, called Challenges. The pagination of the two volumes was coordinated. They used different gender pronouns and slightly different examples so that public schools could use them together to teach coed classes. By 1985, they had been adopted for life-planning programs in twenty-two states. They offered a picture of formal gender equality, separate but equal. Challenges for boys; Choices for girls.
Choices aimed to teach girls about all the career opportunities that were now open to women and get them into the right frame of mind to seize them. “One must remain flexible enough to change,” the book admonished, “but once the basic decision-making skills are learned, the woman is empowered to make sound choices about anything.”
Pages of worksheets allowed students to conduct “Attitude Inventories” on a wide variety of subjects. You were asked to tick off an option from “Strongly Agree” to “Strongly Disagree” in response to statements like “If a working couple buys a house, the husband should make the payments.” “At work, women are entitled to use sick leave for maternity leave.” “Men should not cry.” You tried to answer questions like “How much does a dress cost?” to realize how much you would have to earn. The self-knowledge that you gained from the process was supposed to help you choose wisely in all aspects of life.
Chapter 7 was devoted to family planning. The teaching materials said that by the time the student reached this stage, “she has learned to create a decision-making model for when to have a baby; she has, through values clarification, thought about childcare options. Through an exercise in role-playing, the student learns how much commitment a family requires. The young woman usually concludes that she is not ready emotionally or financially for the responsibility of a baby.”
The authors added that by the time she completed the family-planning unit, the student “has learned to be assertive, a helpful skill in responses that prevent pregnancies.” Being assertive enough to avoid being coerced into sex sounds like a good skill to learn. But you have to wonder what the corresponding page on Challenges said: Try not to rape your girlfriend?
The emphasis on planning and choice put the burden of policing romance on young women—precisely where it had been in the Steady Era. Only now, these women were also responsible for preparing themselves for careers.
Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, life-planning techniques continued to be incorporated into the curricula in a wide range of public and private schools. These programs told young people to look at their romantic lives as part of a grand strategy. More important, they taught students to think that any deviation from that plan was a personal failing.
A future of debt and loneliness continues to be the main theme of outreach aimed at teen girls who might consider becoming mothers. An ad campaign that the New York City Human Resources Administration plastered on the subways in 2013 confronted them directly. Got a good job? one baby asks, bawling. I cost thousands of dollars each year. THINK BEING A TEEN PARENT WON’T COST YOU? text slapped diagonally across the bottom reads. EXPECT TO SPEND MORE THAN $10,000 A YEAR TO RAISE A CHILD.
Another ad featured a tiny girl with an index finger pressed against her lips; she is looking off frame right, as if she is embarrassed for you. Honestly Mom … the thought bubble above her head says. Chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me? The banner confirms: 90% OF TEEN PARENTS DON’T MARRY EACH OTHER.
* * *
Our culture sends very different messages to richer and poorer women about motherhood. Articles aimed at middle- and upper-middle-class women rhapsodize about the incomparable joy that having children will bring into their lives. Poor women, particularly women of color, are warned that having a baby will trap them in a lifetime of poverty. Both claims may be true. Motherhood may be a joyful experience if you can afford it. It may be ruinous if you cannot. But in both cases, the emphasis on planning serves to make the reproduction of the world look like a lifestyle choice—a purely private concern. The imperative to line up your life perfectly suggests that it is moral as well as practical to do so.
This fiction that it is female nature to take full responsibility for reproduction places a tremendous burden on women. And it strains many romantic relationships. The fiction that men and women who desire sexual and romantic relations are hardwired to want opposing things is not good for anyone. I bet you know at least one bachelor who has spent decades unable to commit to any relationship, despite professing that he yearns to do so; I know several. It turns out that even if cultural stereotypes say that a man can date around endlessly without lowering his stock, of course the experience will change him, just as it changes the partners whom stereotypes say he can dispose of at no cost to himself.
The success of the 2007 Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up suggests how desperately men as well as women may want to get out of this impasse. In it, the young, hotshot career woman played by Katherine Heigl spends a wild night celebrating a recent promotion, falls into bed with the schlubby loser played by Seth Rogen, and several weeks later finds herself in the predicament that the title suggests. The first time I heard it summarized, I thought it was a horror movie. If we take the leap of faith that her character would not sprint to the nearest abortion clinic, we get to enjoy a fantasy in which two unappealing people can fumble their ways toward happiness without ever having to make any joint decisions whatsoever.
The unplanned pregnancy is not presented as a disaster. It is a godsend. Especially for Seth Rogen’s character. Stereotypes say that the kind of man-child he epitomizes—unemployed, directionless—is terrified of the responsibilities of monogamy, marriage, and fatherhood. But it is clearly he, not Heigl, who is saved by their chance encounter. Knocking up a stranger rescues the man-child from himself.
The movie makes it clear that if, for whatever reason, the woman played by Katherine Heigl wanted to have a deadbeat’s child at this juncture, she could have managed on her own. This is precisely what makes her a heroine. Indeed, if we thought that she was desperate to snag Seth Rogen, the movie would be unbearably depressing. It is her willingness to take on all the work of reproducing the world that is supposed to make her worthy of the happiness she stumbles into. She earns a man and a family by proving that she would have been willing to do everything herself.
Is it worth it? The greatest risk run by the Clock-Watcher who plans every day of her life, fearing that any misstep or wrong “choice” will derail her, is being disappointed.
How many Career Women have grown into exactly the women they planned, only to find that the future they thought they wanted was not what they expected? How could it not be disappointing after so much work? Like the housewife of Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique, I imagine the Career Woman who returns to work two weeks after giving birth dismayed. The new Feminine Mystique has created a new problem with no name that feels disarmingly familiar. Is this all? Is this what all of that was for?