It’s not enough for women to become mothers; they must do it in the right way (with a husband), and at the right time (late twenties, early thirties at a push). Otherwise, they risk disrupting the “natural” order and becoming general menaces to society that must be probed and prodded into eventual submission.
That’s the takeaway, anyway, from the conversations I’ve been having with my single thirtysomething female friends, many of whom, like me, are ambivalent about having children, and even if we weren’t, we lack the necessary infrastructure to even have one if we wanted to.
