It is true that young women today enjoy an unprecedented level of financial and social freedom and are able to exercise their independence without the negative stigma that many of our fore mothers had to bear.
Women in their 30s can boast that they have forged impressive careers in all fields, with solid bank balances to match. Women can also choose who they want to be with, how many men they wish to be with and for however long they care to have them around.
However, despite all of these social and economic advances made by the Gen X and Y sisterhood, one pervading problem remains: unprecedented levels of Gen X and Y women are also finding themselves single, childless and in many cases, chronically depressed and lonely.
The irony seems to be that even though they know they have had so many choices along their 20-something way, many are waking up only to realize that the choice to have a career eventually meant the need to forge that career, which in the end, has left them bereft of the time to find a loving spouse, nurture and build a relationship and even contemplate the choice of having children.
Even more frustrating is that women who do find potential mates in their 30s are finding mates with a lot of excess baggage ? the baggage of ex-wives and girlfriends, children from previous relationships and tales of distrust and commitment fatigue.
This baggage is then further compounded by those women in their 30s who come face to face with their own fertility for the first time, who find out the hard way that they have simply left it too late and that unlike their career achievements and capabilities, their physical capabilities have a definite expiry date.
Some are fortunate enough to have the material resources to revert to procedures like IVF to create the much wanted child that they are struggling to conceive on their own. But what the media don’t often advertise is the struggle these women go through, the tales of how traumatic those procedures can be and how high the failure rates for conception are through these processes.
The question is: how did it get to this? Why have seemingly intelligent and capable women prioritized work over the need for love, companionship and family? Was it a conscious choice, or did they simply think their eternal 20’ness would go on forever?
The answer to these questions is that the women of Generation X and Y were the first to be told that they could do anything, become anyone they wished to become and achieve more ? just like any man. As part of that sisterhood, we were imbued with infallible confidence and zeal that we could have everything we wanted simply because it was our right and our entitlement.
But we interpreted this message and took it in to the work place the wrong way: we thought that to find success we had to compete with men and therefore we began to fight the corporate battle the way men fought. In so many words, we ultimately became men, and we paid the ultimate price for that success: aloneness and the pervading contemplation of what the point of it all was.
There was of course one word that was missing from the feminist classrooms, one word that was simply by-passed in the quest for female achievement: balance. A word which hopefully the next generation of women will be much better at achieving.
