I’m Childless and Single in My 60s, Yet My Life is Rich and Full of Love. Don’t Blame Feminism If You’re Unhappy in the Autumn of Your Years, Writes Mandy Appleyard (2024)

I’m Childless and Single in My 60s, Yet My Life is Rich and Full of Love. Don’t Blame Feminism If You’re Unhappy in the Autumn of Your Years, Writes Mandy Appleyard

The following (link below with excerpts) is a reaction to an essay that was published several days prior, by a woman who blamed feminism for why she never did marry or have kids.

I’m a lifelong Conservative. I’m not a feminist. I certainly don’t agree with all views of feminists, but I am tired of segments of society – especially other Conservatives – using Feminism as a boogeyman (or boogey-woman?) they use to blame everything on!

I may be writing another blog post on this issue at a later date. I’ve never been a liberal nor have I ever been a feminist.

Conservative Christianity played one role of several as to why I remain never-married into my 50s, although I had hoped and had expected to be married years ago. But, as I said, that may be a topic for another blog post on another day.

Many feminism- hating Conservatives continue to overlook the role Conservative beliefs have in keeping women single, they only ever want to blame feminism.

I was glad to see this essay by this author, because it seems like at least once a year, I see an essay by another woman or a social media post by another woman, who claims she was raised by a feminist mother, or she herself was once a feminist, but she now blames feminism for why she’s still single, or why she is depressed or unfulfilled, at age 30+.

Some of these women claim to be ex-Feminists who only discovered bliss and true purpose once they ditched Feminism and adopted regressive gender stereotypes –

Well, again, I don’t know how those women account for women such as myself – I am a lifelong Conservative, I’ve never been a Feminist, but I was a Christian Gender Complementarian until my 30s, and living by regressive traditional gender roles not only did not bring me bliss, purpose, joy, or a husband, but it created a lot of problems in my life I otherwise would not have been subjected to had I not been raised by a family and church to think or live by traditional, non-feminist gender roles.

(Link): I’m childless and single in my 60s, yet my life is rich and full of love. Don’t blame feminism if you’re unhappy in the autumn of your years, writes MANDY APPLEYARD

May 26, 2024
by Mandy Appleyard

If I were overweight because I gorged on chocolate, I wouldn’t blame Lindt – in the same way that if I’d done a job I loathed for the last 40 years, I wouldn’t hold my school careers adviser responsible.

So why writer Petronella Wyatt should blame feminism for the disappointments in her own midlife — childless, manless, depressed — as she did in these pages last week, I have absolutely no idea.

What is feminism? To me, it’s the belief that women are equal to men and should have equal rights and opportunities. It’s not a dirty word: it’s a progressive, positive, enriching, empowering belief which has improved the lives of millions of women, including my own.

If, in the autumn of our years, we are disappointed with how our lives turned out, then surely we only have ourselves to blame? We made our choices in life and we must make our peace with the consequences.

Petronella argues that she is lonely and depressed because feminism taught her to prioritise a career over a family life, reducing feminism to a crude and lazy binary to bolster her argument. The truth is that millions of women who regard themselves as feminists are married with children and grandchildren — it’s not an either/or.

By the same token, millions of single, childless women like me are perfectly happy with lives which feel full and rich, free, unscripted and bold.

Feminism is about enrichment and opportunity: it is the reason a small-town, working-class Yorkshire girl like me was able to go to university then enjoy a long and fulfilling career in journalism which has taken me all over the world. Had I been born 10 years earlier, my fate would have been marriage and children.

When I was born in May 1960, women still promised to obey their husband: it was legal to pay a woman less than a man for the same work, abortion was against the law, a man could lawfully rape his wife, and girls were told they didn’t need to concern themselves with an education because they would be getting married. …

Feminism — a worldwide movement of brave women agitating for much-needed change — is what separated these two worlds: an old world where women were second-class citizens, and a new one where they had some independence and control over their lives in the way that men had always enjoyed.

Some may say that feminism failed our generation: I say that it made me the woman I am proud to be. No husband and no children, yet I am loved and love; I am financially independent and free as a bird; I have enjoyed a long and fulfilling career which has taken me to places I never dreamed I would see, and into the company of people who have become lifelong and cherished friends. …

When I was younger, I expected one day to be married with children. I saw that conventional life as a given, while never making it a priority. There were many relationships, none of them longer than seven years, and I had three pregnancies around the age of 40 which ended in devastating miscarriages.

I don’t blame any of this on feminism: I blame my turbulent relationship history on my own unwise choices, and my childless state on my biology. Now in my early 60s, I share with many other women my age the status of being single with no family.

If you argue that ‘the feeling of being loved promotes happiness more than anything else’, as Petronella did, it seems to suggest that you can only acknowledge and value love that comes from a spouse or a committed romantic partner.
That kind of love is very special, but it’s not the only source of it. Love can come in many guises and from many different people — from brothers and sisters, from aunts and uncles, from mothers and fathers, from friends and lovers.
The latter may be fleeting, but even love in the moment can be dizzyingly intense and immensely fortifying. Love enriches us all, and it’s important for us to acknowledge that it exists in many more places than marriage, none of them inferior to romantic love.

…The article references that ‘one in 10 British women in their 50s has never married and lives alone, which is neither pleasant nor healthy.’ I say, don’t speak for me, nor my friends, nor the myriad women living their best lives unfettered by husbands, children and domestic drudgery.

Besides, behavioural scientist Paul Dolan, author of Happy Ever After, argues that the happiest and healthiest population sub-group are women who never married or had children. Middle-aged married women, he argues, are at higher risk of physical and mental conditions than their single counterparts.

Where we can agree perhaps is Petronella’s assertion that loneliness is the leading cause of depression among ‘middle-aged females’. But the vast majority of them are married.

I have always thought that the loneliest place in the world must be a marriage in which neither party is happy.
And I say that because while I have never been married, most of my friends have, and they confide in me that spouses become the wallpaper of each other’s lives: that there is boredom, that sexual desire wanes, that staying married is an act of will because walking away, which often looks like the preferred option, causes too much disruption to too many people. And so, they stay, bored and dissatisfied but afraid to leave.