Frequent visitors to this website will recall that I posted an article a while ago about the decline of the White British birthrate in England and Wales in 2016 to a mere 60.6% of all births. I followed that with a piece about the depressing effect which a shortage of housing has on our birthrate, a shortage due in large part to immigration. I’m pleased to see that Lionel Shriver has picked up the connection between immigration and housing shortage in the 17th March edition of the Spectator; perhaps Western Spring is more widely read than I might have supposed! This essay is concerned with a rather different cause of the collapsing birthrate: feminism.

On this subject it is worth quoting at length from “Of British Blood and British Birth” by J.R.Bell (available from Western Spring). According to Mr. Bell:

“Both the traditional family and the birth rate have been hit hard by permissiveness and by feminism. So what of feminism? Let us say at once that it is right to insist upon the equality of women with men. Indeed it is not easy to understand how any man who is devoted to a mother, a wife, a sister, or a daughter could insist upon their inferiority and subjection. Any man who has witnessed that female dedication which fuels and drives our entire charitable and voluntary sector may suspect that if there is an inferior sex it is not the female! It is absolutely right that women should enjoy equal rights to employment. It is absolutely right that women should enjoy equal rights to property and education. It is absolutely right that women should no longer suffer the tyranny of brutal husbands.

“Unhappily these advantages come with a price tag. The price is paid mainly by women at the upper end of the economic scale. Women with a good education and a well paid job often find that the advancement of their careers requires them to forgo children. That may indeed be the preferred option of many such women, but the removal from the child bearing population of a disproportionate number of our most intelligent and active women both lowers the quality of future generations (dysgenics) and reduces the absolute numbers of the population. The proportion of younger women who intend to have no children has risen from a tenth to a fifth in the past generation”

Mr. Bell’s point is supported by David Goodhart in his “The Road to Somewhere” (C. Hurst and Co. 2017) where he says “women are not a single bloc any more than men are and too much of the modern equality movement, and family policy, has been dominated by the concerns of highly educated upper professional (elite) women. They do not need a reliable male breadwinner, but are understandably more concerned about the continuing biases at the top of the professional tree and how raising children can interfere with career progression or work. It is thanks to their influence that even a Conservative government, in order to seem modern and liberal, has expended far more time, energy and money on equality at work and childcare funding than on increasing support for family and marriage or trying to reverse the decline of the two parent family in lower income Britain.

Goodhart goes on:- “..notwithstanding equal opportunity strategies geared to female economic independence most mothers still prioritise family life and prefer not to work too intensively outside the home while raising young children. Indeed most couples would have more children if they could afford to. A Guardian survey of 2014 found one third of couples would have more children if it weren’t so expensive. An Economist survey found the same preference for slightly larger families throughout most of Europe, including in Britain.”

If it is right that most couples would have more children if they could afford to do so, it leaves us with two questions:- why can’t they afford to do so and what, if anything, can be done about it? As we have seen, the impact of immigration on housing costs is a large part of the reason why many people cannot afford more children, but the diversion of public funds to the concerns of elite women is another part. (And yet again we must recognise that these factors affect only white women who have on average 1.7 children – Pakistani and Somali women who are happy to live with lower standards and for whom the taxpayer so generously provides, have 3.8 and 4.2 children respectively.)

As for what can be done about it, Goodhart (again) proposes a means by which couples with children can be left with more of their own money: “the most important single measure…is to introduce fully transferable personal allowances between the married or cohabiting parents of children. At a stroke this would remove the current tax penalty suffered by single earner couples. It would also go some way to compensating for the ‘couple penalty’ in the benefit system and help to ensure that couples would be no worse off living together than living separately – or pretending to.

No doubt Goodhart is right, but providing more money through adjusting the tax system is only one part of the solution, albeit an important part. It will be much more difficult to change a feminist attitude which prevails among many elite women, and therefore tends to inform the public debate about the role of women, that a “child-free” status is as valid a choice as motherhood. We can begin to contest that that attitude only by an insistence that it is not an equally valid choice because motherhood is the unique honour and glory of a woman. It may also be worth mentioning in this context that the realisation of the true role of womanhood will also restore men to their proper place (their only proper place) as the facilitator and protector of motherhood.

Once upon a time Britain was known affectionately to her own people as the “mother country”, a nurturing and protective entity deliberately contrasted with the stern and demanding “vaterland”. She was especially the mother country to those of her children she sent overseas to populate the great wildernesses of North America, Australasia and southern Africa, or to rule and guard her tropical possessions. With the departure of Empire the phrase is heard less often and sometimes with a tinge of nostalgia but, if our native birthrate is to be rescued from its present decline into sterility, and our people from their descent into minority status, Britain must find a new meaning for the phrase “mother country”.

By Frederick Dixon © 2018

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