The telegraph has an article about Cherie Blair's attack on the Church for her teaching on contraception.

"Despite being a devour [sic] Catholic and encouraging her husband, Tony, to convert from Anglicanism, she said she used contraception.

The wife of the former Prime Minister said: 'I feel if you look at what progress women have made in the world, one of the reasons is because they have been able to control their fertility.' "

I would here argue--along with Blair's countryman, Chesterton--that her definition of "progress" leaves something to be desired. There was a time when "progress" meant that things are getting better and not merely changing.

Is it "progress" that in those families fortunate enough to have two-parent households both parents are gone most of the day at work? For who, exactly, is that "better?" It's not the children, it's not the husband, and I would even go so far to say that it's not the wife, either. At the very least, it's not better for every wife, and a great many know this and recognize it.

For one thing, this whole notion of "progress" is based on the assumption that women want nothing more or less than to have the same career options (and, indeed, the same careers) as men, and to have such options at every time during their lives.

I will first note that such a system is not actually realizable, with or without the bitter convenience of contraception. This is so because women have babies; most (if not all) women ultimately do want to have children at some point. This includes even a number of the most feminist-minded women whom I have met, almost all of whom do want to have children some day. The biggest difference between the feminists and the rest of womankind is more a matter of timing on this issue: most young ladies want to be "young" mothers, in the sense of being twenty-something; the feminist wants to be a career-woman who has children, and thus wants to be "established" first--thus, she wants to delay children until she is nearer to forty than thirty.

I must add that there is not a dearth of irony here. It is the feminist who will maintain that it is social conditioning which drives women to desire children; the fact of the matter is that most of the women who I have known have yearned for children and held it off because they have wanted to "settle" and "become established" first--they want to get out of college, maybe even out of graduate school, and into the work-force first, and they want the same for their husbands. Yet, if this view of needing to get through college first isn't something which is socially conditioned, then that phrase has no meaning.

There certainly is not an ingrained, instinctive desire to attend college. A great number of people in our own country are entering college who have no need to be there--and who don't really want to be there, either. Why are they ding so? The answer should be obvious--because since the time of middle-school (or perhaps earlier), every teacher, every counselor, ever principal and every relative that the kids have has asked at least once whether the kid was going to attend college. People are bombarded by this in school, from the countless posters advertising the wealth to be made with a college degree to the admonition that he ought to strive for higher grades so that he can get into college.

Rarely asked was the question, "What do you want to do with your life after school?" Perhaps a better explanation of this is needed--that question was asked constantly, but the answer given would be twisted to push each kid into college. "I want to build electrical circuits" obviously meant "I want to be an electrical engineer" and not "I want to be an electrician," for the former meant a college degree, and the latter meant trade school. The young man's skills may have been more well-suited to trade school, and he may have been happier with a career in trade school, but a benchmark of success (and thus for funding) at many a high school has become the college enrollment rate; the graduation rate from said college was often deemed considerably less important.

In any case, there is often considerable peer pressure (in addition to the pressure form teachers and counselors) to enter college. During the last couple of generations, this has been equally true for both men and women. Moreover, there has been developed a culture in college which attaches a bit of a stigma to marriage between people who are still trying to complete their degrees (let alone to child-bearing and raising for the young women). Thus, while women have the instinctive desire to marry and have children by the time they finish college (and often much earlier), there is plenty of pressure on them to wait until later.

Even among newly-wed couples who have finished college and begun their careers, there is considerable pressure (in the form of "advice") to "wait a few years" to have children. The theory goes that they "need time to adjust" to married life. Children obviously "get in the way" of that--as if children are not the whole point of marriage. Was marriage not once called "starting a family?"

There is indeed much social pressure as concerns children. However, it is the feminists who are applying the pressure to have children later and later; social conditioning has nothing to do with a woman's desire to have children and everything to do with the fact that she will postpone childbearing.

Which brings us back to Mrs Blair's comment about progress. Which is really the more progressive system? Is it the traditional system, in which the woman's desire for the family is fulfilled--her house filled with the sounds of the laughter and merriment of children? Or is it the one in which she makes a career to enjoy material wealth, winning the hangings and trappings to decorate her desolate hermitage and bread to place before her solitary table?