One of the things I've been thinking about is how radically the
lives of women are bound to change after peak oil, and I think it
bears discussing and writing about, because I think we do have some
control (not as much as we'd like) about how our, and our daughters
roles in the post-carbon world will take shape. It is, IMHO,
important that we start thinking now about what we want for
ourselves and for our children and grandchildren. Because peak oil is likely to come out very differently for women than for men.

The way women live now in the Western world is almost entirely a
result of cheap energy and its byproducts. I think it would be easy
to lose track of how much contemporary feminism, with its focus on
women in the workplace, and on the politics of equality is shaped by cheap energy in the forms of birth control, easy access to medical care, formula, breast pumps, drive-to daycare, Social Security, etc... I am a feminist, and enormously grateful for what feminism has given me, but I also feel that women have not carefully enough interrogated the degree to which their options are dependent on carbon exploitation.

One of the primary indicators of quality of life for women is level
of education - in general, the more education that women have, the
better their economic status, the less dependent they are on
husbands and fathers for economic and personal support, the more
likely they are to have control of their own fertility, the fewer children they have, etc... Women now outnumber and outperform men at colleges and at pretty much every stage of the educational game, and we take that for granted. I think we mostly tend to view the old attitude of "why send women to
college/educate women, because they are only going to start having
babies" as pure sexism, and there's certainly some of that embodied within that thinking. But in
a culture where school costs are an enormous burden (as they are in
much of the undeveloped world, and may well be here when our
educational infrastructure begins to struggle without its inputs),
ugly choices do end up getting made, and economic returns on
investments are expected. Given women's desire and vulnerability to
pregnancy, there is a certain miserable logic to ensuring that the
son, rather than the daughter gets to go to college, or to school at
all, to emphasizing domestic training rather than calculus for girls. We are accustomed to imagining education as equally available
to everyone (it isn't even now), but that too is a product of our wealth. So we can expect that unless we are prepared to fight this fight tooth and
nail, our daughters and granddaughters will be less well educated
than we are, with all the losses that entails. IMHO, we should be ready for that fight.

Reproductive issues, are, obviously speaking, at the heart of things
for women. While domestic violence, for example, crosses all sorts
of barriers, women who are older and better educated at the time of
marriage are somewhat less likely to be physically abused. But in a
culture where birth control availability is either restricted or
simply unaffordable (again, as in much of the impoverished world)
because of lack of access, lack of money for health care, etc..., and where stresses are far greater than they are today, women will be more vulnerable to abuse than they are at the moment, with fewer resources (most probably lost to other priorities as economic shortages occur).

We can expect our daughters to marry sooner than we do, and often when they become pregnant - in most cultures, neither
women nor men traditionally delay sexual contact past their early-to-
mid 20s by choice. Our daughters will have the same impulses and
desires we do, but without the limiting factors of birth control.
So we can expect most of them to have their first children in their teens or
early to mid-twenties, at the latest. We can also expect them,
because they are less well educated, less economically free to leave
their husbands, and younger, to be more vulnerable to violence from
their partners. We can expect them to have more children, closer together, with all the dangers and health consequences of doing so for both themselves and their children.

And indeed, it will not only be accidental, but necessary that we have children earlier, as the high-tech medical care stops
filling the fertility gap for women who want to finish their
educations and wait. An MD, JD, Ph.D or MA takes years, into one's late twenties or thirties. The biological fall in fertility that takes place after one's early-to-mid 20s will affect all those women who choose to wait, assuming that they are sufficiently restrained to have a choice. When I had my first child at 27, three years into my Ph.d program, I was the
youngest person I knew among my overeducated friends having
children. Many of the women I know are only beginning their
reproductive years in their mid 30s, entering, as a friend of mine called it, the "amniocentisis years." But women who do so
in the future will know that they risk never having children, and
have increased risks of medical complications (not to mention those
birth defects that we now eliminate so casually with amniocentesis
and theraputic abortion), including disabled (and dependent) children and health consequences to themselves. Our daughters may not find it worth the
risk to wait, even if they could, if, for example, death because they cannot afford a cesaerian is one of the potential consequences. Nor would they readily choose to risk a child with a serious disability (much as I loathe to see selective abortion, having a child with autism I'm aware of the particular difficulties a post-peak future has for him) when fewer resources for such a child's care and education will be available.

While it is possible, perhaps even probable that we'll see a
resurgence of wet nurses, it seems more likely that the model in
which women who are also parents of young children work outside of
the home will mostly have to cease. Formula, refrigeration, and
high-test electric breast pumps are costly, and most women probably
will not be able to afford them. Women now combine nursing with every job under the sun - but we only do so because of the high inputs that enable working while nursing. Without those, we are just as tied to our children as women of any prior century. So whatever work women do will
have to be of the sort where children can easily be brought along,
and can interrupt it regularly to nurse. Traditional women's
domestic labor has most of those qualities, and women can expect to
find that their job options are dramatically limited if they choose
to have children.

For women who do not choose to have children, celibacy and
lesbianism may be the only certain options in a world where birth control is
not readily available. With a reduction in access to medical care,
less adequate hygeine, etc... The fear of death in childbirth is
both reasonable and real, but women who do not want to endure it
will not have the options of enjoying full heterosexual partnerships and still continuing to do other things. Nor will those women who wish to space their children out more than nursing and abstinence would permit. Unless strong subsidized programs for sterilization and birth control arise in the US (like those in India and Cuba) - and it seems unlikely given the religious climate here, we should expect our daughters to get pregnant more
often, and more often out of wedlock, and prepare ourselves for the
support of our grandchildren, and to try and mitigate the effects of
teenage pregnancy on our daughter's future.

Population is a touchy issue on the peak oil front. We need to reduce the world population to a sustainable level, probably below 2 billion. But while education and incentives do drop reproductive levels dramatically, punitive and forcible methods overwhelming target women and do them harm. China's programs of forcible abortion, for example, are not matched by a program of forcible vasectomy. And much of what peak oil does - making people poorer, less well educated, less free, leads to more children, not fewer. If we're to reduce population adn remain humane and free, we must prioritize the status of women and the medical care and education that enable them to have fewer children, and know those children will grow up.

On the upside, we are likely to see domestic labor valued and given
its due for the first time in fifty years. Anyone who has done so
knows how enormous the simple job of food production is without a
grocery store and labor saving devices. That alone (much less
hygeine, family medicine, midwifery, pregnancy, breastfeeding,
gardening, milking, egg collection and on and on...) could engage
most modern women full time. Given the ways in which reproduction
ties women to their homes and children, it is worth preparing our
daughters to take pride in and do domestic labor well, while
educating them as well as we can in other ways.

We may be the last generation of women who were as educated as their
male counterparts, and free to choose our destinies. We are likely
to see changes in how women are viewed, in laws about marriage and
domestic violence, and in reproductive freedom. In general, our
daughters and granddaughters can probably expect to have children
younger, be pregnant longer, be more vulnerable to impoverishment
and abuse, to be less well educated and less free in many ways that
women today. But there are choices we can make to mitigate these
things, to ensure that our children, while subject to the realities
of their bodies and the world, remain as free as humanly possible.

More on this as time allows.

Sharon in upstate NY