Does feminism fail women?

The trouble was, throughout my 20s and early 30s, my relationships with men were short-lived and problematic. I was always attracted to exciting, but emotionally unavailable men, who were anything but suitable husband - let alone father - material.

So Danielle, along with so many other young women, encouraged and rewarded the wrong sort of men. The family type man was bypassed. What conclusion does Danielle draw from this mistake? She writes:

I still bitterly regret not having had children much sooner. I wasted precious time in my 20s and 30s waiting for the love of my life, when I should have just got on with it - whether or not the right man was by my side. He could have come later.

So she still doesn't get it. Even with the benefit of hindsight, when things are already too late, she isn't aware of the possibility of a culture in which men and women prepare themselves for marriage and parenthood at a reasonable age.

Her "solution", if generally adopted, would only drive the wedge between men and women more deeply, making things even more difficult for future generations.

What this illustrates is that individuals won't always figure out for themselves what to do, even in securing the most important things in their life. It helps if individuals are guided by a supportive culture or tradition.

But what is there to help modern women? You would think that modern women have all the support they need, as a whole feminist infrastructure has been set up for them. But feminism has proven itself to be an inadequate support for women. It doesn't matter how many "women's officers" there are in government, academia and business, if all that feminism aims at is autonomy and careers.

Feminists have never seriously interested themselves in questions of how women might successfully marry and become mothers (only with how motherhood might be made less of an impediment to careers).

When my generation of women were delaying marriage and motherhood to some vague point of time in their late 30s, where were the feminists warning against such an obviously unwise move? Where were the feminists who were concerned about the unhappiness that such a life course would inevitably bring to many thousands of women?

As I recall, it was a couple of male obstetricians who first sounded the alarm bells. And when an Australian journalist, Virginia Haussegger, found herself among the ranks of reluctantly childless women, and criticised feminism for focusing only on careers and not relationships, she was met with a harshly unsympathetic response from feminists and labelled an ingrate.

Unfortunately it seems likely that women will continue to suffer for as long as feminism remains their official support. What is needed is for more women to conclude, as Virginia Haussegger did, that feminism is "an inadequate structure from which to build a life".