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

If I were overweight because I binged on chocolate, I wouldn’t blame Lindt—just as, if I’d been working in a job I hated for the past forty years, I wouldn’t hold my high school counselor responsible.

So why writer Petronella Wyatt should blame feminism for the disappointments of her middle life – childless, husbandless, depressed – as she did in these pages last week, I have absolutely no idea.

What is feminism? For me it is 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 that has improved the lives of millions of women, including mine.

If in the autumn of our years we are disappointed with how our lives turned out, don’t we have only ourselves to blame? We have made our choices in life and we must make peace with the consequences.

Petronella claims she is lonely and depressed because feminism has taught her to prioritize a career over family life, reducing feminism to a crude and lazy binary to further her argument. The truth is that millions of women who consider themselves feminists are married with children and grandchildren – it’s not an either/or.

Likewise, millions of single, childless women like me are perfectly happy with a life that feels full and rich, free, unscripted and bold.

Feminism is about enrichment and opportunity: it’s the reason a working-class Yorkshire girl like me was able to go to university and then enjoy a long and fulfilling career in journalism that has taken me all over the world . If I had been born ten years earlier, my destiny would have been marriage and children.

When I was born in May 1960, women still promised to obey their husbands: it was legal to pay a woman less than a man for the same work, abortion was against the law, a man could legally rape his wife, and girls were told they didn’t have to worry about an education because they were getting married.

By the time I was a young woman studying at the University of London in 1979, all that had changed: equal pay had been introduced, the Sex Discrimination Act of 1975 had been passed and a woman could no longer be dismissed for being pregnant.

Feminism – a global movement of courageous women fighting for much-needed change – separated these two worlds: an old world in which women were second-class citizens, and a new one in which they had a certain independence and control over their lives. degree of independence and control over their lives. that men had always enjoyed.

Some may say that feminism has failed our generation: I say it has made me the woman I am proud of. No husband and no children, yet I am loved and sweet; I am financially independent and free as a bird; I have enjoyed a long and fulfilling career that has taken me to places I never dreamed I would see, and in the company of people who have become lifelong and dear friends. Journalism is not well paid, but I am happy to say that I have a spacious, comfortable house on the Yorkshire coast, that I have no debts, that I am independent in every respect, and that I have never been happier and have been peaceful.

When I was younger, I expected to get married and have children one day. I took that conventional life as a given, but never made it a priority. There were many relationships, none longer than seven years, and I had three pregnancies in my forties that 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 sixties, I share the status of single without a family with many other women my age.

Behavioral scientist Paul Dolan, author of Happy Ever After, argues that the happiest and healthiest subset of the population are women who have never married or had children.

To claim that “the feeling of being loved promotes happiness above anything else,” as Petronella did, seems to suggest that you can only recognize and appreciate love that comes from a spouse or a committed romantic partner. That kind of love is very special, but it is not the only source of it. Love can come in many forms and from many different people – from brothers and sisters, from uncles and aunts, from mothers and fathers, from friends and lovers. The latter may be fleeting, but even love in the moment can be dizzyingly intense and enormously empowering. Love enriches us all, and it is important for us to recognize that love exists in many more places than marriage, and none is secondary to romantic love.

Petronella and I live in different worlds: she is the middle-class product of private education, while I am a working-class woman who went to the local university. What we do have in common is that we are women of a certain age who take the road less traveled: a road all about freedom and independence.

Yet she seems deeply ungrateful to have grown up in a world where women like us had so many more opportunities than our mothers and grandmothers, bound to the home by the demands of husbands and children – and to which we certainly have feminism to thank. She tells us that financial independence was the feminist ideal, but “in practice that only happens if you run a hedge fund or can write best-selling novels.”

I wonder: what world does she live in? A gold-plated and expensive affair, it seems, and one that is an insult to the millions of ordinary working women – nurses and teachers, secretaries and administrative assistants, shop assistants and saleswomen – who manage to be financially independent. It may be difficult for many of them to achieve this, but through hard work and good housekeeping they can do it.

My friends are women like that. Many of them may not consider themselves ‘feminists’, but they do recognize the dramatic, positive changes in the status of women over the past forty years, and are enjoying the improvements in their lives, both at home and at work.

The article notes that ‘one in ten British women in their 50s have never married and live alone, which is neither pleasant nor healthy.’ I say, don’t speak for me, nor for my friends, nor for the countless women living their best lives, unencumbered by husbands, children, and housework.

Furthermore, behavioral scientist Paul Dolan, author of Happy Ever After, argues that the happiest and healthiest subset of the population are women who have never married or had children. Middle-aged married women, he argues, are at greater risk of physical and mental illness than their single counterparts.

What we can perhaps agree on is Petronella’s claim that loneliness is the leading cause of depression among “middle-aged women.” But the vast majority of them are married.

I’ve always thought that the loneliest place in the world must be a marriage where neither party is happy. And I say that because, even though I’ve 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 decreases, that staying married is an act of love. That will happen because running away, which often seems like the preferred option, causes too much disruption for too many people. And so they stay, bored and dissatisfied, but afraid to leave.

The truth is that we all make what we think are the best choices on our journey through life, and often those choices turn out to be unwise. Women like Petronella and I, different as we are, have reached an age where we take stock. Of course there are disappointments, but it is unfair and indecent to blame anyone other than us. We are not brainwashed, nor are we coerced. We had countless more choices than any of the women who came before us.

The argument that feminism made the mistake of telling women to act and think like men is nonsense. Feminism has opened doors and made new things possible for women of my generation: it has brought us opportunities and something closer to equality. Most of us are extremely grateful for that.