“The Baby Shower” By: Laura Daniel

There is an assumption that women have that when they hit a certain age there seems to be an instinct  to settle down, buy a house and have children... is this really what women want? 

Paradise? Really?

In this episode of Sex and the City "The Baby Shower" (SATC) the women attend a baby shower of one of their previously outrageous friend who partied and stripped at parties. They never thought that she would ever settle down none-the-less have a baby. Carrie ends up toying with the idea of having a baby when her period comes late and tries to figure out if she has a maternal instinct.

Is this secretly what
women still want?

Do all women have to have that maternal instinct? Men usually say yes. The norm of women is that they want to have children and stay at home taking take care of the house. I happen to have more ambition for my life. I want to have a career and work outside the home. I am not saying that women who want to have children and work in the home are wrong, however the concept of the homemaker is a little outdated and slightly glamorized. Television in the 1950s started showing women working in the home and tailoring their viewing around the housework that they had to complete that day. Daytime television was female centred because they were the ones who were at home taking care of things, while the primetime (night) television was focused on the male viewer because this is when they were home. This is a rather sexist view and SATC brings this into the light. Women don’t have to just be homemakers.

In Jersey at the baby shower

Now this is what
I'm talking about! 

Today if a woman doesn’t want to get married and wants to work and be single and successful people say that she has drive. However, some people would still see this as something that only a man could do. Yes there are still those people out there that don’t want to let women be independent. I am not one of those women. Sure being married would be pretty cool to have a double income, but children? Having children today isn’t the same as having children way back when, there is a lot more to worry about. Having a double income today is “normal” however; a double income is necessary to stay in the middle class economy of today.  Going back to children, it isn’t absolutely necessary for families to consist of two parents and a child, you don’t need children to survive. In the early days people had children to help with the farms and had to have lots in order to survive. Today children don’t (usually) contribute constructively to a household and its income; rather they suck the income away from the earners.
The women in the episode might be on to something. L.S. Kim said something about the show Ally McBeal saying that rather than being a feminist text it is more female centred and prowoman. Which the women of SATC are, they are conscious of the ways in which woman are viewed but do things for their own benefit.