Lynn Barber has something to say to you young women

Barber, regular contributor to the Guardian and former contributor to Penthouse offers her opinion.

I was brought up to believe, and still believe, that who you marry is the most important choice you make in life. Does that make me anti-feminist? I don't think so, because I believe it's as true for men as it is for women. You can't be happy if you're married to the wrong person.

Being older and already married, I could only watch with bemusement as feminism went through its florid evolutionary stages in the Seventies - the 'all men are rapists' phase, the Andrea Dworkin compulsory boiler suit phase, the bra-burning, picketing Miss World phase, the sitting-in-a-circle-inspecting-your-vagina-in-a-mirror phase. But I was very aware in the Eighties of the 'having it all' phase when women were supposed to 'juggle' career and motherhood. I was aware of it because I was actually doing it at the time but I never thought juggling babies was a good idea. What it actually involved was permanent exhaustion and permanent guilt.

The problem for young women is, as it always has been, an economic one - that just when they need to be pushing ahead with their careers and earning decent money is also when they need to be having babies. It worries me that so many young women now choose to defer the babies, thinking they can somehow magic them up by IVF when they are in their forties. Often they can't, so they have no children to console them when their much-vaunted careers end in redundancy. In an ideal society, I believe, couples would have children young, preferably in their early twenties, when they're energetic and flexible enough to live on little money, and then start the serious career-building in their thirties when the children are at school. The present recession might actually make that easier - if there are no careers for 20-somethings to pursue, they might think it is quite a good idea to have babies instead.

Excuse me, I have to go have babies now because I don't have a job.