This is something I've been thinking about for a while. Like most women of my age, I was brought up with the idea that you have to get your career sorted before you procreate. Working in Kazakhstan with women of 35 who already had teenage children, I saw an alternative. Hilary Mantel asks us to consider if the 'career, then children' rule is just one more way we have to fit in with the male-oriented working world timetable. Actually the problem with having children early might not be so much about career as about finding the right person to have children with in your early 20s....