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 gorged on chocolate, I wouldn’t blame Lindt – in the same way that if I’d done a job I loathed for the last 40 years, I wouldn’t hold my school careers adviser responsible.

So why writer Petronella Wyatt should blame feminism for the disappointments in her own midlife — childless, manless, depressed — as she did in these pages last week, I have absolutely no idea.

What is feminism? To me, it’s 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 which has improved the lives of millions of women, including my own.

If, in the autumn of our years, we are disappointed with how our lives turned out, then surely we only have ourselves to blame? We made our choices in life and we must make our peace with the consequences.

Petronella argues that she is lonely and depressed because feminism taught her to prioritise a career over a family life, reducing feminism to a crude and lazy binary to bolster her argument. The truth is that millions of women who regard themselves as feminists are married with children and grandchildren — it’s not an either/or.

By the same token, millions of single, childless women like me are perfectly happy with lives which feel full and rich, free, unscripted and bold.

Feminism is about enrichment and opportunity: it is the reason a small-town, working-class Yorkshire girl like me was able to go to university then enjoy a long and fulfilling career in journalism which has taken me all over the world. Had I been born 10 years earlier, my fate would have been marriage and children.

When I was born in May 1960, women still promised to obey their husband: it was legal to pay a woman less than a man for the same work, abortion was against the law, a man could lawfully rape his wife, and girls were told they didn’t need to concern themselves with an education because they would be 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 sacked for getting pregnant.

Feminism — a worldwide movement of brave women agitating for much-needed change — is what separated these two worlds: an old world where women were second-class citizens, and a new one where they had some independence and control over their lives in the way that men had always enjoyed.

Some may say that feminism failed our generation: I say that it made me the woman I am proud to be. No husband and no children, yet I am loved and love; I am financially independent and free as a bird; I have enjoyed a long and fulfilling career which has taken me to places I never dreamed I would see, and into the company of people who have become lifelong and cherished friends. Journalism is not well paid, but I’m pleased to say I own a roomy, comfortable house by the coast in Yorkshire, I have no debts, I am independent in every sense, and I have never been happier nor more at peace.

When I was younger, I expected one day to be married with children. I saw that conventional life as a given, while never making it a priority. There were many relationships, none of them longer than seven years, and I had three pregnancies around the age of 40 which 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 60s, I share with many other women my age the status of being single with no family.

If you argue that ‘the feeling of being loved promotes happiness more than anything else’, as Petronella did, it seems to suggest that you can only acknowledge and value love that comes from a spouse or a committed romantic partner. That kind of love is very special, but it’s not the only source of it. Love can come in many guises and from many different people — from brothers and sisters, from aunts and uncles, from mothers and fathers, from friends and lovers. The latter may be fleeting, but even love in the moment can be dizzyingly intense and immensely fortifying. Love enriches us all, and it’s important for us to acknowledge that it exists in many more places than marriage, none of them inferior 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 comprehensive. What we do have in common is that we are women of a certain age walking the road less travelled: a road which is all about freedom and independence.

Yet she appears profoundly ungrateful to have grown up in world where women like us had so many more opportunities than our mothers and grandmothers, who were tied to the home by the demands of husbands and children – and for which we surely have feminism to thank. She tells us that financial independence was the feminist ideal but ‘in practice it doesn’t happen unless you are managing a hedge fund or able to write best-selling novels’.

I ask myself, what world does she live in? A gilded and expensive one, it would seem, and one which insults the millions of ordinary working women — nurses and teachers, secretaries and admin assistants, retail workers and saleswomen — who manage to be financially independent. Achieving that may be difficult for many of them, but through hard work and good housekeeping, they manage it.

My friends are women like these. Many of them might not think of themselves as ‘feminists’, but they do acknowledge the sweeping, positive changes in the status of women over the past four decades, and relish the improvements in their lives, both domestic and professional.

The article references that ‘one in 10 British women in their 50s has never married and lives alone, which is neither pleasant nor healthy.’ I say, don’t speak for me, nor my friends, nor the myriad women living their best lives unfettered by husbands, children and domestic drudgery.

Besides, behavioural scientist Paul Dolan, author of Happy Ever After, argues that the happiest and healthiest population sub-group are women who never married or had children. Middle-aged married women, he argues, are at higher risk of physical and mental conditions than their single counterparts.

Where we can agree perhaps is Petronella’s assertion that loneliness is the leading cause of depression among ‘middle-aged females’. But the vast majority of them are married.

I have always thought that the loneliest place in the world must be a marriage in which neither party is happy. And I say that because while I have 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 wanes, that staying married is an act of will because walking away, which often looks like the preferred option, causes too much disruption to too many people. And so, they stay, bored and dissatisfied but afraid to leave.

The truth is that we all make what we believe to be the best choices on our journey through life, and often those choices turn out to have been unwise. Women like Petronella and me, different as we are, have reached an age where we take stock. Of course there are disappointments, but it is disingenuous and ungracious to blame anyone but us for them. We weren’t brainwashed, nor were we coerced. We had myriad more choices than any of the women who came before us had.

The argument that feminism made the error of telling women to behave and think like men is hogwash. Feminism has opened doors and made new things possible for women of my generation: it brought us opportunity and something closer to equality. Most of us are immensely grateful for that.