The 57-year-old novelist said that society ran on a "male timetable" which dictated that women should have babies at an older age.
"Having sex and having babies is what young women are about, and their instincts are suppressed in the interests of society's timetable," she said.
"I think it is that men's lives have set the timetable. Men reach a sort of sexual peak when you are 20, a social peak when you are 40.
"There is this breed of women for whom society's timetable is completely wrong."
Mantel, who won the Man Booker Prize last year for her novel Wolf Hall, said that society was "incredibly hypocritical" about teenage sex and teenagers having babies.
"I was perfectly capable of setting up and running a home when I was 14, and if, say, it had been ordered differently, I might have thought 'Now is the time to have a couple of children and when I am 30 I will go back and I'll get my PhD,'" she said.
"But society isn't yet ordered with that kind of flexibility," she said in an interview in today's Stella magazine.
"We were being educated well into our twenties, an age when part of us wanted to become mothers, probably little bits of all of us. Some were more driven than others."
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