Without Children

Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother by Peggy O'Donnell Heffington
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I thought this was a thoughtful, well-researched inquiry into why women don't have children, by choice, and not. She points out that the desire not to have children for various reasons have always existed, there have always been means and ways women have tried to take control of their bodies, their roles, and their desires. What I thought was fascinating was the social policies that seem to support the traditional family but actually work against it, especially in regards to America. We have become increasingly isolated from each other, meaning there is less support for mothers, and fewer roles for women without children (including single and those unable to have their own children) to help in the nurture of children. Policies like affordable day care and long (or any) maternity leave have been discouraged in order to entice mothers to stay home and raise children but actually make it economically difficult to raise a family. I thought Heffington did a remarkable job of being sensitive to women on both sides of this issue, validating both choices to have or not have children and encouraging us all to be kinder to each other and more supportive of those with children.

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Heti suggests the term “not not a mother”: For women without children, it could be a rejection of the negative identity, “not ‘not a mother.’” For mothers, the double negative cancels itself out and they become, simply, a mother. This, Heti writes, is a “term we can share.”

We need an elaborated vocabulary for making kin and caring beyond the ‘pro-and anti-and non-natalist,’ and that does not use the binary-implying word ‘choice.’”

Women I got graduate degrees with, drank too much whiskey in bars with, ran marathons with, have been transformed, literally overnight, into Adults, with Real Responsibilities and Meaning in Their Lives. Meanwhile, I have remained a child, failing to feed myself properly on a regular basis, killing houseplants, and indulging in wild, hedonic pleasures like going for a run every morning and having a clean living room.

But a man who produces no children is not usually identified with that lack.

Today, we benefit from the wisdom of Black, queer, and Indigenous feminist thinkers who have taught us that “mother” is best used as a verb, not a noun: mother is something that you do, not something that you are.

New York Times survey in 2021 concluded that reproductive decisions were closely tied to jobs, money, and the desperate struggle many millennials have faced to gain even a tenuous foothold in the rapidly eroding middle class.

For the rest of us, the majority without kids, our non-motherhood was arrived at slowly, indirectly, through a series of decisions that sometimes had nothing, and yet everything, to do with reproduction:

there was far more space for motherhood to be a social role, not just a biological one, more space for women who did not birth children to fully participate in loving and raising them.

Many of us have mourned the passage of what Cheryl Strayed has called “the ghost ship that didn’t carry us,” the shadowy, silent version of the life we did not choose that glides parallel to us, barely visible through the mist.

The activist and writer Jenny Brown has argued that we should understand falling births in America as a work slowdown or a strike: the people who do the labor of birthing and raising children are increasingly refusing to do it under the poor conditions they’ve been provided.

the reasons women aren’t having children look and feel less like a strike than like individual decisions to opt out, less like a shared experience and more like a personal failure to overcome modern-day stresses, real and imagined.

That the isolation of the American family would correspond to its shrinking makes sense.

“grandmother hypothesis”: the idea that older women might stop reproducing because they can do more good by caring for their communities and extended families than by having additional children of their own.

The modern nuclear family was not just a biological unit, but also, in the public imagination, a social unit bonded by a kind of love and loyalty that was both natural and unique. 55

“Assimilation” to white American culture and society demanded nothing less than the destruction of communal support networks and the isolation of nuclear families from each other.

As long as work remained in the home, it was more or less genderless; and as long as work remained genderless, women maintained a partial hold on equal household power.

The family, he writes, “was roughly torn apart each morning by the factory bell.” 42 Dad went to work, leaving Mom behind to oversee a family whose importance had been hollowed out. No longer the site of economic productivity or industrious familial labor, the family was reduced to just two functions: raising children and creating a soft, loving, comfortable environment to do it in, a “haven in a heartless world.” 43 Along the way, women lost the ability to contribute economically to their families, and the household power that comes with that contribution. 44

If a woman’s highest calling was to be a mother, then carrying out motherhood’s attendant duties should be anything but work. 47

In the context of a history that features mothers making economic contributions to their families far more often than it does not, the problem isn’t that motherhood is incompatible with work. The problem is that the way we work today is increasingly incompatible with motherhood.

Two decades later, fertility exploded during the baby boom, which also happened to coincide with the most generous social welfare programs in American history. 63

“The birth rate,” he writes, “is a barometer of despair.”

Infertility, then, may be the only medical condition that is a medical condition only if the person who has it thinks it is.

The sociologist Sally Macintyre has pointed out that there are “two visions of reality” for women. For unmarried women, “pregnancy and childbearing are abnormal and undesirable and conversely the desire to have a baby is aberrant, selfish, and in need of explanation.” For married women, the opposite has long been true: “Pregnancy and childbearing are normal and desirable, and conversely a desire not to have children”—and, I would add, the simple fact of not having them—“ is aberrant and in need of explanation.”

Though both procedures can involve the destruction of fertilized human embryos, in a 2013 Pew survey about half of Americans said they believed abortion to be morally wrong, and only 12 percent believed the same of IVF. 71

motherhood was the source of their power. “The woman’s body, which receives, hosts, and gives forth the future of the species, is inherently powerful,” they wrote.

The problem is not the children. The problem is the society parents have to parent in.