Why do we blame childless women?
Between the cruel stereotypes of the selfish, career-obsessed and the tragically barren lies a more complicated truth about childlessness.
Crazy cat lady. Career-obsessed. Selfish. These are the kinds of stereotypes that place middleaged, single and childless women at the bottom of the social heap.
In our collective minds, they are childless either by choice – living their best lives, unencumbered by nappies, car seats and school duties – or theirs is a sad story of failed fertility treatments, miscarriages and giving up on the dream of becoming a mother.
But there is another kind of childlessness, one still mostly absent from our cultural narrative: women who are childless by circumstance.
They don’t necessarily have fertility issues but, for a range of other reasons, were not able to conceive during their fertile years.
They might not have found the right partner. It might have taken them time to deal with childhood trauma. They might have had to help care for dependent family members, or they mightn’t have felt they could afford to have a child.
Statistics suggests this is actually the most common picture.
In Britain, where one in five women is childless, an estimated 80 per cent of older women are childless due to circumstance, rather than choice or infertility. A global survey by the OECD estimates that only up to 1.5 per cent of women in Europe aged 15 to 39 choose not to have children.
New Zealand census statistics suggest childless women are on the increase here too, with the trend expected to continue. Statistics NZ says about one in four women born in 1975 remain childless.
Christchurch grief counsellor and Canterbury University academic Lois Tonkin has met many women who have missed motherhood. Their stories made Tonkin, a mother and grandmother of four, realise how misunderstood the women were.
In a bid to reduce the stigma, shame, isolation and loneliness some of them feel, she collected 36 stories from women living in New Zealand and overseas, and put them together in a book released late last year:
Motherhood Missed.
‘‘They felt that, in some way, their predicament was their fault, because it was the outcome of choices they had made, but looked back and couldn’t see where they would have made different decisions,’’ Tonkin writes.
Tonkin first met a circumstantially childless woman 15 years ago. Jackie was 36, single and desperately wanted to become a mother.
‘‘She talked about her shame that she had ‘failed’ as a woman – in ways she couldn’t quite articulate – and her embarrassment and confusion, as a feminist, at feeling that way.’’
‘FEMINISM HAS DROPPED THE BALL ON CHILDNESSNESS’
Although a mother, I was surprised at how much I could relate to childless women’s struggle to define their identity.
When my son was born three years ago, I lost track of who I was. Motherhood was dwarfing everything else – the journalist, the friend, the wife – and I have never quite felt like my old self again. It seems that, no matter what women do, those around us keep wanting to define us by our children or lack thereof, in a way they would never do with men.
Women who have missed motherhood dread being asked: ‘‘Do you have children?’’ – just as many stay-at-home mums dread being asked: ‘‘So, what do you do?’’
Feminism often clashes with motherhood, a theme explored in some of the stories in
Motherhood Missed.
Gina, 43, recalls how her mother and grandmother raised her as a feminist. ‘‘They wanted me to feel that I could be anything or anyone, that it wasn’t necessary to have a child in order to fulfil myself.
Andrea, 53, writes that growing up in the 1980s, she wouldn’t have been friends with anyone if their ambition was to be a stay-athome mum. ‘‘It seemed the most banal thing you could do with your life to me.’’
Julia, 48, recalls being heavily influenced by second wave feminism as a teenager and rejecting the kind of life her mother had. ‘‘But I remember at some point – in my midto-late 30s – thinking, ‘Oh, bloody feminism! It never did me any good! Look! I’m childless!’’’
For UK author Jody Day, whose website for the childless, Gateway Women, has reached hundreds of thousands of women worldwide, "feminism has dropped the ball on childlessness’’, which is ‘‘one of the unintended consequences of the sexual revolution’’.
A generation ago, the most shamed figure in our culture was the unmarried mother, and earlier waves of feminism focused on women’s right to control their own fertility.
Now, Day says, the figure we shame is ‘‘the childless, middle-aged spinster’’. She believes our society is making childlessness so uncomfortable that most women would do anything to have children, which is a shame, because childless women could ‘‘smash the patriarchy if they felt empowered’’.
‘THERE MUST BE SOMETHING WRONG WITH HER’
Day has conducted workshops for childless women around the world, and says she has never met a career woman who knowingly ‘‘left it too late’’. It’s a harmful social trope that places all the blame and a huge dollop of shame on the individual.
Women don’t miss out on motherhood because they are stupid or careless, she says, but ‘‘because human life is complex and choices never happen in a vacuum’’.
People are becoming more willing to talk about fertility struggles and treatment but
circumstantial childlessness is still taboo, Day says.
A big reason why women miss out on motherhood is because they did not meet the right partner, which is hard to talk about ‘‘because of old patriarchal beliefs that a woman must be chosen’’. ‘‘There must be something wrong with her if nobody wanted to form a long-lasting relationship and have kids with her.’’
Day herself is childless by circumstance. After a grieving process, she is now in a good place and childlessness no longer defines her identity.
She says to become empowered, childless women must reject the stereotypes society feeds them: ‘‘‘I will never be happy without children; my life is ruined.’ It takes a lot of strength to not be shaped by this narrative, but until you work on it you can feel very crushed. Judgment and opinion of others about your situation and what it means about you becomes part of your identity.’’
LETTING GO OF THE BABY DREAM
Nelson woman Kathryn Grace is one of the women who shared her story with Tonkin.
She met her husband when she was 30, and they travelled before settling back in New Zealand. Grace was healthy and had undergone surgery for her endometriosis, so she felt confident she would get pregnant when the time came.
She started trying to conceive in her mid-30s. ‘‘I was just busy with life before then,’’ she says. When she reached her late 30s, she ramped up efforts: taking her temperature, timing intercourse and eventually starting fertility treatment.
Meanwhile, friends who had also started trying to conceive in their mid-30s were all getting pregnant with their first, then second and sometimes third children. One year,
15 of Grace’s friends and family members had babies.
She became pregnant through IVF treatment in her early 40s but lost the child at around seven weeks.
‘‘I was so incredibly exhausted by the loss and by the years of relentlessly trying and failing to have a baby. This was not how my life was meant to be,’’ she writes.
Through a spiritual coach, she learned to come to terms with the fact that she would not have children.
‘‘Letting go of that dream is the hardest thing I have ever done,’’ she writes. ‘‘It’s like I had to re-programme. I had to decide that having children is not the only way to be happy.’’
Once she decided to move on, her life became exciting again. After years of anxiety trying to conceive, ‘‘it’s like I finally took my life off pause’’.
She has since set up a small organisation, Fertility Potentials, to support women struggling with fertility issues.
FINDING OTHER WAYS TO MOTHER
Grace says holding on to hope for too long can make it harder for women to think about what Jody Day calls ‘‘plan B’’.
‘‘When you are trying and you’re not getting pregnant, you think ‘my life is over’. After 10 years of trying and three IVF rounds, the only message I could see was ‘don’t give up hope and you will get pregnant’.
‘‘We need another message: that even if you don’t get pregnant, you can have a good life.’’
Tonkin says that hope can drive women and keep them going through fertility struggles, but it can become toxic: ‘‘Hope gets in the way of the point at which you realise this is not going to happen for me and how
can I develop a life I take fulfilment and pleasure in?’’
Childless women often find other ways to be a mother in the world or develop meaning in other ways, once they come to terms with the fact they will never have their own children – often when menopause hits.
Shelley*, 50, was on the path toward adopting a child from China as a single woman after failed fertility treatment in her 40s. As the process dragged on over two years, she realised she was approaching menopause and might not have sufficient energy to raise a young child. So she made the ‘‘pragmatic’’ choice to withdraw her application. At the time, she was devastated: ‘‘It’s too hard to even describe what it’s like.’’
A few years on, she still feels sad about it, although the waves of grief are getting smaller as time goes on. ‘‘I don’t go every day: ‘Oh poor me, I don’t have children.’’’
Shelley has channelled her energy into her nieces, nephews and grandchildren, and volunteer work with young people. ‘‘They are not my kids but I care about them. You find other ways to be nurturing and caring.’’
HOW TO AVOID CAUSING PAIN WHEN TALKING TO CHILDLESS WOMEN
1. Don’t presume they are childless by choice.
2. Don’t presume they are OK with it, but also don’t pity them.
3. Don’t suggest solutions (online dating, adoption, fertility treatment) or give advice.
4. If you are a parent, be mindful of not always talking about your children.
5. Ask them what is going on in their lives.
6. Be aware that asking people whether they have kids can be a painful question.
7. Involve childless people in social events.
*Not her real name.
"We need another message: that even if you don't get pregnant, you can have a good life."