Without Child

Challenging the Stigma of Childlessness

Laurie Lisle

• Publisher: Laurie Lisle
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780786756049
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Without Child challenges the stigma of childlessness by offering childless women the lifeaffirming story of themselves. Beginning with the difficult inner journey a woman faces before finally deciding or realizing she will not bear children, Without Child explores the myth of the childless woman's rejection of the maternal instinct. It also examines the childless woman's relationship to mothers and mothering, to her femininity, to men, to achievement, to her body, and to old age.Laurie Lisle contends that childless women are part of an ancient and respectable cultural tradition that includes biblical matriarchs, celibate saints, and nineteenth-century social reformers. However, like other aspects of women's history, this tradition has been forgotten and, in the process, maligned. Without Child bring childless women out of obscurity and places them back in women's history. Without Child brings scope and depth to a subject that has long been misunderstood. Weaving rich materials from history, literature, religion, and sociology with the author's own and other stories, this groundbreaking book does what no other has done before-presents childlessnessin a multifaceted and positive light.Most women grow up thinking they will become mothers, and many do follow that path. But for those women who are willingly or unwillingly without children, childlessness is a way of life that many of them must constantly defend. Without Child explores the facts and fallacies behind childlessness, what it means for women and society, and reminds us of how women can and do embrace this choice.In the shadow of a culture that claims to adore the child, Without Child bring a long forbidden topic into the light. Wide-ranging, yet intimate, philosophical, yet clear~sighted, this important book will reassure millions of women that they are not alone, not unusual, and, in fact, are part of a long and honorable tradition. Laurie Lisle is the author of four other books besides Without Child: two biographies of women artists, a history of a girls'school, and a memoir from the point-of-view as a gardener. Raised in Rhode Island, she lives with her husband in Litchfield County, Connecticut and in Westchester County, New York. For more information, please see her website at www.laurielisle.com.

ONE

FINDING THE WORDS, DISCOVERING MY WAY

The realization that I will never give birth to a child has enveloped me gradually and aroused in me an intense, combustible mixture of emotions that follows no existing script. Children have always charmed me, and during the wonderfully free decade of my twenties, I assumed I would eventually have one of my own. Then at the age of thirty-two I had “a dream about a laughing baby,” I abruptly noted in one of my private, handwritten journals on the last day of January 1975, when I was living with my boyfriend and working for a newsmagazine. The nighttime reverie jolted me because I had almost forgotten about motherhood in my absorption with other forms of love and work. Although I came to believe that I faced a private struggle between mothering and writing, I was actually involved in a dilemma, even an ancient drama, that was important to members of my generation born during the 1940s. It is typical of Americans to feel tension between the symbolic pulls of the family and the frontier, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the issue of motherhood has become an integral part of this pressure. As I moved through my childbearing years, I never found a good way to reconcile my impulses toward intimacy and independence, my longings to nurture a child and to explore the world. Over the past two decades, these desires have been irreconcilable for me—to my lingering regret at moments, but ultimately to my measured relief.

Who are we, those of us without offspring?

When I began this investigation into what it means to be a nonmother, or a nullipara in medical parlance, I read a great deal of history and literature, looking for clues. I came upon the stories of numerous women who had avoided childbirth for reasons of adventure, romance, spirituality, ambition, art, idealism, duty, poverty, terror, or the desire for an education. I discovered the unusual pledge of an engaged couple in the late nineteenth century to pass up parenthood in favor of greater marital intimacy and equality as well as to devote themselves to the service of God. I came upon the passionate words of an intentionally childfree woman who only dared to publish her argument in 1905 under the pseudonym of A Childless Wife. I found numerous foremothers whose childlessness was inexplicable, but who lived extraordinarily interesting, useful, and gratifying lives. Today most of us without children do not know that the childless woman has always existed for a multitude of reasons, both fortunate and unfortunate. We are part of an old and respectable—and even inspiring—social tradition which, like other aspects of women’s history, has been neglected and forgotten. This lost knowledge of archetypes and individuals, including Greek goddesses and medieval witches, Christian celibates, and Renaissance ladies, counterbalances the paucity of contemporary images of enriched and exuberant womanliness outside of motherhood.

Part of my research involved a review of the findings of contemporary social scientists. I was distressed to discover that studies done prior to the 1970s indicated that females withoutchildren were deviant and disturbed. In more current data, however, subjects were more like myself: women who had come of age in the 1970s and then, armed with educations and aspirations, had gravitated to cities in America and western Europe. As I read the sociological literature, I realized that people of my generation were childless for a wide variety of reasons.A 1983 British study, for instance, divided childfree couples into four groups based on temperament and circumstance: altruistic idealists, easygoing hedonists, partisans of a particular lifestyle, and resigned ill or older people.

In my research, I learned that rarely before have so many Americans entered into lifelong childlessness by choice or by chance. Historically, 3 to 30 percent of all women worldwide have not borne children. In 1994 almost 18 percent of American women reached the age of forty without giving birth, a number that had been gradually growing for several decades and was already much larger than the rate of their parents’ generation. Much of the childlessness is now deliberate, although the line between willing and unwilling is often indistinct and wavering. Nonmotherhood as a widespread and long-lasting phenomenon has happened suddenly—in one generation—along with the arrival of modern contraceptives and legal abortions.

The topic of childlessness is so unusual, in fact, that there are no exact words or precise phrases to name or describe it. The existing vocabulary is unrelentingly negative, descending from a mythological or distant past when being childless was rare, inadvertent, and most often unlucky. Descriptive expressions for childlessness have evolved from barren to sterile to infertile, terminology that almost always applies to the female, not to the male. The medical term for a woman without a child, nullipara, comes from the Latin root for empty, void, zero, like the word for a female who has never been pregnant, nulligravida. In the 1970s the word childfree was coined, but because it suggests a flippant disregard toward children, I find it unsuitable. Other terms, like childless or unchilded, non-mother or notmother, have recently been invented or come into common usage, but since they all allude only to the absence of a natal child, and not to how this absence is experienced, they are also unsatisfactory. We are given or innovate a vocabulary that polarizes us for or against parenthood but never indicates the dignity of nonparenthood, which should be called something evocative and neutral, perhaps otherhood. Since no word or phrase yet encompasses a sense of the unique texture of living without sons and daughters of our own, I will use most of the existing ones in positive ways in an effort to evolve a more precise language.

Sociologists and psychologists tend to look for social or personal explanations for childlessness, so they are sometimes blind to the pressures of gender politics. Millions of women are not giving birth today for a number of interrelated reasons, but one of the most important is nagging ambivalence about motherhood. When a woman without a child considers having one, she invokes fantasies about her potential mothering self along with memories of her own mother and observations of her sisters and friends with children. In the early 1960s, I was disheartened at the sight of my high-spirited college roommate tending her small son, the result of an accidental pregnancy that forced her to give up school as well as her musical trio; although her little boy was adorable, she seemed shockingly subdued. Many young women are winning diplomas and degrees today, but after childbirth they are still expected to delay or drop other activities, an agenda that many resent and resist, especially those with the most education and the best jobs. This double standard is nothing new. Almost a century ago the social worker and magazine editor who called herself A Childless Wife explained that she had gained a sense of self-confidence from competing with boys in co-educational schools, an experience that left her reluctant to remain at home with children.

During times of privation and stress in the past, women have had fewer or no children for reasons of survival or even as a form of passive resistance to oppressions like slavery. In recent years, misgivings about the economic penalties of full-time child raising have been underscored by the United States government’s persistent indifference to the difficulties of working parents, which contrasts sharply with the policies of European countries. In many cases a woman’s choice to remain childfree is less an aversion to parenthood than an attempt to retain the potential of adulthood. In the living of my life, I came to realize that I had not just neglected to give birth to children, I had responded to very real but veiled antinatalist conditions in the culture around me. Hesitancy about undertaking parenthood is a morally responsible attitude when a man or woman determines that the odds are low for providing a child with a decent childhood in an unstable social milieu.

The rejection of parenthood is a delicate and even dangerous topic; it has an element of subversiveness to it, especially when it is the choice of happily married couples. In the past, particularly during wartime, the absence of progeny was a threat to the survival of families, ethnic groups, and nations, but although the earth is now threatened by overpopulation, few of us still dare to speak openly about our real reasons for refusing to breed. We are afraid to challenge the view of motherhood as the essential female experience. An uneasy silence exists between mothers and nonmothers, since we seldom talk frankly about the motives for our reproductive behavior or the realities of our daily lives. Even those of us without offspring rarely talk about it among ourselves because we often feel isolated by our private rationales. “To this day, women without children have no common activity, no common language,” Berenice Fisher, a professor of education at New York University, has observed. “They share a common stigma, but the meaning of that stigma often varies for the women themselves.” Certainly many of the nulliparas and nulligravidas whom I interviewed had never talked in depth about nonmotherhood before, and their speech was as often painfully hesitant as quietly triumphant. And their words made me consider the complicated origins of my own childlessness.

Almost from birth I had wondered, either subliminally or overtly, whether or not to be a mother. In the decade preceding my birth, during the Depression of the 1930s, large numbers of American women never bore children; although statistics compiled at the time are not comparable to current ones, it appears that childlessness (and single-child motherhood) was near or at its highest level in this country. Wives and daughters of out-of-work men needed jobs, and many of them put offmarriage or postponed childbearing in order to earn wages. Patterns among my relatives reflected those tendencies but for different reasons. My mother’s older sister, an attractive “society girl” and champion skier, stayed single into her thirties until she eventually decided to marry, and my mother, who married my father in 1936, remained a childless wife for six years. Although my mother said later that she had wanted to get pregnant in the early years of her marriage, the birth of a baby certainly would have affected her carefree way of life; snapshots taken at the time show my parents thoroughly enjoying their little rented house, their English spaniel’s large litters, summer days on the fishing boat named for my mother, and autumn weekends at the family hunting camp in rural Rhode Island.

After America entered the Second World War in 1941, the nation’s leaders put out a patriotic appeal to civilians to enter the factories and offices vacated by those entering the armed services. More women began to earn paychecks than ever before, and by 1944 they composed a third of the nation’s civilian labor force. It is revealing in light of the government’s resistance to underwriting child care today to realize that during that national emergency, Washington was willing and able to open rapidly thousands of day-care centers to enable mothers to take jobs. After the armistice, however, the centers were abruptly closed and female workers were fired, effectively sending mothers and nonmothers alike back home so returning servicemen could be rehired. It was a bitter experience for those who had ventured forth to learn trades in the name of patriotism and who wanted to keep them, but their protests went unheard and unheeded as an era of virulent pronatalism began.

I was conceived just before my father joined the navy at the beginning of the war, and my mother, Lally, unlike many other mothers, stayed home to care for me. My earliest memory of her, vague in its details but emotionally vivid, is of a high-spirited and beautiful young woman who loved to sing and to twirl me around in her arms. I recently saw home-movie footage of my mother’s sister’s postwar August wedding that dramatically confirmed my early remembrance: my mother, the slender and elegant matron-of-honor in a long, ruffled organdy gown with fresh flowers woven into her long dark hair, was laughing and animated. As the five-year-old flower girl, I wore a circle of rosebuds over my dark bangs as well as a dress that was a miniature version of hers; I appeared lively and unafraid as I grabbed a boy cousin’s hand, jumped offa low stone wall onto the lawn, and pulled him toward the sherbet and the towering, flower-decked white wedding cake.

As was the custom in my mother’s family, she raised me with live-in help, first a baby nurse and then a college student, all within the embrace of her and my father’s large families, most of whom lived nearby in the small city of Providence, Rhode Island. Although her sister and two brothers were in the armed services, her beloved eldest brother, who had a medical deferment, lived with his family a block away, and her father, who was retired, walked over to visit every afternoon after I was born.

When my father, Laurence (Larry), returned from the Pacific at the end of the war, he did not remain at home for long. Having had a taste of freedom and authority, he decided to leave my mother and me as well as the enveloping extended families for a different kind of life as a furniture manufacturer in a Vermont village. After his death four decades later, I discovered that his edition of Robert Frost poetry had a stanza scissored out, perhaps so he could put the lines in his wallet and reread them often; the words were about the difficulties of departing and discovering one’s own way. He left behind in our house his masterly replica of an eighteenth-century corner cupboard, but he tore from my baby album a heartfelt letter he had written to me two months after my birth in the hours before his ship left San Francisco for the war zone. The letter, which came to me from my stepmother after his death, revealed a father whom I had never known. In the letter, he told me always to love my mother (“as much as your little heart will stand”), especially if he should not survive the war. His neat handwriting relayed the values dearest to him and advised me to go to my mother if I should inherit his shyness. Promising a rapport that was never to be, he wrote: “Some people, but not Lally, might be foolish enough to tell you that you have never seen your Daddy, but don’t let them fool you. They told me you couldn’t see, but I know better than they do, for you looked right at me and smiled and then you winked—and I winked back.”

In the fall of 1950, five years after the end of the war, my maternal grandparents had a formal photograph taken of their rapidly growing family. Three of their five children had returned from serving in the military, and six more babies had been born; by then we numbered twenty-four, ranging in age from my seventy-one-year-old grandfather to a month-old granddaughter. My mother had already divorced and remarried, and among the new toddlers was my little half sister. At eight years old, I sat cross-legged at my mother’s feet, in a pose identical to the boy cousin my age, wearing a lace-collared party dress, my straight brown hair neatly tamed by a barrette, gazing intently and somberly into the lens of the camera.

The ultradomesticity of the 1950s was a throwback to the Victorian glorification of maternity. For the past hundred years, since the decline of agriculture and the advent of industrialism, American women had been giving birth to fewer children. The postwar domestic phenomenon was an aberration for several reasons: women who were educated and had experienced life outside the home not only had larger families than in the past few generations, averaging 3.7 children each by 1957, but they stayed home to care for them by themselves. Middle-class American wives experienced a curious combination of comfort and confinement in that period of postwar prosperity, marked not only by advances in health care and the widespread availability of household appliances but also by job discrimination and popular notions that women could be best fulfilled through their roles as wives and mothers. My mother, who was raised by a nanny, found herself at age forty rearing me, my half sister, and a half brother who was born in 1952, with scarce help. Yet the wartime years, during which she and many other women enjoyed an unexpected amount of independence, either on the job or running households alone, had made deep and lasting impressions on them. Many, including my mother, would convey to their daughters distinct double messages that originated in their lost autonomy and aspirations—the confusing words and actions that urge conformity on the one hand and rebellion on the other—and that inadvertently helped revive American feminism when these daughters came of age a few decades later.

Growing up in the 1950s, I did not know any women without children except a few very young or elderly teachers. Most females without progeny had come of age during the 1930s and were now over the age of fifty. Childlessness among younger women was rare, consisting of only 8 percent of the daughters of Depression-era mothers. Neither did I know any mothers of young children with jobs, except for several young widows. My mother, who had left high school in 1933 during the depths of the Depression, had been told that it was wrong for girls from comfortable backgrounds to take jobs from male breadwinners. Once she mentioned to me that it was wise for a wife to have something respectable to do if her husband died or divorced her; when my father left her, she confided ashamedly, the only job she could imagine doing was arranging flowers for a florist. During my childhood I cannot remember anyone asking me what I wanted to be when I grew up. No one had to ask, because it was assumed that my only option was to be a stay-at-home mother. Even an aunt who had been an officer in the Women’s Army Corps was living out that scenario. Thinking about my future was a little depressing because, although I adored my little sister and brother, I realized that the daily rounds of diapers and feedings bored me and exhausted my mother. My mother’s double message to me about motherhood included excusing me from baby-sitting, since during her girlhood that was the sphere of servants. Still, I remember thinking at a young age that it was dangerous to dream too much about other ways of life, since harboring any hopes outside housekeeping would make it impossible for me to adjust to marriage and motherhood. I clearly understood that I was supposed to hold myself in suspension, essentially unformed and unjelled, in a kind of willed immaturity, because of my inevitable destiny.

During the 1950s, the 3 percent of wives without children, or even those with one child, were considered socially aberrant. A sense of secrecy enveloped them, and they were pitied as infertile or scorned as neurotic. One 1955 study, which described wives in childless marriages as introverted and maladjusted, implied that they had personality problems that resulted in a rejection of motherhood, but later sociologists have suggested that the condemnation of childlessness may have troubled them instead. The only women for whom it was possible to be childless without censure were the mentally disturbed, the genetically defective, the sexually deviant, the chronically ill, or, in some circumstances, the rare genius. The pronatalist bias was so strong then that Harvard social psychology professor Lotte Bailyn, a Viennese-born wife and mother, noted that the choices to stay single or childless existed only in principle for a professional woman. In reality, the tiny number of deliberately childless during that era were usually those of modest means with high aspirations in the arts and academia or ambitious offspring of immigrants and lower-class parents.

Against this background, meanwhile, I was in training to be a bride, the first step in an upper-middle-class milieu toward becoming a mother. The pressure came from every direction, but mainly from my mother, despite her own marital disappointments. The Bachrach photograph of her formal and fashionable May Day wedding to my dapper father at the age of twenty-one shows a stiffly smiling bride buttoned into her mother-in-law’s heirloom nuptial gown and veil, flanked by six bridesmaids and two flower girls. That marriage had failed painfully, but now, in my young eyes, she seemed disillusioned again. Around 1951, while I was still prepubescent, my father and his lady friend sent me a large expensive bride doll elaborately enveloped in white tulle. My immediate reaction was to put it away in a drawer and refuse to touch it, an inarticulate but resentful act of rebellion against what I already sensed about matrimony. It was not that I did not treasure gifts from my father—I had carefully saved two simple cloth dolls he had sent me from Panama during the war. The bride doll, however, remained untouched and pristine in its tissue paper, although from time to time I wistfully gazed at its frilly loveliness, wanting to believe in its romantic promise.

Around the age of ten, as my socialization continued, my mother talked me into dropping horseback riding lessons for ballroom dancing classes at a place called...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Finding the Words, Discovering My Way
• 2. Examining the Choice, Why It Arises
• 3. Searching History, Remembering Our Maiden Aunts
• 4. Understanding Our Mothers, Enlarging Motherhood
• 5. Dreaming About a Child, Loving Childlikeness
• 6. Living with Men, Improvising the Way
• 7. Recognizing Our Womanhood, Redefining Femininity
• 8. Possessing Ourselves, Doing Our Work
• 9. Looking Ahead, Celebrating Our Lives
• Notes
• Index