This morning, CNN1 ran a piece on misunderstandings and stereotypes of childless women called “Check your ‘cat-lady’ preconceptions about childless women.” Naturally, it’s full of preconceptions, misunderstandings, and stereotypes of childless women. In particular, the women are still discussed by their relationship to/with children, and the voluntarily child-free are conflated with the involuntarily childless and uncertain.
Let’s take a quick walk through the women interviewed for this story:
- Grell Yursik, 35: she and her husband have not decided whether they want to have children;
- Laurie White, 43: refers to herself as “accidentally childless”;
- Melanie Notkin, 45: says she has circumstantial infertility because she’s single and discusses “the pain and grief over not having children,” promotes maternal instincts of childless women;
- Kitty Bradshaw, 35: heeded advice to wait to have children (portrayed as bad advice in the story), still dreams of having them and has moved to LA to find a husband;
- Sheila Hoffman, 64: conscious choice to be child-free.
Women, still defined by the activity of their uteruses. Still defending their ability to be maternal,2 still looking for someone to create a child with,3 still using morally loaded language to justify their childless state as an accident of fate.
In fact, in an article ostensibly about the great life of childless women, four of the five women interviewed discuss wanting to have children and feeling that the circumstances of their lives simply don’t allow it. There are 33 paragraphs in the story, and three—the last three—talk to and about a woman, Sheila Hoffman, who actively made the choice to not have children. None of the paragraphs on Hoffman discuss her choice or how it makes her feel, only the need for role models for women that are not mothers. This, despite the fact that the DeVries Global white paper that at least in part prompted Wallace’s article showed that a full 36% of the 1000 women without children interviewed didn’t actually want children (and another 18% were on the fence).
So why did Wallace’s article spend absolutely zero time on this theoretically large segment of the American population?
Because it’s still not considered acceptable for women to not want children. Even the term being coined for these women, “Otherhood,”4 emphasizes the Otherness5 of women who have decided to skip having children.
What is acceptable is for a woman to want to have children, but to ruefully conclude that she cannot because she is single, cannot afford IVF treatments or being a single mother,6 or has lost her chance for reasons running the gamut from missed love to missing love. Women can and should be apologetic and sad about being childless; it is an accident, or a tragedy, rather than an empowered choice. And that’s reflected in Wallace’s article.
But beyond being infuriating for those of us—a third of the women sampled!—who are cheerful, happy, and decisive about our decision to not have children, the grouping of women who do not have children with women who do not want children is hurtful to the women who do feel that loss in their lives. These experiences—of feeling circumstantially infertile, of accidental childlessness, of deeply wanting a child—should not be lumped in with those of us who happily hug our IUDs, pills, and/or condoms whilst skipping gleefully down the Marvel toy aisle thinking “all for me, all for me.”7 Being infertile, circumstantially or medically, is a serious emotional wound that should not be conflated with a joyful and intentional life choice.
Write about the pain.
Write about the joy.
Don’t write about them at once, because that only does a disservice to both.