Insofar as there is any truth to the stereotype that shrewish “girl bosses” do not have children because they work too hard, it is that women have often had to refrain from becoming mothers for economic reasons, and not just in the wake of second-wave feminism: During the Great Depression, “a greater percentage of women remained childless than at any other point in American history.” Fertility rates are declining globally, but they are declining more slowly in Western European countries that “tend to have generous maternity leave policies, prenatal and postpartum support, free day care, and shorter workdays for nursing mothers.” The lesson is refreshingly practical: There is no need to appeal to misty mystifications to account for a trend that is easily explained by economic hardship and social isolation.I’ll never forget the first time I heard about The Expanse. “Most explanations for why women aren’t having children focus on individual choices made by individual women,” Heffington writes, but this solipsistic emphasis is misguided.
Before America graduated to telling upwardly mobile White women that, if they decline to reproduce, they are avatars of late-modern decadence, it was forcibly sterilizing Black women in the Jim Crow south.Įach chapter of “Without Children” is vivid and informative enough to fascinate in its own right, but by the end its strands have braided into a broader thesis. The centuries-long cultural campaign in favor of procreation is one side of a historically eugenicist coin, and the other is even darker. On the contrary, “the expectation that people sexed female at birth would become mothers was forged by a long history that sought to make reproduction into white American women’s primary civic contribution.” In 1873, a Justice of the Supreme Court wrote in a concurring opinion that “the paramount destiny and mission of women are to fulfill the noble and benign offices of wife and mother,” and as recently as 1974, a couple who confessed that they did not want children on “60 Minutes” received death threats after the segment aired. It begins by debunking the persistent myth that Americans do not place a high premium on procreation.
“Without Children” is a feat of diligent research and, better yet, blazing argument. Heffington, who takes it upon herself to speak on behalf of the “unleavened bread” derided by Roosevelt, is more assertive. What we don’t have is a great term for a woman without children other than ‘a woman without children.’” “Natality” and “woman without children” may be unfamiliar - even clunky - phrases, but they are appropriately jarring rebukes to the glibness of our usual rhetoric, which rarely seems to move beyond entreaties for “more babies, please.” Banks begins by noting that “there is still no single, alternative word to express for birth what ‘mortality’ expresses for death,” namely “how birth shapes all human life, defining its limits and its possibilities,” while Heffington opens by reflecting that “we have a term for women with children, which is mother. Both Banks and Heffington struggle to break with the established scripts, even linguistically. There is no end of hand-wringing over careerists who forgo the delights of cherubim in favor of corporate paychecks, but careful interrogations of parenthood are few and far between. Just as motherhood is both an obligation and an afterthought, it is both a national obsession and the stuff of cheap talking points.
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