Clodagh Finn: Women without children face the brunt of bias

For many years, it felt as if the world didn’t quite know what to do with a woman without children. But then, how could that be otherwise — in Ireland at least, where our Constitution uses the words ‘woman’ and ‘mother’ as synonyms?

Somehow that detail was missed in all the fevered debate in the recent referendums on family and care. But let’s recap. Article 42.1.1 champions a woman’s contribution in the home, saying the common good could not be achieved without it.

In the next paragraph, 42.1.2, the word ‘woman’ morphs into ‘mother’, as if one automatically leads to the other: “The State shall, therefore, endeavour to ensure that mothers shall not be obliged by economic necessity to engage in labour to the neglect of their duties in the home.”

Much has changed since those problematic lines were first published in 1937, but I wonder if there has been any real shift in the assumption that all women aspire to become mothers, if circumstances and health allow?

Those who don’t want — or can’t have — children are somehow seen as ‘other’. They need to explain themselves, it seems, or suffer the indignity of being labelled and stereotyped.

And what stereotypes. Author Nicole Louie provides a pretty comprehensive list in the introduction to Others Like Me: the Lives of Women Without Children. 

Hearing her read those lazy tropes aloud at the launch of that illuminating book last week added an extra layer of outrage (to this listener at least).

“You know the ones,” she said, looking out into a packed room of people who knew the dismissive labels only too well.

There’s “the crazy cat lady, the sorrowful barren woman, the selfish childfree woman, the overambitious career woman, the incomplete woman, the cold-hearted woman, the unnatural woman.”

That set of pejorative terms, as Nicole Louie observed, is repeated across cultural channels, causing millions of women to feel isolated, ostracised, or in some cases, to be literally written out of family history. For example, Candice, a 49-year-old psychotherapist born in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was excluded when her father did the family’s genealogy tree.

“My name was not there. I found that hurtful and offensive. If a person has no children, does that mean they do not exist? Is having offspring the only true contribution to mankind?” she asks in one of 14 first-person stories beautifully told in Others Like Me.

Another, Daniela, a 43-old-year American, is at the launch to describe her experience of a medical profession that has clearly been shaped by the belief that every woman wants to become a mother, even to the detriment of her health. There’s a hush in the room as she describes periods so heavy they “would actually push tampons right out of” her body, and her later diagnosis of uterine fibroids.

The options, she was told, were pregnancy or hysterectomy, a false choice that forced Daniela and her husband down a path they felt under pressure to take.

When she miscarried at nine weeks, Daniela didn’t want the ER doctor’s sympathy, or reassurance that her “dream” would finally come true with another pregnancy. “I had to just lie there knowing I wouldn’t be trying ever again. 

I just didn’t feel that kind of grief. My grief was for myself, for the torture some doctor had put me through for an outcome I didn’t want in the first place. I just wanted to be healthy.”

Little wonder the idea that all women will, at some point, become mothers is so prevalent when you consider how early — and often — that message is reinforced.

Nicole Louie was just six when she was given a doll with a tiny baby snuggled upside-down inside a cavity in its pelvis. She recalls trading the detachable baby for a pencil and the doll for butterfly stationery.

“On one of those sheets, I wrote what I wanted to be when I grew up: banjo player, pony trainer, story maker. Mother was not one of them,” she writes.

Yet, two decades later, she had yet to meet a woman who had lived or wanted to live a life without children. She had no role models around her, so she set out to find some. At first, she gathered the names of famous women who didn’t have children — Dolly Parton, Billie Holiday, Oprah Winfrey and Coco Chanel to mention a few.

Then, she revisited her book shelves and reread the work of some of her favourite authors — those without children — with a new lens. The likes of Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Hilary Mantel, and a host of others, had much to tell her.

In the real world, she out set to create a version of it that allowed space for others like her. Like us. And, as one of her interviewees said, it was as if she had a divining rod that led her to women whose stories offered a much-needed riposte to the notion that childlessness is some kind of condition.

It is not. Meet the Turkish woman who climbed Everest; the asexual trumpet player who was born in Ghana, grew up in Japan and now lives in France; the Peruvian anthropologist who had to fight to have her tubes tied; the singer from Iceland who makes theatre productions for children.

Their full lives, told in Others Like Me, are vastly different. The only thing they have in common is that they do not have children but often, because of that, they face enduring prejudice.

The woman who unites them in an important and lyrical book, has also felt the brunt of that bias. Nicole Louie, a writer and translator, faced a struggle to feel socially valued and equal in her native Brazil, as well as in the other places she has called home: Sweden, the UK, Portugal and now Ireland.

Change is coming, though. And not before time.

Given the fall in birth rates and the increasing numbers of women without children, it’s not surprising that another book on the same subject, Caroline Maginnis’s very welcome and wonderfully titled Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women, has just been published.

She playfully uses the term harpy to blast stereotypes to smithereens. That brings me back to labels. A distinction is often made between women who are child free by choice and those who are childless by circumstance, but neither should ever (ever) be referred to as a ‘non-mother’.

That limiting term negates the experiences of millions of women around the world who are, at last, being written back into glorious being by writers such as Caroline Maginnis and Nicole Louie. They won’t be put back in a box again.

So the next time someone asks a woman without children if she has any offspring, here’s hoping she won’t have to mind the (conversation) gap.