Image: Delphine Desane
Womanhood ≠ Motherhood: A challenge to the cultural assumptions which equate womanhood with motherhood
words Ally McCrow-Young
Mid-morning at the doctor’s office. I’m absent-mindedly scrolling through my phone when a woman enters, tailed by two other women wearing matching red scrubs. She introduces herself as Erin and asks if I mind that her two apprentices sit here and observe.
“Sure?” I reply, confused. It’s pollen season and I’ve come here for allergy medication. Perhaps this Erin is some kind of allergy specialist, I think.
Erin’s manner and posture seem eerily still, solemn somehow. “I see from your file that you are 32 years old,” she asks me over her glasses.
“Er…yes?” I say, still befuddled and wondering how age relates to anti-histamines. “I also see that you do not have children.” Her tone indicates that this statement does not require an answer. She proceeds, “Did you know that as soon as you enter your late twenties, your fertility rate begins to rapidly decline?”
She holds up a graph that looks like a roller coaster and points to the steep drop. “Did you know that every single year from the age you are right now, that decline happens more and more quickly, making it harder and harder to get pregnant?”
Erin inclines her head ever so slightly, owl-like. She says quietly, unequivocally, “You do want to have children, don’t you?”
My mind races, fight-or-flight, fight-or-flight? The roller coaster graph swims in front of me, making me wish I was riding one right now, hands in the air, belly full of sweets.
The two apprentices gaze fixedly at me, red scrubs immaculately pressed. Erin places a steady hand on my chair, waiting. Images from The Handmaid’s Tale I watched last night materialise in my mind.
Fight, I decide. I gulp audibly. “No. I don’t plan to have children.”
“I see my life as ‘child-free’, as an active decision I have made carefully and deliberately. But the world continues to deem it as ‘child-less’, as something women like me are lacking, and therefore something to correct.”
I steady myself for what I know is coming, for the same fight I’ve fought so many times before. The same one I know I will have to fight for years to come.
The universal response to my decision to be childfree is so familiar by now, it might as well be a script.
Respondent: “But why not? Have you really thought about it? You’re missing out. You’ll change your mind, you’ll see.”
Erin’s reply mirrors the usual script almost to a tee, with the addition of even more mountainous graphs. She concludes with a plea for me to “think about” my decision, urgently.
“Uh…I really just came in for some allergy medication…” I say to Erin, backing out of the room, closing the door with a click on the Gilead gang. That day, and every pollen season since, I settle for over-the-counter allergy meds.
I would love to say these ambush and interrogation scenarios are a one-off, but they are unfortunately commonplace for childfree women. It’s a form of gaslighting that we’ve all become accustomed to, knowing with certainty the question “But why not?” is always waiting.
In those ‘fight’ moments, we’ve learned to arm ourselves with carefully reasoned lists about our decisions to be childfree. I could cite the environmental impact of overpopulation, the concerns for bringing a child into an increasingly polarised and unstable world. I could cite my lack of general interest in infants. I could cite my love of travel, of working, of animals and of listening to records loudly at midnight. But, I may as well be speaking white noise as soon as I’ve begun to reply.
The difference comes down to one syllable. I see my life as ‘child-free’, as an active decision I have made carefully and deliberately. But the world continues to deem it as ‘child-less’, as something women like me are lacking, and therefore something to correct.
It doesn’t take long to pull up countless examples of this assumption in society. Negative stereotypes abound in pop culture, emphasising the “less” in childless – she’s the crazy cat lady, she’s the sad spinster, she’s the cold-hearted career bitch. Seeing childfree women as less-than is the norm.
As women of colour, we are already put into a box. The world insists on ascribing us one thing only. Asian girl, check. Black girl, check. We’ve fought for the right to be seen as individuals, fought to break free of that one, defining box. And lately, it seems like that fight has been met with some progress, slow and steady, but progress nonetheless.
Yet, women are continually assigned to another box – the box that deems womanhood as motherhood. For young women, this box is especially confining, its walls heavy with the weight of historic gender roles that limit our autonomy.
The way in which the world refuses to uncouple womanhood from motherhood becomes increasingly clear when comparing the treatment of childfree men versus childfree women. Childfree men are never interrogated about their reproductive decisions because their personhood is not seen as being bound to their status as a parent. A childfree man in the workplace, for example, is a leader in his field, a fiercely independent individual. Yet a childfree woman in the same context is selfish, given the side-eye and an awkward conversation.
Rather than further entrench one ‘correct’ way of being a woman, we should instead expand our concept of womanhood to encompass a spectrum of choices. In the same way that we have come to understand gender and sexuality as diverse and fluid, it’s time to begin acknowledging the plurality of womanhood. Let’s shoot for a future beyond gaslighting women about their decisions, and put aside the scripted fights. Because one box does not fit all.
Read more stories and considerations on contemporary motherhood in our latest release Motherhood Untold: Six Essays on Unconventional Motherhood.