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From the Introduction
By Rochelle Ratner
"I don't want children," the nine-year-old
narrator in Evelyn C. Rosser's "January 1953" proclaims. "I want
a mink coat, a red convertible, and a big house on the beach. I
can just picture adults tittering in the background. Give her a
few years, they say, and of course she'll change her mind.
In beginning this volume with Rosser's
diary entry, I feel as if I'm embarking on an autobiographical journey.
Growing up in the 1950s, I encountered, at an early age, the assumption
that being female meant being--some day--a mother. I must have been
five or six when my mother, giving me a bath, explained the importance
of washing the belly button, "because that's where babies come
from." I recall later, while bathing myself, purposely leaving
my navel unwashed, so determined was I that I didn't want babies.
I also learned the "shame" of childlessness
first hand. The whispers I heard concerned my grandfather, who had
outlived three wives and married his fourth two years before I was
born. For thirty years he'd had a house full of children: his, hers,
and theirs. The last thing he wanted was more children. Although
Rae, his fourth wife, was a widow, she was childless. But because
the Jewish religion teaches it's a sin to marry a barren woman,
the family concocted a story about her having had a son who died
in infancy. (Years later, I gained further insight into how creativity
might help a woman avoid the stigma of childlessness. Perhaps because
I never had children, I am more comfortable teaching in senior centers
and hospitals than in schools. I recall a woman who was probably
the best writer in one particular class; she often wrote vivid poems
to and about her grandson, David, reflecting on their outings and
conversations. It was only after I'd been teaching the workshop
for several months that I discovered she'd never married and never
had children.)
My own commitment to childlessness
remained virtually unbroken as I grew from child to adolescent to
adult to non-parent. But why? Why, in the face of powerful social
expectations and pressures, have I--and millions of other women--elected
to remain "without child"?
As soon as we address the question
of childlessness, we are thrust into the realm of cliché
and mythology, where no one is protected from the false assumptions:
women won't grow up until they're mothers; women who don't have
children are selfish, cold; childless women must have been abused
when they were growing up. Friends caution that you're missing out
on life's most exhilarating pleasure or reason that your partner
won't feel any ties to a childless relationship. Some myths are
even more disturbing: the persistent notion that lesbians--not to
mention poor women, women with prison records, or women with HIV--are
categorically unfit to be mothers.
There are, of course, the easy
replies to superficial questioning (or self-questioning): I adore
my sister's children; I haven't been in the right relationship;
this apartment is too small; I'm too wrapped up in my career (or
my art); I don't want to clone a little image of myself; I want
children, but my partner doesn't; I have a difficult time relating
to children; the world doesn't need more children.
In fact, there are as many reasons
for childlessness as there are childless women. My own rationalization
as a teenager was that I hated my parents, hated them for having
brought me into this troubled and friendless world, and I could
never live with myself if my own child felt that way. On better
days I added that I might be willing to adopt a child already born,
but I could never be responsible for that birth. By the time I learned
such feelings were a part of normal adolescence I had moved to New
York, my apartment was too small, I wasn't in the right relationship
and, because I had no siblings, nieces, or nephews, I had a difficult
time relating to children.
* * * * *
In the mid 1990s, when the proposal
for this volume was making the rounds of publishing houses, one
editor I respected made the comment that "children are in right
now." That's precisely my point...
These [child-free] women desperately
needed to talk, to realize they weren't the only women in the world
who did not want children. And they needed to read about experiences
and feelings that resembled--and thus validated--their own. I needed
this myself. Because growing up--and even as a young woman living
on my own in New York, reading widely and editing a review of contemporary
literature--I had no belief that such women really existed.
In 1990, I chanced upon Irena Klepfisz's
essay "Women Without Children/ Women Without Families/ Women Alone,"
which candidly explored the fear and guilt her decision to remain
childless has caused her. Written from the viewpoint of a Jew whose
father was killed in the Holocaust, it had a resonance and poignancy
that ignited my search for what others had written on the concept
of child-free existence. But I was busy with other projects, and
it was a lackadaisical search, at best.
Then I heard Molly Peacock read
her poem "Upbringing. It was shortly before the 1992 presidential
election, ironically enough at a benefit reading for Planned Parenthood.
She prefaced the poem by recounting some of the grim details of
abused children that had recently been flooding New York newspapers.
The contrast of this poem with my memory of Klepfisz's essay reawakened
my interest in the subject. I decided that a volume of women's writing
about childlessness might yet be possible--an anthology exploring
the lives, fears, and dreams of childless women, juxtaposing the
works of writers I respected. And if it could be printed and bound,
and distributed to bookstores and classrooms around the country,
then perhaps the next childless woman might not feel so alone.
* * * * *
At the start, I wondered if this
anthology should include both writing by women who had chosen not
to have children and women who--through infertility, death, discrimination,
or a variety of other losses--had been denied children. But how
different, really, is Julia Alvarez's decision not to mother from
Paulette Bates Alden's decision to give up fertility treatments,
or from the decision by Pamela Walker's character to symbolically
bury her lost infant? All three describe themselves mainly in relation
to the mothers around them. All three writers eventually come to
terms with their childlessness and get on with their lives. (In
a way, even women who are mothers face similar challenges; the mother
of a teenaged daughter recently told me that during an argument
her daughter shouted, "Get a life!"). As women, mothers and nonmothers,
we find ourselves having to let go--of the physical child as well
as of the desire for children.
In fact, I believe it is a virtue
of this collection that the writers in these pages reflect a broad
variety of experiences and perspectives, and even that they tend
to contradict one another, or themselves; it testifies to the social
and emotional complexity that surrounds the issue of childlessness.
But at the same time this collection, taken as a whole, reveals
much common ground: each writer deals with living as a woman without
children, in a world that continues to consider motherhood a condition
inseparable from womanhood.
Not all of the contributors--or
their characters--are physically childless. Hettie Jones describes
a mother accompanying her daughter to the abortion clinic. There
are the pieces written by mothers who don't mention their children,
such as Diane di Prima and Grace Paley. Nor does being childless
prevent you from writing about children. Joyce Carol Oates, childless
herself, presents an all-too-familiar portrait of an adolescent
son shutting his mother out of his life. (It is often noted that
the painter Mary Cassatt, famous for her portraits of mothers and
children, was never a mother.)
It was not necessary that the selections
included here be true stories (and many are not) just deeply felt
and vividly presented. Every writer who contributed an essay or
memoir is also a poet or fiction writer, and when it came to making
the final selections, art, as well as message, was a deciding factor.
* * * * *
Looking at the early years of the
twentieth century, I found more literature by working-class women
writers like Agnes Smedley, who depict the grinding strain of bearing
and raising children in poverty--and, sometimes, assert that there
are other ways for women to live. In her 1929 novel Daughter
of Earth, Smedley's protagonist chooses to remain childless
as part of her effort to escape the cycle that destroyed her mother
and so many of the other women around her.
But not surprisingly, literature
directly exploring childlessness--particularly chidlessness by choice--begins
to emerge more visibly with the first stirrings of second-wave feminism,
in the mid-1960s. In 1963, the year that Betty Friedan's The
Feminine Mystique was published, Tillie Olsen delivered a lecture
that would one day become part of Silences, her ground-breaking
work on women writers, in which she acknowledged the challenge children
present to women seeking the concentrated time and attention needed
to pursue their art:
More than any other relationship,
overwhelmingly more, motherhood means being instantly interruptible,
responsive, responsible. Children need one now .... It
is distraction, not meditation, that becomes habitual; interruption,
not continuity; spasmodic, not constant toil.
Nineteen sixty-three was the same
year that Sylvia Plath, living out the reality that Tillie Olsen
described, woke at five o'clock every morning so she could concentrate
on the startling poems in Ariel before the baby cried. The
following year, 1964, saw the publication of Jane Rule's novel The
Desert of the Heart (reprinted I985), which is, of all
the novels I have read, the one that most boldly forefronts an image
of women choosing, quite resolutely, not to have children.
The protagonists in this emotionally complex story of love between
two women are Ann, a casino-worker in Reno, who states flatly that
"it's fertility that's a dirty word to me," and Evelyn, who is in
Reno to get a divorce after a childless sixteen-year marriage, and
comes to understand that the tragedy of her infertility is also
a liberation. Not coincidentally, 1964 is also the date of
the earliest piece in this volume, Diane di Prima's "I Get My Period:
Summer 1964," a poem that embodies much of the ambiguity
many women experienced at the time.
It seemed to me a logical choice
to locate this book, in time, within the era that began with the
contemporary women's movement in the West. In this era, feminists
in general, and women writers in particular, have grappled quite
directly with issues surrounding motherhood--and dared, as never
before, to name childlessness as a viable choice. In her perceptive
essay, "Motherhood--Reclaiming the Demon Texts," published in Ms.
Magazine (May/June 1991), Ann Snitow recalls writings from
the contemporary feminist movement's first decade, such as Shulamith
Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex, which attacked the institution
of motherhood and its crippling effect on women. As Snitow reasonably
points out, many of these works would be misinterpreted; these writers
were lashing out at patriarchy, and not at women who were mothers.
Yet they would be denounced as "mother-hating" texts, and while
feminist writers would continue to examine motherhood, they would
fail to sustain "a strong and clear critique of the prescription
that all women must be mothers." This would become particularly
true following the political shift of the early 1980s. Snitow
writes:
It's been some time since feminists
demanding abortion have put front and center the idea that one
good use to which one might put this right is to choose not to
have kids at all. Chastised in the Reagan years, pro-choice strategists
understandably have emphasized the right to wait, to space one's
children, to have each child wanted. They feared invoking any
image that could be read as a female withdrawal from the role
of nurturer. We are--in this period of reaction--elaborating,
extending, reinstitutionalizing motherhood for ourselves. Never
has the baby been so delicious. A feminist theorist tells me she
is more proud of her new baby than of all her books.
Paula Weideger, in another Ms.
magazine article called "Womb Worship" (February 1988) personalized
this phenomenon, noting that the feminist movement had reversed
itself on the question of childlessness by choice, and that she
suddenly felt like a pitied outsider because she was holding her
ground and not having children.
Yet the ideas of the women's movement
in general, and the option to remain childless in particular, had
entered the popular consciousness, and it could never be fully expunged.
No matter how much rhetoric has been spewed concerning "family values,"
today even the most conservative women are aware of their options.
The idea that women can be fulfilled without being mothers, that
childlessness can even be a positive choice, seems to have seeped
deep enough into the culture to weather the anti-feminist backlash.
Snitow acknowledges that "however raggedly, women are already living
out basically new story lines, making piecemeal changes." In the
1980s and 1990s, numerous articles in the popular press, and even
several nonfiction books, defended the choice not to have children.
And many others insisted upon the ability of involuntarily childless
women to live rich and complete lives. (Admittedly, the Library
of Congress has no subject heading that separates voluntary childlessness
from "the heartbreak of infertility." University of Redlands librarian
Angelynn King, who compiled much of the bibliography included here,
lamented about how difficult this makes life for a researcher.)
The pieces collected in this anthology
were scattered, not easy to find unless you were looking for them.
But the fact is, they exist, as do a great many more not included
here--some of them from the 1960s and 1970s, but most from the 1980s
and 1990s. Other pieces were written expressly for this volume by
women who welcomed the long-overdue opportunity to write on this
subject. If, as I firmly believe, art imitates life, then we need
no further proof that this issue is here to stay.
Politics aside, we seem to have
reached the point where the experience of childlessness can be creatively
explored. In 1998 Molly Peacock, whose poem "Upbringing" ends this
volume, produced what is, to my knowledge, the first memoir to place
the decision to remain childless at the heart of a woman's life
story, Paradise, Piece by Piece. I hope that in the future
many more full-length creative works--memoirs and novels--will
focus on the issue; but I was encouraged that I found a rich enough
stock of poems, stories, and essays to fill a volume. Judging by
the responses I received when telling people about this project,
it would seem we are finally breaking through the walls of silence.
I believe it is only now, at the start of the new millennium, that
Bearing Life could come into being.
* * * * *
Bearing Life contains over fifty contributors, and
there are many more writers who might have been included in these
pages. Women here assert their right to be non-motheers, child-free,
childless -- whatever they cchoose to call it -- and to do so without
shame or apology. In stories, essays, and poems, childless women
may be heard, more and more, as strong voices.
These diverse pieces present alternatives
to motherhood. They reveal women contemplating, enduring, enjoying,
living lives without children. They explore--and in doing
so legitimize--the experience of childlessness in the contemporary
United States and Canada. This book is, in a profound sense of the
term, a pro-choice book. But it is not a self-help book.
It gives no instructions on how to overcome guilt, talk to a pregnant
friend, or break the news to parents. Not every piece ends happily
with a view of women finding fulfillment. Rather, the writers here
face hard issues, and readers are permitted to share in their determination,
frustration, fear, anguish, defiance, celebration and, sometimes,
humor.
Reading these pages, we see ourselves,
our friends, members of our families, and we take away something--love,
understanding, maybe deeper knowledge--to pass on, if not to our
own children, then to the children of others. It's an important
legacy.
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