To be a woman, what does that really mean? Does it mean you enjoy everything pink, love fashion, are softer, gentler, and destined to be a mother? Feminist research over the past three decades has done much to disrupt the conflation of womanhood and motherhood. However, despite this, as well as research illustrating that increasing numbers of women are choosing to not have children, those who make such choices are often still faced with subtle, and sometimes not so understated, resistance.
Why is there often a refusal to accept a choice which should be private and not even up for debate? Could it be that there is an elusive belief that you are “less a woman” for opting out of a role that has been traditionally conflated with womanhood?
To gain some insight into this topic, three professional women working in South Africa’s media scene, all of whom plan on leading child-free lives, opened up about their decision and the reactions of shock, confusion, and unsolicited advice and questioning they frequently have to endure.
“Sometimes people grill me, and other times they just look at me like I said something very inappropriate,” explains Patricia Pieterse. Similarly, Kyra Reddy says: “I get such shocking responses from women, like: ‘how can you even say something like that?’, or, because they’ve decided for me, ‘once you have a child you will change your mind.’?”
Reddy, like Pieterse, believes that these reactions are both a product of and a push to make women fit into social expectations of what they should do. Pieterse says she can understand such confused sentiments because she herself grew up believing women should be mothers. Reddy, however, is less forgiving, saying she pities people with such narrow mind-sets, and often believes these reactions are sparked by jealousy from people who didn’t realise their freedom to choose not to be mothers.
For Lia Marus, the astonishment in people’s reactions is muffled when she explains one of her reasons for remaining child-free is that she has Cowden’s Syndrome (a rare inherited disorder characterised by multiple tumour-like growths) and that her husband had leukaemia as a child.
Even then, people feel the need to push her toward considering motherhood through adoption. “I personally think they don’t want me to feel that they are excluding me from experiencing what being a mother is,” says Marus, but this “problem solving” is never something she asks for. “My husband and I don’t want to consider adoption. We like our lives as they are,” she says.
Reddy and Pieterse echo Marus’ sentiments, saying that together with their husbands, they’ve decided they like their lives as they are: child free. “We love the freedom to travel, wake up whenever we want to and do things on a whim,” says Reddy.
Pieterse, after hearing countless people say “it’s never the right time to have kids” as a dictum to motivate her to do so, flipped it by asking, “if it’s never the right time to have kids, then why do it?”
This “gradual realisation” was not shaped by a loathing for children; on the contrary, Pieterse believes there are too many children born to people who don’t really want them and who, in turn, suffer the consequences of not being adequately loved. Pieterse, an egg donor herself, respects the choice to have children and derives great satisfaction from helping others conceive. She just wishes others would respect her decision to not be a mother.
“I don’t think I need to defend my decision because I certainly don’t feel ‘less of a woman’. What other people think of me is their problem, not mine,” Reddy states bluntly. And she’s right. A woman’s right to choose and to not choose is exactly that, her right.
A choice, as Marus matter-of-factly put it, that is personal and between her and her partner, and should not be open to public debate and unsolicited advice. Not only do these three women feel that they are not “less of a woman” for having child-free lives, but that they are stronger for not bending to society’s conventions and for knowing what it is they want from their lives.
They would like to urge those who react adversely to their decision to contemplate their assumptions about what they expect from women. Their tendency to collapse motherhood and womanhood is not only unwelcome and rude, but they also, as Pieterse highlights, do damage to any sort of feminist achievement of women having the right to choose how their bodies are used. “Womanhood is not an exclusive club with petty rules like ‘you’re not a real woman without kids’. If we create trifling divisions among ourselves, we’re giving away our power.”
If women cannot support one another’s decisions to be women outside of being mothers, then how can the assumption that women are somehow less (than men) ever hope to Pieterse: “As a couple we have chosen to remain child-free. People often take exception to this, assuming Christiaan bullied me into it, because as a woman I’m expected to want kids.
People say we’re selfish and depriving our parents of grandchildren. Well, if we’re so selfish then maybe it’s better we don’t have children? It makes me feel angry when people say we’re selfish because it is a knee-jerk reaction, because it goes against the norm. I feel like people don’t appreciate that it is a person’s choice and not everyone has to have kids. We all have the right to choose not to take such a life-altering step.”