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Without children : the long history of not being a mother / Peggy O'Donnell Heffington.

By: Material type: TextTextPublisher: New York : Seal Press, 2023Edition: First editionDescription: x, 245 pages : illustrations (black and white) ; 24 cmContent type:
  • text
Media type:
  • unmediated
Carrier type:
  • volume
ISBN:
  • 9781541675575
  • 1541675576
Subject(s):
Contents:
Introduction: We're not having children -- Because we've always made choices -- Because we'll be on our own -- Because we can't have it all -- Because of the planet -- Because we can't -- Because we want other lives -- Conclusion: An if, you'll forgive me for asking, why should we?
Summary: "From Joan of Arc to Queen Elizabeth I, to Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony, to Sally Ride and Jennifer Aniston, history is full of women without children. Some chose to forgo reproduction in order to pursue intellectually satisfying work--a tension noted by medieval European nuns, 1970s women's liberationists, and modern professionals alike. Some refused to bring children into a world beset by famine, pollution, or climate change. For others, childlessness was involuntary: infertility has been a source of anguish all the way back to the biblical Hannah. But most women without children didn't--and don't--perceive themselves as either proudly childfree or tragically barren. Seventeenth century French colonists in North America, struggling without the kind of community support they enjoyed in their mother country, found themselves postponing children until a better moment that, for many of them, never arrived. It is women like these--whose ambivalence throughout their child-bearing years inevitably makes their choice for them--that make up the vast majority of millennials without children in the United States. Drawing on deep archival research and her own experience as a woman without children, historian Peggy O'Donnell shows modern women who are struggling to build lives and to figure out whether those lives allow for children that they are part of a long historical lineage-and that they are certainly not alone"-- Provided by publisher.
Holdings
Item type Home library Collection Call number Materials specified Status Date due Barcode Item holds
Adult Book Adult Book Main Library NonFiction 306.85 O26 Checked out 06/29/2024 33111011264781
Total holds: 0

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A historian explores the complicated relationship between womanhood and motherhood in this "timely, refreshingly open-hearted study of the choices women make and the cards they're dealt" (Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can't Sleep ).



In an era of falling births, it's often said that millennials invented the idea of not having kids. But history is full of women without children: some who chose childless lives, others who wanted children but never had them, and still others--the vast majority, then and now--who fell somewhere in between. Modern women considering how and if children fit into their lives are products of their political, ecological, and cultural moment. But history also tells them that they are not alone.

 

Drawing on deep research and her own experience as a woman without children, historian Peggy O'Donnell Heffington shows that many of the reasons women are not having children today are ones they share with women in the past: a lack of support, their jobs or finances, environmental concerns, infertility, and the desire to live different kinds of lives. Understanding this history--how normal it has always been to not have children, and how hard society has worked to make it seem abnormal--is key, she writes, to rebuilding kinship between mothers and non-mothers, and to building a better world for us all.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-232) and index.

Introduction: We're not having children -- Because we've always made choices -- Because we'll be on our own -- Because we can't have it all -- Because of the planet -- Because we can't -- Because we want other lives -- Conclusion: An if, you'll forgive me for asking, why should we?

"From Joan of Arc to Queen Elizabeth I, to Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony, to Sally Ride and Jennifer Aniston, history is full of women without children. Some chose to forgo reproduction in order to pursue intellectually satisfying work--a tension noted by medieval European nuns, 1970s women's liberationists, and modern professionals alike. Some refused to bring children into a world beset by famine, pollution, or climate change. For others, childlessness was involuntary: infertility has been a source of anguish all the way back to the biblical Hannah. But most women without children didn't--and don't--perceive themselves as either proudly childfree or tragically barren. Seventeenth century French colonists in North America, struggling without the kind of community support they enjoyed in their mother country, found themselves postponing children until a better moment that, for many of them, never arrived. It is women like these--whose ambivalence throughout their child-bearing years inevitably makes their choice for them--that make up the vast majority of millennials without children in the United States. Drawing on deep archival research and her own experience as a woman without children, historian Peggy O'Donnell shows modern women who are struggling to build lives and to figure out whether those lives allow for children that they are part of a long historical lineage-and that they are certainly not alone"-- Provided by publisher.

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