Danielle Vella

A family was not regarded as "a childrearing unit" until much more recently (1). And the modern sentimental family became officially established in the nineteenth century (2). This family was commonly known as composed of a man, a woman, and several children all of whom upheld their roles within the family. As time has gone on, historians have seen the family unit decrease in size largely from what started as families of eight or larger to becoming an average of four people, and now an even more common simple “family”—if one would even call it that—of two. The new trend towards voluntary childlessness within the nation is overtaking the mindsets of many young people in the twenty-first century. Despite the negative stigma previously attached to it, voluntary childlessness is gaining popularity with the rise of activism and new templates for a family model. Society strays further and further away from the heteronormative traditional familial ideals, encouraging and accepting new forms of the family which defy the norm.

The heteronormative traditional ideals originated with religion in the early seventeenth century of the colonial period. Around sixteen fifty in New England birthing a child was seen as a “blessing" and a reward for being a good Christian, as religion was a very strong value held in many families at that time (3). Because of this strong belief, women always desired several children in attempts to demonstrate their good faith. When a woman did not have a child it demonstrated how she was not deserving of the gift of life since God was not gifting the woman a child. This led many colonists to avoid seeking medical advice as it was shameful and seen as defying the will of the Lord to find a solution to her barren-ness (4). Seeing how respected God and religion were in the colonial period, this is strong evidence that suggests the origin of the childlessness stigma that still remains strong in modern times. To be barren was to be “sterile, deficient, and empty” (5). These adjectives demonstrate the simple start of a woman’s identity being defined by motherhood and fertility, as though it is her only role. Due to the fact that a woman’s identity is so closely linked to fertility, many of the infertility issues were blamed on women, an example, in eighteen fifty women were told to solve infertility by “exercising more and changing their diet” (6). This was a valid and sound conclusion until the late nineteenth century because there was no technology to aid infertile couples if they did happen to face societal backlash and try to resolve their fertility complications.

This prompted the medicalization of childbirth, which soon arose after the Civil War, where the inability to procreate shifted from a social to a medical problem (7). Therefore initiating the advancement of technology, which then created many procedures, one being “ovarian transplantation” which involved the transfer of a fertile woman’s ovaries to a woman who had lost her ovaries from disease (8). This was one of the few procedures, which was not accessible to most of the infertile community unless the woman had lost her ovaries, demonstrating the true lack of resources available to this marginalized group. Even with the resource of this procedure, many would avoid utilizing it due to the lack of hygiene in the medical world (at this time), so hospitals were typically avoided. With this rise in awareness of childlessness and the progression of technology, humanity started to seek out more solutions to the grave issue of infertility in a heteronormative culture. At first, doctors and “knowledgable” experts of the nineteen twenties and thirties had a belief that “every form of contraception could cause sterility” meaning there was no physical possibility to prevent having children besides being infertile (9). Obviously, with there being no way of preventing pregnancy and childbirth, those who were fertile had as many children as they could bear, and at this time in society, it was (and in many ways still is) necessary to have a child to earn respect and be a valued member of the community. One secretive method of obtaining a child was through a “black market of babies” which was the initial start of informal adoption because many women lied about birthing their own children in order to earn their respective place in society that they would otherwise be deprived of (10). As better technology emerged, many childless couples sought another solution to try and be accepted into society, and psychological hypotheses search for reasons to prove how birthing children is innate.

Many psychologists in the early twentieth century investigated where the particular desire and pressure to have children roots from. "Around the nineteen twenties, William McDougall developed hormic psychology and attempted to describe human behavior as goal-seeking and having human instincts" which revolved around an emotional core, including the maternal/paternal instinct (11). Whereas John B. Watson would attribute it to “learned behavior from generations before us”, and Freud would follow with the idea that our life instinct drove us towards sex and that many women would have children as a solution to the penis envy he claimed they faced (12). This was associated with various stages of “psycho-sexual development and an unresolved conflict from earlier development” (13). Even Carl Jung had his own belief that there was an “innate drive toward sex" because it was seen as the motive for life energy (14). All of these theories have their own respective evidence but none of them have been proven to be the true cause of why people are commonly driven to have children and especially fail to explain why a woman would fight this supposed “natural urge” to birth a child. With several experts starting to become the "voices of reason" in the early twentieth century, many people felt as though they were meant to have children simply because they were expected to. The main factor that seems to perpetuate this need for children is the “heterosexual traditional custom" that made childbearing ideal, along with the common models held in Western civilization (15).

The custom of having children appears to be an unspoken societal agreement that many married couples have blindly followed, where children are had all together or not at all. Historians first started to notice a pattern of high childlessness occurring during "economic hardship and psychological stress such as during The Great Depression around nineteen twenty-nine to the mid-nineteen thirties” (16). This trend was seen due to the fact that many families were struggling to feed and support themselves, and they knew that having a multitude of children would be an unrealistic lifestyle during a time of economic despair. Women faced many challenges due to not fitting their “woman role” during a highly traditional time period where they were expected to follow these norms. Despite having an expectation of children, many families started to adopt the ideology that there were certain requirements of the environment in order to have children. However, this did not eliminate the stigma for certain people but rather allowed for a specific time period where this was permissible.

These norms really started to shift once the feminist movement was ignited. Second-wave feminists started to campaign for reproductive rights and sexual freedom, which increased in available hormone contraception between the nineteen sixties and the nineteen seventies; with this society saw a five percent increase in childless women in the United States ages forty to forty-four (17). Feminists focused on women's rights and independence which encourages women to think about what they want rather than what society wants. Voluntary childlessness finally started to receive attention in the nineteen seventies when the rise of nontraditional living arrangements and the disconnect between marriage and procreation started to take place (18). This was seen when activist groups and organizations fighting for instead of against childlessness started to form, such as the “National Organization for Non-Parents known as NON, which was established in nineteen seventy-two” (19). Each generation of feminists kept trying to achieve their goal of unraveling the sexist norm upheld by the definition of womanhood and heteronormative standards (20).

While the feminists made substantial progress, there are still very prejudiced and stigmatized views held against those who do not have children whether they are doing so intentionally or not. Being childless—at all—was seen as a misfortune and this would cause a lot of emotional distress for couples who desperately wanted children and did not have a choice in being an outcast of society (21). Because "reproduction and parenthood are historically framed in heteronormative ways, anyone outside the norm such as teenage mothers, single fathers, or gay parents was considered unnatural, shameful, and abnormal" (22). This explains the heightened emotional distress that many couples who struggled with fertility felt, as they understood what children meant to their status and overall reputation in the heteronormative way of life. Infertility produced many points of reevaluation in one’s beliefs, needs, and priorities as women faced issues such as non-motherhood, an "incomplete sense of self, and a separated sense of self from society” (23). This carries “an ancient stigma" since infertility was always seen as unnatural because one should simply be “able” to produce a child since it was the societal expectation (24). Not being able to perform what was considered a biological “duty” caused people to categorize infertility as “negative, representing failure, or an inability to work normally” (25). Many women felt feelings of “anxiety, isolation, and conflict, along with inadequacy and shame” which led many infertile couples to refrain from revealing if they were having such complications, they wanted to protect themselves from the stigma that society would adhere to their reputation (26).