Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 23, No. 2, pp.

223–234, 2000
Copyright © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd
Pergamon Printed in the USA. All rights reserved
0277-5395/00/$–see front matter

PII S0277-5395(00)00076-5

WHEN NO MEANS NO: DISBELIEF, DISREGARD AND

DEVIANCE AS DISCOURSES OF
VOLUNTARY CHILDLESSNESS

Rosemary Gillespie
University of Portsmouth, School of Social and Historical Studies, Portsmouth, Hampshire, PO1 3AS, UK

Synopsis — Cultural discourses of femininity and women’s social role have historically and tradition-
ally been constructed around motherhood. However, recent studies into women’s childbearing inten-
tions have revealed an increasing number of women in Western Europe and the United States choosing
to remain childless. Thus, a distinction has emerged between cultural discourses on femininity and the
experiences of an increasing number of women. This article considers the questions that emerge from
this. In particular, to what extent and in what ways might cultural discourses of motherhood and femi-
ninity have declined and transformed as women’s lives have changed. What might be the implications of
this for constructions of femininity and identity in women. Drawing on an empirical study into voluntary
childlessness amongst women, this article argues that pronatalist discourses and those that denigrate
voluntary childlessness persist despite the considerable changes and increased autonomy experienced
by women during the second half of the 20th century. However, through rejecting and resisting dis-
courses that conflate femininity with motherhood, childless women create new discourses that can sub-
vert and transform constructions of femininity. The article concludes that the advent of these new and
alternative discourses signify the emergence of a radical feminine identity, distinct and unshackled from
motherhood. © 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Constructions of femininity and women’s so-
cial role have historically and traditionally
been contextualised around the practices and
symbolism surrounding motherhood. Mother-
hood has predominantly been perceived as
natural for women, the desire for it inevitable,
unquestioned and central to constructions of
‘normal’ femininity (Erikson, 1964; Russo,
1976; Stone, 1977; Nakano Glenn, 1994).
Yet, at the start of the 20th century signifi-
cant transformations in women’s reproductive
experiences can be seen to be occurring. In the
United Kingdom, Western Europe and the
United States, although most women continue
to become mothers at some time in their lives,
women are having fewer children and having
them later in life. Between 1970 and 1995 in
the United Kingdom, birth rates per woman
fell from 2.4 to 1.71 (Central Statistics Office,
1997). The mean age of mothers at birth in En-
gland and Wales has risen from 26.4 in 1976 to
28.6 in 1996; this is expected to have risen to
28.7 by 2000 (Central Statistics Office, 1997).
Yet perhaps the most notable of these trends is
the increasing number of women who remain
childless altogether. In 1991, twice as many
women stated that they expected to remain
childless, compared to 1986; in 1947, 20% of
women were still childless at the age of 30, and
for women born in 1967 this is estimated to be
40% (Central Statistics Office, 1995). In 1991,
the Office of Population Census and Surveys
(OPCS) forecast that 20% of the 1960s, 1970s
and 1980s British cohorts of women would re-
main childless; consequently higher levels of
childlessness seem set to remain (Central Sta-
tistics Office, 1993). Although, as Frank, Bi-
anchi, and Campana (1994) have highlighted,
later childbearing may be directly related to
higher levels of involuntary infertility, as fertil-
ity has been shown to decline with age. Never-
theless, studies have shown that increasing
numbers of women in Western Europe and
North America are rejecting motherhood and

223
224 Rosemary Gillespie
choosing childlessness (Bartlett, 1994; Camp-
bell, 1985; Ireland, 1993; McAllister & Clarke,
1998; Morell, 1994).
This article will consider key questions that
emerge from this. In particular, it will seek to
establish whether, in the context of consider-
able social change, and an increased autonomy
experienced by women in the contemporary
era, traditional, pronatalist cultural discourses
that position motherhood at the cornerstone
of feminine identity, have diminished. Many
women in the west for example, are able to ex-
ert greater control over their fertility through
the use of contraception. They spend less of
their lives pregnant or childrearing. They are
less confined to the private social space and
are more likely to engage in paid work. This
article will consider to what extent, and in
what ways, social change has impacted upon
motherhood ideologies in ways that transmute
them and reduce their significance. It will fur-
ther consider what this might tell us about
women’s capacity to subvert and transform
cultural norms; and the extent to which this
give rise to new femininity discourses, distinct
from motherhood.
The article begins by setting out the mean-
ings that have come to be associated with
childlessness, and in particular voluntary child-
lessness, through an examination of the cul-
tural discourses that encompass and define
both motherhood and childlessness. In order
to assess the extent to which pronatalist dis-
courses continue to be pervasive and wide-
spread, and what might be the effects of this on
women in the contemporary era, I will draw
upon the findings of an empirical study into
the experiences of 25 voluntarily childless
women from a large city in the South of En-
gland. I conclude by considering the implica-
tions of voluntary childlessness for broader
constructions of femininity and identity.
DISCOURSES OF MOTHERHOOD
AND CHILDLESSNESS
Ideas, both essentialist and determinist, that
motherhood is fixed, unchanging, natural, ful-
filling and in particular, central to feminine
identity have become entrenched in western
culture (Russo, 1976; Stone, 1977). Although
predominantly married and heterosexual
women have been seen to conform the notion
of the ideal mother (DiLapi, 1987; Macintyre,
1976); others who may be single, divorced,
black, poor, lesbian or disabled are perceived
as less suitable/unsuitable (Phoenix, 1991;
Smart, 1992; Williams, 1989). Nevertheless,
Judaeo-Christian religious constructions of
womanhood as heterosexual, fertile, life-giving
and fecund, emphasise how bearing children,
and the pain associated with childbirth, were
seen to be God’s curse on Eve for her sins.
Mary is upheld as a symbol of perfect woman-
hood, passive, obedient and a recipient of
God’s will (Gittins, 1985).
Key political perspectives, predominantly
those of the political right, have also rein-
forced motherhood ideology. Conservatives
and neo-liberals support what are seen to be
traditional family values, associated with kin-
ship, ‘natural’ social roles and the containment
of sexual behaviour within the nuclear family.
In the 1990s, in the United States, born-again
Protestantism has been a powerful influence
on the New Right coalition, whose agenda in-
cludes preserving traditional family values and
the restriction of the availability of abortion.
In the United Kingdom, the Conservative
Thatcher and Major governments of the 1980s
and 1990s set out to reverse what they saw to
be the decline in traditional nuclear family val-
ues, by setting themselves up as the Party of
the Family, and with a Back to Basics cam-
paign. Similarly, in the late 1990s New Labour
have also been quick to set out their position
on the importance of ‘family values’.
Modern science has also authenticated tra-
ditional understandings of feminine identity
and motherhood, examples include the socio-
biology of Darwin and more recently that of
Richard Dawkins (1989). Freud (1925) also
produced an analysis of gender difference
based on cognitive processes grounded in geni-
tal difference that contextualised ‘normal’
feminine identity around motherhood. Freud’s
theories formed the backdrop for the subse-
quent popularisation of psychology that pre-
cipitated influential discourses that positioned
the mother at the centre in the successful up-
bringing of the child (Bowlby, 1953; Winnicott,
1964).
However, perhaps the most powerful player
in scientific endorsement of the centrality of
motherhood to constructions of femininity and
women’s health has been that of modern medi-
cine. Reproductive medicine, for example, has
drawn on knowledge and control over women’s
 Discourses of Voluntary Childlessness
bodies, accessible only to a comparably small,
male-dominated group of medical experts
(Ehrenreich & English, 1979; Faulkner & Ar-
nold, 1985; Scully & Bart, 1978). Martin (1989)
has highlighted that medical culture provides a
powerful ideology and system of socialisation,
whose ideas, discourse and practices pervade
everyday life. As Rose, Steven, Kamin, Leon,
& Lewontin (1984) have argued, “what is bio-
logical is given in nature and proved by sci-
ence” (p. 6).
In sum, motherhood discourses can be seen
to be drawn from, and enmeshed in powerful,
hegemonic ideological doctrines. Experts and
opinion formers constitute powerful elites who
have been able to privilege their accounts of
the natural inevitability of a desire for mother-
hood in women; of motherhood as women’s
principle social role; and crucially, the central-
ity of motherhood to understandings of femi-
nine identity. Lukes (1974) argued that the
most insidious form of power is to shape peo-
ples’ perceptions so that they do not question
the social order. Motherhood ideologies have
been seen to pass into popular discourse and
everyday understanding and become ‘truth’
and ‘facts’, which inform the understandings of
women (Boulton, 1983; Nicholson, 1993). Con-
sequently, the nurturance of children has his-
torically been seen to be what women do, and
mothers have been seen to be what women
are, constituting the central core of normal,
healthy feminine identity, women’s social role
and ultimately the meanings of the term
woman.
Nevertheless, just as motherhood has been
constructed as central to understandings of
‘normal’ adult femininity, women who are not
mothers have frequently been seen to be ‘un-
natural’ and are pitied or vilified. Failure to
become a mother is interpreted within a west-
ern biomedical framework as a physical or psy-
chological illness (Becker & Nachtigall, 1994;
Hayes, 1992; Strickler, 1992). The physical in-
ability to have children, or the ‘failed body’ as-
sociated with involuntary childlessness, is con-
structed in medical terms as infertility,
synonymous with notions of illness and dis-
ease. Infertility is dominated by medical dis-
courses associated with abnormality, treat-
ment and cure. Once diagnosed, the usual
course of action is medicalisation and treat-
ment in the hope of bringing about a preg-
nancy and the birth of a child (Becker &
225
Nachtigall, 1994; Strickler, 1992; Hayes, 1992).
However, whilst women who are involuntarily
childless have been seen to be worthy of sym-
pathy, resources and support, women who
choose not to mother, who are voluntarily
childless, have been understood in ways that
emphasise their selfishness and their deviance,
as aberrant, immature, and unfeminine (Ire-
land, 1993; Macintyre, 1976; Somers, 1993;
McAllister & Clarke, 1998; Stewart & Robin-
son, 1989). Joan Smith (1996) has argued that,
even in the 1990s, the increasing numbers of
women who are choosing childlessness are of-
ten subject to scorn and contempt.
Social change
As the trend for childlessness has emerged,
so has a growing body of literature that has en-
deavoured to understand it. Recent accounts
have predominantly sought to interpret the
trend within explanations associated with
broad macro explanations of social change
(Bartlett, 1994; Campbell, 1985; Ireland, 1993;
McAllister & Clarke, 1998; Morell, 1994). In
particular, following the influence of Second
Wave feminism, new opportunities, freedoms
and choices, denied to previous generations of
women, have come to be available. Many
women now have access to safe abortion, con-
traception and reproductive technologies that
enable them to exert greater control over their
fertility, in terms of whether, when and in what
context they will have children (Richardson,
1993; Holdsworth, 1988). As Ireland (1993) em-
phasises, increased reproductive choice has
brought the possibility of chosen childlessness
into the lives of many women. Diverse family
configurations, the changing nature of human
relationships and women’s wider participation
in paid work, all have meant that options for
women other than motherhood have become
increasingly available (Becker, 1981; Condy,
1991; Faux, 1984; Safer, 1996; Veevers, 1983).
The effect of social change has been to give
rise to a range of new discourses associated
with a ‘new femininity’. As women increas-
ingly engage in new roles, new contemporary
discourses, associated with a wider diversity of
feminine experience, expectations and iden-
tity, increasingly become relevant. At the end
of the 1990s new emergent discourses exempli-
fying women’s greater sexual freedom and in-
226 Rosemary Gillespie
dependence are evident through for example:
an increasing market for lifestyle magazines
for women such as Cosmopolitan, Vogue and
Red; television situation comedies, such as
Ellen, Friends and Ally McBeal; and contem-
porary lifestyle literature such as Bridget
Jones’s Diary (Fielding, 1996). Consequently,
cultural discourses associated with a mother-
hood imperative increasingly co-exist along-
side a wide variety of alternative and compet-
ing discourses.
As women’s lives have become trans-
formed, it would be reasonable to anticipate
that traditional pronatalist discourses would
become outdated and diminish. Yet have den-
igratory discourses of chosen childlessness
broken down, as women are increasingly in-
volved in roles other than motherhood, and as
more of them choose childlessness? Or might
they simply have become transformed in ways
that accommodate social change, yet still con-
vey expectations that women will become
mothers.
McAllister and Clarke (1998) have empha-
sised that studies into childlessness have pre-
dominantly not distinguished between volun-
tarily and involuntarily childless women.
Studies that do distinguish often highlight
what is for some the complexity of the decision
to remain childless. Several suggest, for exam-
ple, that the choice to remain childless is often
ambiguous and vague; qualitatively different
between different women, in different social
circumstances and at different times in their
lives (Campbell, 1985; Morell, 1994; Veevers,
1983). Some studies have considered voluntar-
ily childlessness within specific social group-
ings, such as those in partnered, heterosexual
relationships (Burgwyn, 1983; Campbell,
1985; Morell, 1994; Safer, 1996); or those who
have sought sterilisation (Campbell, 1999).
Others have predominantly considered the
policy implications of growing childlessness
(Bouwens, Beets, & Schippers, 1996; Condy,
1991). McAllister and Clarke have suggested
that few women make an early and irrevocable
decision to remain childless; rather that choice
is an ongoing process-taking place over time,
and in the context of life events, such as rela-
tionships. However, as with Campbell’s (1999)
study into sterilised childfree women, partici-
pants in this study predominantly described
themselves as having chosen childlessness and
stated their intention to remain that way. Al-
though a minority were ambiguous about their
choice, several had made the decision at a
young age and now in their 40s and 50s had no
regrets; other younger participants predomi-
nantly stated that they did not intend to
change their minds. However, whereas Camp-
bell’s study focused predominantly on child-
free women’s ‘journey’ to sterilisation, this
study considered questions concerning the
persistence of pronatalist discourses. Drawing
on a small qualitative study, using in-depth,
semi-structured interviews with 25 voluntarily
childless women, the remainder of this article
will address these questions. I will consider
whether traditional discourses of motherhood
and childlessness have transformed or dimin-
ished, or simply become more sophisticated
and subtle in the ways that continue to project
a pronatalist mandate. Finally, I will consider
what might be the implications of these find-
ings for broader constructions of femininity
and identity.
THE STUDY
Methods
The study took place in the summer of 1996
in a large city in the south of England. Partici-
pants were recruited from a Family Planning
Clinic (FPC). This venue was chosen because
clinic attenders constituted a sample of
women, many of whom were confronting re-
productive choices through the use of contra-
ception. It was assumed that a proportion of
these might be voluntarily childless and that
key questions concerning their childlessness
might be explored. Initially out of all the
women approached during a twice-weekly
evening clinic over a 12-week period, a group
of 266 consented to complete an initial intro-
ductory questionnaire. The questionnaire es-
tablished first whether respondents were al-
ready mothers, and second if they intended
to become mothers in the future. It enabled
some comparisons to be made between those
who intended to remain childless and the re-
mainder.
A total of 33 defined themselves as volun-
tarily childless and stated their intention to re-
main so. These were contacted by telephone or
letter and invited for interview. Subsequently,
25 women aged between 18 and 51 agreed to
 Discourses of Voluntary Childlessness
be interviewed. Qualitative methods seek to
explore and legitimise the lives from which
they are drawn by enabling individuals to give
an account of their experiences (Stanley &
Wise, 1983). In doing so, they help to validate
experience and enable the voices of those pre-
viously silenced to be heard (Cotterill &
Letherby, 1993). Using qualitative interviews,
and maintaining anonymity through the use of
pseudonyms, participants shared their subjec-
tive experiences of voluntary childlessness. Al-
though the findings of a small study cannot
provide a comprehensive picture, neverthe-
less, the findings here offer useful insights into
the meanings and experiences of childlessness.
They also help to foster debate and raise key
issues for further research.
Findings
Of the 33 respondents in the voluntary
childless sub-group, all but 1 were white; all
but 2 defined their sexuality as heterosexual.
Perhaps due to the overtly heterosexual envi-
ronment of the FPC, 10 questionnaire respon-
dents had chosen not to disclose their sexual-
ity. Wellings, Field, Johnson, and Wadsworth
(1994) have argued that lesbian or bi-sexual
orientations may be under-reported in surveys
because they can be stigmatising. In addition,
sexual orientation may not conform to specific
categories. For example, lesbian identity may
not exclude heterosexual practice, possibly
precipitating attendance at a FPC. Studies
have emphasised that it is the more highly edu-
cated women who remain childless (Joshi,
1989; McAllister & Clarke, 1998; Veevers,
1983). These findings were also supported
here. Educational achievement was higher in
the voluntarily childless sub-group, 75% hav-
ing achieved A level or university degree, com-
pared with only 48% of the remainder. Simi-
larly, 30% were employed in managerial or
professional occupations, compared with only
13% of the remainder.
The qualitative interview participants ex-
emplified how normative, pronatalist cultural
discourses remained evident. They emphasised
how others seemed extraordinarily uncon-
strained, offering interpretations, explana-
tions and in particular, denigrations of their
childlessness. This predominantly centred
around disbelief that childlessness was by
choice; disregard of childlessness as a valid
227
choice; and finally a conviction that childless-
ness represented a deviant choice.
DISBELIEF OF EXPLANATIONS OF
VOLUNTARY CHILDLESSNESS
Participants described the ways others fre-
quently disbelieved that they had chosen child-
lessness. They described how their choice was
often re-cast by others as different more ‘legiti-
mate’ explanations were superimposed. These
included presuppositions of infertility or other
manifestations of fertility denied.
Wendy, a 31-year-old administrator had
been married for 10 years and lived with her
husband. She described how childlessness was
assumed to be infertility by family members.
Wendy: Dave’s granddad asked me, at a fam-
ily wedding, if I was barren. I’ll never forget
it, it was like that scene out of the film Edu-
cating Rita, it was clear he assumed that no
children meant can’t have children.
Saffron, a 51-year-old married, writer and
lecturer described how her status as a childless
woman finally ‘fell into place’ for others when
she had a hysterectomy.
Saffron: . . . it was when I had my hysterec-
tomy. Something clicked with them. Oh that
is why she never had children because she
had problems, because she couldn’t. It was
just assumed despite everything I had said.
A second way in which participants’ ac-
counts were disbelieved, was through explain-
ing childlessness in terms of the ‘career
women’. Alice, a 33-year-old solicitor lived
with her female partner and her cat. A keen
gardener, she decided many years ago that she
did not wish to have children. She emphasised
the ways others perceptions of her conformed
to stereotypes of the hard, ruthless, unfemi-
nine, childless ‘career woman’; of motherhood
denied.
Alice: I do experience having to provide an
explanation for being as old as I am, almost
33 and yet not having children, not having
married. The expectation is that you will
marry and have children. . . . I take my career
very seriously, and they say: ‘Oh that is fine.
You are a career women’. You can then fit
228 Rosemary Gillespie
into a different category. In a way it is al-
lowed, it is a respectable alternative. . . .
Similarly, Lisa, a 36-year-old administrator
had been married for 5 years. Enjoying the
freedom that a childless lifestyle afforded, she
emphasised how rejecting motherhood led to
others perceiving her as ‘hard’.
Lisa: I think the perception of me is that I am
a hard-nosed career women. . . . . They think
it is not that I don’t want to have a family,
but that I am hard, driven, that I have not al-
lowed myself a family, that the pressure to
succeed has prevented it in some way.
These explanations, reframing participants’
accounts of childlessness as involuntary through
ideas about hidden infertility and motherhood
denied through careers, emphasised others’
perceptions of the ‘unfortunate’ nature of child-
lessness. Others generally accepted women’s
wider participation in the paid workforce, yet
they did not accommodate the notion of women
choosing childlessness comfortably within this.
Treating their accounts as unreliable, mirrors
the ways in which women’s reports of sexual vi-
olence have often not been believed by the me-
dia and the criminal justice system (Smart, 1992;
Stanko, 1985). Consequently, by negating and
disbelieving women’s accounts, motherhood as
natural, fulfilling, universally desirable and cen-
tral to understandings of femininity remains un-
challenged and intact. Disbelieving participants’
accounts provided a way in which childlessness
could be accommodated within traditional cul-
tural discourses.
DISREGARD OF EXPLANATIONS OF
VOLUNTARY CHILDLESSNESS
Participants also described the ways others dis-
regarded their accounts of voluntary childless-
ness. Often this was by inferring they would
‘change their mind’. As Letherby (1994) has
argued, women who have no children are fre-
quently themselves considered to be childlike.
Participants in this study described how others
saw them as not yet having passed into the
normal adult female role, and therefore had
not yet made the ‘normal’ adult decision to be-
come mothers. Thus, participants were simply
posited as future mothers, who would change
their minds with the onset of maturity and the
assumed ‘inevitability’ of heterosexual part-
nerships. Alice described how, in the law firm
where she worked, the assumption made by
managers that women would leave to have
children was used to deny them opportunities.
When she asserted that she did not intend to
have children, it was presumed that she would
change her mind.
Alice: . . . as an articled clerk a few years ago
it was revealed to me that not many young
women could be selected to be articled
clerks, because the firm selected those who it
considered to be future partners. And it
would inevitably lose along the way most of
the women. And the same person in the
same discussion told me when I said I don’t
intent to have any: ‘Oh you will change your
mind’. I resented it because it suggested that
I didn’t know my own mind. My own judge-
ment was flawed. . . . I was not an adult.
Denials of women’s accounts often involved
the suggestion that they would change their
minds when they ‘met the right man’.
Katherine, a 21-year-old who had recently
graduated with an honours degree, lived with
her boyfriend. She hoped to become a journal-
ist and considered there to be no place for a
child in her chosen lifestyle
Katherine: They don’t like it, they say: ‘Oh,
you’ll change your mind. You’ll meet the
right person’. . . . It’s like I don’t know what I
want. I haven’t made up my mind yet; ha-
ven’t grown up which is very patronizing. . . .
I just don’t want children.
Lynne, who was 32 and married, described
not being taken seriously by her physician
when seeking sterilisation.
Lynne: I have made all kinds of noises, with
my GP, with the Clinic and all over the place
to say that I want to be sterilised. But they
just won’t have it, because I’m too young. . . .
I am too young to know what I want, if what
I want is not to be a mother. It would be dif-
ferent if I wanted to be a mother. I would not
be too young then.
The policy of refusing sterilisation for
young women is based on the idea that it will
ultimately lead them seeking reversal, when
 Discourses of Voluntary Childlessness
they ‘inevitably’ change their mind (Gillett,
Martin, & Romans, 1993). Campbell (1999)
has described how young women seeking ster-
ilisation are frequently refused, disbelieved
and infantised. This paternalism reinforces the
idea of childless women as childlike, whereby
doctors inevitably ‘know best’ and over-rule
women’s decisions ‘for their own good’
(Ehrenreich & English, 1979). Recent exam-
ples in the United Kingdom of medical pater-
nalism, whereby women’s reproductive deci-
sions have been over-ruled by others include:
the surgical removal of a women’s ovaries
without her consent; and the deployment of
the Mental Health Act to enforce a caesarean
section against the will of ‘Ms S’ (Scott, 1998).
An assumption that childless women will
change their minds, and that others ‘know bet-
ter’ reinforces childlessness as an inappropri-
ate, temporary choice; and of childless women
themselves as childlike.
A further way in which voluntary childless-
ness was disregarded as a legitimate choice
was through assumptions that participants
would ultimately come to regret childlessness.
Explanations grounded in future regret draw
on traditional, medical and psychological ex-
planatory theories of femininity that only
through motherhood can women be truly ful-
filled. Yet ideas surrounding children and ful-
filment were also frequently juxtaposed with
ideas about the ‘payback’ of parenting, of chil-
dren as a resource for company and care in old
age. Sandra, a 49-year-old university re-
searcher, had experienced tacit disapproval
from friends as well as more overt criticism
suggesting that she would regret her choice, as
children might be needed as carers in old age.
She lived with her male partner and was in-
volved in the care of elderly relatives and had
never wanted to be a mother.
Sandra: I think some of them think that we
will regret it later on. But if they think that,
sorry but that is not the reason that you have
children. . . . One person in particular said:
‘Who is going to look after you when you get
old?’. I am currently looking after my own
elderly parents and I would not wish that on
anyone.
Similarly, Lynne described how the ‘joy’
that she was missing out on was emphasised to
her by friends and colleagues.
229
Lynne: People have said: ‘You don’t know
what you’re missing out on, it’s such a joy,
you won’t have grandchildren’.
Disregarding voluntarily childless women’s
explanations of their choice as irrational, tem-
porary or something they would come to re-
gret marginalises their accounts of their
choice. As with disbelief, negating women’s
account through disregarding preserves no-
tions of motherhood as natural, inevitably de-
sirable and central to understandings of femi-
ninity.
VOLUNTARY CHILDLESSNESS
AS DEVIANCE
Letherby (1999) has highlighted that non-
mothers both involuntary and voluntary are
considered outsiders or ‘other’. However, for
those who have chosen to reject motherhood,
their outsider status is further constructed as
deviance (Ireland, 1993; McAllister & Clarke,
1998; Macintyre, 1976; Somers, 1993; Stewart
& Robinson, 1989). Lesley, for example, a 41-
year-old local government officer who had co-
habited with her male partner for 20 years,
made the decision to remain childless when
herself still a child and could not imagine any
circumstances whereby she might feel differ-
ently about motherhood. She described how
her partner’s family perceived her as ‘strange’.
Lesley: One of my partner’s, well his sister-
in-law actually, said to me one day: ‘Isn’t it
about time you had children?’ and I just
looked at her and said: ‘Well actually I’d
rather have another dog’. The look of hor-
ror. It’s never been mentioned again . . .
there is an element of, there could be some-
thing strange about her.
Annette, a 26-year-old police officer with
the local vice squad had been married for 1
year. She experienced considerable pressure
from her husband’s family to have a baby, de-
scribing how her decision to remain childless
set her out as a ‘black sheep’.
Annette: It makes me feel like I’m not seen
as Annette who does all these other things.
Just Annette who may one day have a kid
and we will wait for that . . . but it makes me
feel a bit of a black sheep.
230 Rosemary Gillespie
Sally was a 30-year-old college lecturer, di-
vorced, lived alone and had no current part-
ner. She had decided to remain childless since
her childhood. She described how she was per-
ceived by acquaintances to be deviant, preda-
tory and dangerous due to her lack of a desire
for a child.
Sally: I have had it from men at dinner par-
ties, stuff like: ‘Oh my God, is she mad? You
can almost see it in their eyes. A woman and
she doesn’t want to get married and settle
down and have babies. There must be some-
thing wrong with her’.
Deviance was also exemplified through no-
tions of childlessness as ‘selfish’. For example,
Mary, a 49-year-old occupational health nurse,
single, with no current partner, had never
wanted to have children. She had travelled
widely and lived abroad.
Mary: There is a girl, a friend, funnily
enough a nurse, who thought it was quite un-
speakable, that I was not going out and doing
my womanly thing by getting married and
having my 2.4 children.
Participants described the ways making
choices that met their own needs through
choosing childlessness, rather than the needs
of others through motherhood, was framed as
selfishness and unfeminine. Lack of a desire to
mother was conceptualised in terms of devi-
ance and abnormality, as it transgressed cul-
tural images of femininity; of nurturing and
self sacrifice, associated with motherhood.
DISCUSSION
Weedon (1987) has suggested that the mainte-
nance of ideology requires the discrediting and
marginalising of experience which seeks to re-
define it. Women who transgress discourses of
what constitutes suitable ‘normal’ behaviour
for women come to be constructed as selfish,
deviant and ultimately unfeminine (Butler,
1990; DiLapi, 1987; Ireland, 1993). As Morell
(1994) has argued, the normalising of mother-
hood has been perpetuated through discourses
that deprecate childless women. Thus, women
who choose to remain childless have been
‘called upon to account for themselves’ in ways
that women who become mothers have not
(Morell, 1994). Dyson (1993) has emphasised
that chosen childlessness is often incompre-
hensible to others who feel the need to express
their bewilderment. Participants in this study
described how others interpreted their choice
to remain childless through disbelief, disregard
and as deviance. Transgressing the norm of
motherhood often led to confrontation, resent-
ment and conflict, described by Campbell
(1985) as the ‘consequence of difference’. The
findings here exemplify how pronatalist dis-
courses are persistent, widespread and that
voluntarily childless women encounter them in
their every day lives.
Yet the persistence of these discourses
needs to be understood in the social context
within which it arises. In particular, changes to
women’s lives have meant that expectations
that women will remain located within the pri-
vate social sphere, or within the nuclear fam-
ily, dependent upon a male breadwinner, have
become unrealistic. In this study, women’s role
in wider society was generally well accepted by
others; the motherhood mandate was not one
whereby women were expected to remain
solely in the home. Yet despite women’s in-
creased participation in the paid workforce
during the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury, their working patterns remain signifi-
cantly different from those of men (Smith,
1997). Much of the liberal feminist struggle has
been to attain ‘women friendly’ flexible work
practices, allowing them to combine paid work
with family responsibilities. Women’s primary
responsibilities are still seen to be motherhood
and the care of children, creating what has
widely come to be termed women’s ‘dual
roles’. Consequently, women’s increased par-
ticipation in the labour market has occurred
within a context of flexible mothering prac-
tices, as they combine paid work with mother-
hood, often described in terms of ‘having it
all’.
New discourses that posit women as having
it all indicate that rather than decline, mother-
hood discourses may have simply changed,
modernised and become more sophisticated in
ways that accommodate social change. For ex-
ample, studies into women’s increasing labour
force participation exemplify how it is as-
sumed that women engage in paid work in
combination with their responsibilities in the
home (Shelton, 1990; Spitze, 1988). In addi-
 Discourses of Voluntary Childlessness
tion, as a result of women’s greater presence in
the paid workforce, perceptions of women
combining occupational roles with mother-
hood have resulted in the flourishing of images
of the ‘superwoman’. For example, references
to high profile women such as businesswoman
Nichola Horlick and QC Cherie Booth are of-
ten sanitised by juxtaposed images and refer-
ences to their homes and families. Cultural dis-
courses associated with motherhood and
femininity in the late 1990s acknowledge
women’s greater independence and participa-
tion in the public world. However, women are
predominantly expected to accommodate
motherhood within these circumstances,
rather than to choose childlessness. Thus, de-
spite significant social change, and despite
women’s gains in terms of fertility control and
greater freedom, pronatalist cultural dis-
courses and those that posit motherhood at the
cornerstone of feminine identity persist, albeit
in a manner recast and transformed.
Hall and Du Gay (1996) argued that identi-
ties are constructed through difference,
through what sets individuals apart or ‘other’,
rather than what unites them. In the context of
non-mothers, Letherby (1999) has defined this
as the ‘stranger’. Significantly though, what
emerged from the findings here was the ways
voluntarily childlessness women themselves
resisted these discourses. Although they de-
scribed their exposure to often-robust prona-
talism and denigration of their childlessness,
they vigorously rejected these; highlighting
what was at times a radical childless femininity,
distinct and unshackled from motherhood.
Their frustration and anger at others’ negation
of their accounts was powerfully evident in
their responses. Voluntarily childless women
strongly rejected assumptions that lives were
barren, fruitless and indulgent; and of child-
lessness as failed or flawed femininity. Saffron,
for example, was proud of her childlessness.
Saffron: I think if I was asked to describe my-
self, I would say: “I am 50, I am a writer and
I have no children”. It (childlessness) would
be near the top of the list in describing who I
am.
Other examples of resistance included Vic-
toria and Lisa, who were comfortable with
their choice and angry with others attempts to
diminish them.
231
Victoria: I see women as women, not as
mothers. I don’t feel any less feminine be-
cause I am not a mother.
Lisa: I think it (motherhood) is natural but I
don’t know if it is any more so to have chil-
dren than to not have them. Not having chil-
dren it just feels right for me.
Sawicki (1991) drawing on a position influ-
enced by Foucault, argues that discourses are
never totalising. Rather, she suggests, discourse
is a site of conflict and struggle that potentiates
transformation. Similarly, Bordo (1993) asserts
that dominant discourses which define feminin-
ity give rise to the eruption of difference and
the subversion of meaning. She argues that
power relations are never seamless, but contin-
ually expedite new forms of culture and subjec-
tivity that can precipitate change. Conse-
quently, it is through deconstruction, through
challenging the ways certain ideologies have fil-
tered into notions of ‘common sense’ and
‘truth’, that alternative, competing, less oppres-
sive discourses can emerge (Parker, 1989).
However, the eruption of difference and
the re-signifying of gender identity may be a
complex and incremental process. Several, de-
spite having rejected motherhood discourses,
drew upon other stereotypes of femininity in
describing themselves.
Wendy: To me being feminine is wearing
beautiful underwear, nice clothes, painted
nails. . . . I like to look after myself, I like to
look good, attractive.
Judith: I don’t feel any less feminine for not
being a mother. In some ways I feel more
feminine because I’ve got a better figure. . . .
I’ve only had myself to think about so I can
take better care of myself. . . . I think its
more positive than negative. I wouldn’t think
it would detract from me.
A further example of the immutability of
discourse was evident in the ways some partici-
pants explained their childlessness in stereo-
typical ways. Alice, for example, drew on a
comparison with Margaret Thatcher to explain
perceptions of her as a ‘hard’ career woman.
Alice: If you are a career women, it is an al-
ternative. Although the mother is the proper
232 Rosemary Gillespie
woman, and I am the sort of the Mrs
Thatcher alternative, probably a ruthless
bitch.
Love and nurturing of animals by childless
women has been framed in the context of child
substitution (Morell, 1994). Participants also
drew on these stereotypes to describe them-
selves.
Victoria: I am quite a cat person. . . . I won-
der if this outpouring of love is what I would
have given a child. But I never had a desire
to do that with a child. But with a cat, even if
I see a cat in the street, I just want to pick
it up.
Similarly, animals were an important focus for
nurturing for Saffron.
Saffron: . . . I am very fond of my dog. I have
always loved my dogs with a great passion. I
feel they take up the emotional slack. I love
them more than I ought to and I feel deci-
mated when they die. . . . Most of my cud-
dling needs are taken up by the dog and
the cat.
Drawing on certain cultural stereotypes
whilst resisting others such as those associated
with motherhood exemplified how difficult it
can be to break away from cultural discourses
and how engrained they might be in women’s
lives. In her analysis of women’s appearance or
‘body ideology’ and dominant cultural forms
Bordo (1993) cautions against oversimplifying
the notion that the discursive domain repre-
sents a straightforward site for liberation from
the effects of normalisation and control. She
argues that to resist normalising discourses can
involve considerable personal risk: for exam-
ple, those associated with feminine appearance
contained within advertisements. She argues
that in such texts, ‘resistance’ is exemplified by
strong, ‘rebellious’ young white women with
anorexic bodies; bodies that conform to cer-
tain media driven stereotypes of feminine ap-
pearance, yet fail to represent the majority of
women. Thus, such images convey a message
of resistance, within sub-texts of conformity.
In this study, women who rejected mother-
hood offer resistance to the pronatalist cul-
tural discourses, which they encounter. Their
childlessness acts as a site of resistance in their
struggle against others’ denigration. I have ar-
gued elsewhere that despite the project of con-
temporary feminism being to challenge taken-
for-granted assumptions about women’s lives
and to validate difference, diversity and sub-
jectivity in women, feminism has predomi-
nantly failed to accommodate the experiences
of the voluntary childless (Gillespie, 1999). Al-
though much of the political project of femi-
nism has been to promote reproductive choice
and reproductive rights; many second wave
and contemporary feminists, whilst critical of
the conditions within which women mother,
have themselves failed to challenge the idea of
a fixed, innate or inherent imperative in
women for motherhood (Chodorow, 1978;
Daly, 1979; Martin, 1989; Oakley, 1972, 1976,
1980; Rabuzzi, 1994; Rich, 1977). In Frazer and
Nicholson (1990), for example, critical ac-
counts of “unitary notions of women and femi-
nine gender identity” refer to what they term
“ahistorical . . . categories like reproduction
and mothering” (p. 34). As Letherby (1994)
has argued, it is crucial for feminism that the
lives of women who do not mother are re-
spected and validated as well as those who do.
Resistance amongst voluntarily childless
women to pronatalist cultural discourses signi-
fies the potential for their transformation. Yet
as Bordo (1993) argues in relation to body ide-
ologies, for example, for those who are fat or
old, and as exemplified in this study in relation
to voluntary childlessness, failure to conform
can have high personal cost. The trend for vol-
untary childlessness signifies emergent, and at
times, radical constructions of ‘normal’ femi-
nine identity, distinct and unshackled from
motherhood. Through resistance to cultural
discourses, such as those of motherhood and
childlessness, women’s individuality, diversity,
subjectivity and agency may increasingly come
to be more fully acknowledged, validated and
accommodated.
Finally, this article has established that a
fuller understanding of voluntary childless-
ness can contribute to a more in-depth under-
standing of femininity and identity. In addi-
tion, it can also contribute to a questioning and
re-interpreting of the past. For example, it may
be that there have always been women who
have avoided motherhood. These may have
been largely hidden amongst those who be-
came nuns, perceived as the sacrificial bi-prod-
uct of a religious calling; nannies whose occu-
 Discourses of Voluntary Childlessness
pational circumstances resulted in them having
‘selflessly’ denied their own motherhood for
the good of others; and spinsters who tradi-
tionally have been perceived as having failed,
barren, wasted lives (Weigle, 1982). In addi-
tion, few women in global terms are able to
choose childlessness. As Campbell (1999) has
emphasised, the fact that a woman is a mother
is no indication of whether she wanted to be
one. Cultural discourses on femininity and
identity may never have adequately encapsu-
lated what it means to be a women, in childless
women and equally importantly in mothers.
Considerably more work is needed to assess
social and cultural circumstances of those who
reject motherhood and how we might more
fully understand the processes associated with
choice. Questions also emerge concerning
childlessness amongst men, and relationships
between masculinity and fatherhood (Monach,
1993). These questions go beyond the scope of
this paper, which has focused on voluntary
childlessness amongst contemporary women.
Nevertheless, they highlight the need for fur-
ther research and debate.
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