But Hewlett and her cohort were making an error in assuming that past patterns would so directly apply to the vastly higher number of single women who were now overrunning the nation’s cities, staying single—and keeping men single—later, and already helping to create a market that would push reproductive technology further than it had ever gone. After all, Hewlett published Creating a Life when she was fifty-six, the mother of five children, the youngest of whom was five. Sylvia Ann Hewlett had gotten pregnant, thanks to fertility treatments, at age fifty-one.
It was a testament to how committed professional single women were to the new kinds of lives they were living, that the terrifying threats of egg decline did not set off a wave of early marriage and dramatically lower the age of first birth.
Maybe single women didn’t want to heed the warnings. More likely, it was because even if those warnings were provoking anxiety, there wasn’t all that much they could do about it. Singlehood wasn’t some outfit you could simply change out of when someone pointed out that it wasn’t keeping you warm enough; the husband-free existences women were living couldn’t change course with a snap of the fingers. These were their lives. What were they going to do?
I was twenty-seven, when my warm, maternal gynecologist finished an exam and updated me on the state of my fibroids, the benign tumors that were growing in my uterus, and would need to be surgically removed when I wanted to have children. I loved this doctor. As I sat up, she smiled and said “They’re still growing, but everything else is fine. I just wish you would hurry up and get married, so we can stop worrying about them!”
I never went to see her again. This was my life. What was I going to do?
In her story, Jean Twenge smartly recalled a Saturday Night Live sketch from 2002. “According to Sylvia Hewlett, career women shouldn’t wait to have babies, because our fertility takes a steep drop-off after age twenty-seven,” began “Weekend Update” host Tina Fey. “And Sylvia’s right. I definitely should have had a baby when I was twenty-seven, living in Chicago over a biker bar, pulling down a cool $12,000 a year. That would have worked out great.”
Rachel Dratch was up next, noting, “Yeah, Sylvia. Thanks for reminding me that I have to hurry up and have a baby. Uh, me and my four cats will get right on that.”
Amy Poehler added, “My neighbor has this adorable, cute little Chinese baby that speaks Italian . . . so, you know, I’ll just buy one of those.”
And Maya Rudolph said, “Yeah, Sylvia, maybe your next book should tell men our age to stop playing Grand Theft Auto III and holding out for the chick from Alias.”
At the time they did this sketch, none of these four comedians had children. Today, as Twenge pointed out with satisfaction, they have nine between them, all but one born after they were thirty-five.
It’s not that late parenthood is a perfect solution. The fact is, for many of my cohort, it has been harder to get pregnant than it might have been in our twenties. And, while so far, nearly all my friends who have availed themselves of fertility treatments eventually have had children, the few who haven’t yet become parents have experienced terrible pain and high costs.
What’s more, parenting in your late thirties and forties and fifties is physically taxing. As parents get older, the risks for having children with chromosomal abnormalities, developmental disabilities, and autism get higher. The fertility treatments endured by some older mothers who are having trouble conceiving can be grueling, and doctors do not yet seem completely sure that the high doses of hormones do not have any long-term side effects.
Another impact of older parenthood is that parents often wind up with fewer children than they might have otherwise. According to Lauren Sandler, whose book, One and Only, documented the rising number of only-child households, the percentage of women who have only a single kid has more than doubled between 1990, when it was just 10 percent and 2010, to 23 percent in 2013.10 In part, that’s because, when you start late, there’s less time to keep going, and chances of secondary infertility are higher. But it’s also true that many women who have delayed childbearing have done so for a reason: because of other commitments or hesitations, economic concerns or responsibilities against which they weighed the desire to have children. For these women, fewer children is not necessarily a negative outcome. In a country that continues to make it difficult for women to balance domestic and professional life, having one child can be a strategy to preserve financial stability, a good marriage, a robust sex life, a satisfying career.
Further, the realizations just beginning to dawn on America’s women and men, thanks in large part to the number of them living independently for longer, is that while the world is full of people who love their children and are crazy about being parents, for many of them, parenthood is simply not the only, or the primary role from which they derive meaning and identity.
Child-free by Choice
So hard-wired are our old assumptions about what shapes and motivates the lives of women, that the notion that some women may authentically, truly, in their deepest of hearts not want children has been among the hardest for us to wrap our minds around. A 2002 piece about Hewlett in Time magazine suggested to readers, “Listen to a successful woman discuss her failure to bear a child, and the grief comes in layers of bitterness and regret.”11 Embedded in this is the blanket assumption, so central to our lingering beliefs about gender identity: that for a woman not to have a baby is a failure.
But not according to lots of non-failing women.
“If I had kids, my kids would hate me,” Oprah Winfrey recently told an interviewer. “They would have ended up on the equivalent of the Oprah show talking about me; because something [in my life] would have had to suffer and it would’ve probably been them.”
Winfrey seems to understand that when it comes to desires around motherhood, women are not all built alike. She compared her own personal trajectory to that of her best friend Gayle King, whom she explained was “the kind of kid who, in seventh-grade home-ec class, was writing down her name and the names of her children,” said Winfrey. “While she was having those kind of daydreams, I was having daydreams about how I could be Martin Luther King.”12
In 2009, Food Network star Rachael Ray, questioned by journalist Cynthia McFadden about how she had “famously said that you’re too busy for children,” explained, “I’m forty years old, and I have an enormous [number] of hours that have to be dedicated to work.” Like Winfrey, Ray couldn’t imagine a world in which work obligations would give way to childcare. “I feel like a borderline good mom to my dog. So I can’t imagine if it was a human baby. Plus I also literally don’t think . . . I can’t imagine anybody giving me three or six months off to go physically have a child and take even a baby break. There is too much momentum and I feel like it would be unfair, not only to the child but to the people I work with.”
It is too rarely acknowledged that there are millions of ways that women leave marks on the world, and that having children is but one of them. Motherhood has for so long been the organizing principle of female life that women’s maternal status is often treated as the singularly interesting thing about them, often eclipsing all the other interesting things about them. When pioneering rocket scientist Yvonne Brill, the inventor of a system that prevented satellites from slipping out of orbit in space, died at age eighty-eight in 2013, her obituary in the New York Times began, before identifying her professionally, with this paragraph: “She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. ‘The world’s best mom,’ her son Matthew said.”
Queries about whether childless women want kids, or are planning to have kids, or whether they regret not having them are posed often, whether the person in question is being interviewed about children or her professional life. “I’m not going to answer that question,” thirty-three-year-old actress Zooey Deschanel told an interviewer profiling her for Marie Claire in 2013 who asked if children were on her priori
ty list. “I’m not mad at you for asking that question, but I’ve said it before: I don’t think people ask men those questions.”
They don’t. But, if they did, no one would be surprised to hear men cite other priorities, commitments, different ambitions, and other forms of attachment that they’d formed in the world as reasons why they don’t have children, or as satisfactions that make it okay that they don’t have children. Women have those other ambitions and satisfactions as well.
In a post called “Daughters of Dorothy Height,” writer Robin Caldwell wrote of legendary civil-rights leader, who had just died, “Dorothy Height died childless, having never married. To some women that would be a sin and a shame. To me and countless others who appreciated her presence as a civil-rights activist and women’s ‘club’ movement leader, she died leaving a multitude of daughters.”13
In 2015, former Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall, asked about being childless, replied “I am a parent. I have young actors and actresses that I mentor. I have nieces and nephews that I’m very close to. . . . There is a way to become a mother in this day and age that doesn’t include your name on the child’s birth certificate.14 You can express that maternal side of you very, very clearly, very strongly. It feels very satisfying.”
In these sentiments, Cattrall and Caldwell are preceded by the original single monarch, Elizabeth Tudor, who replied to one of Parliament’s periodic requests that she marry in 1558: “I beseech you, gentlemen, charge me not with the want of children, forasmuch as everyone of you, and every Englishman besides, are my children and relations”15 and “after my death you may have many stepdames, yet shall you never have a more natural mother than I mean to be unto you all.”16
Even if they don’t have subjects, women have responsibilities to other human beings, to their work, their colleagues, to families who are not their own.
In the 1970s, one in ten American women concluded her childbearing years without having a kid. In 2010, it was almost one in five.17 Some of the increase in childless women—around half,18 in fact—can be attributed to the number of women who want children, but do not find a path to having them before their clocks tick out. The other half represents a population of women who, with alternate models of female life more visible and available to them than ever before, conclude that they do not want to have children, at least not as much as they want to do other things.
Historian Louise Knight spoke of how, for some of her subjects and for herself, a drive to create and write overwhelms the drive to procreate. “There is a real feeling, something inside of them that needed to be expressed,” she said of Jane Addams and Sarah Grimké. “And I understand that for some women that thing is being a parent. That isn’t inside of me, and if it were, I would have made other choices.” Knight clarified that she didn’t mean to imply that women who do have children don’t have an urge for self-expression as well. “But they have child fire as well.” Knight recalled being seven years old, watching her sister play with a baby carriage and doll, and experiencing complete befuddlement. “Why would you do that?” she recalled thinking. “But singlehood freed people like me to not pretend they have child hunger when they don’t.”
The freedom accrues not just to people like Knight, who have never married, but to women who do marry and don’t feel a pull toward parenthood. The internet is home to thousands of sites that support the notion of coupled adults who are childfree by choice.
Journalist Piper Hoffman, a religious Jew, has written of how she and her husband slowly came to the realization that neither wanted to give up their work to raise children, despite intense pressure from religious family members and friends. She writes of how liberating it was to discover that there were communities of other people just like them, people who “lacked the drive to make and raise babies” and that they were happy! “They described enticing benefits, one of which particularly stood out for me: having their beloved to themselves and cultivating a devoted, satisfying relationship.”19
Gloria Steinem told me that she regularly gets asked about whether she regrets not having had children, recalling the most memorable version of the question, which came at a women’s center in a poor neighborhood in India. “Somebody asked me, ‘Don’t you regret not having children?’ And I thought, ‘If I’m honest, I’ll lose them, because this is a very traditional [community]’ but then I thought ‘Well, what’s the point of not being honest?’ so I told the truth, which is ‘Not for a millisecond.’ And they applauded. Because they have to have children, so they were glad to know that you didn’t have to.”
The freedom of not “having” to have babies! It’s real and it’s making an impact on the world.
In his 2012 New York Times column, “More Babies, Please,” Ross Douthat surmised that “the retreat from child rearing is, at some level, a symptom of late-modern exhaustion—a decadence that first arose in the West but now haunts rich societies around the globe. . . . It embraces the comforts and pleasures of modernity, while shrugging off the basic sacrifices that built our civilization in the first place.”
Of course, some people’s “decadence” is other people’s “liberation;” the exhaustion with child-bearing and child-rearing that Douthat finds so troubling is the weariness of the women who have borne the children and, until very recently, raised them largely on their own, their “basic sacrifices” the sacrifices of individual identity, social relationships, or the pursuit of equality in the world.
And, while women may have nudged partnerships ever closer to parity and more evenly split sacrifice, the double-punch of biology and social policies still designed around breadwinning-men and baby-making wives mean that it’s still women who must do the lion’s share of the arithmetic: the tallying and risks and rewards, of lost wages and promotions, sick days and leave policies, pumping rooms and corner offices, that come with kids. Women are all too mindful of the variety of losses they incur should they choose to bear children.
“We’re well aware that we lose fertility at a certain age,” wrote Ann Friedman, “but also that we lose professional power after we have kids.”20 Singer Vanessa Carlton told journalist Jada Yuan about how her mentor, Stevie Nicks, once explained why, in her rock-and-roll youth, she never saw herself as a mother. “She said, ‘I wanted to be respected by every single dude on that stage, and if I walked out and I’d made that choice, the dynamic would have been different.’ ”
And By Circumstance
It’s estimated that about half of women between forty and forty-four who have not had children aren’t childless because they chose it, but because it happened to them.
Melanie Notkin’s book, Otherhood, chronicles what she calls “circumstantial infertility,” which she calls the “unrequited love story of our generation.” For women like Notkin, not having kids wasn’t a decision, and certainly not her desired fate. “The heartache over our. . . . childlessness due to being without a partner is exacerbated by the inexhaustible myth that we have chosen not to be mothers,”21 she writes. Notkin calls women who yearn for children but do not have any of their own “childfull:” “We choose to fill our lives with the children we love like our nieces and nephews and friends’ children.”
Kristina leads a Girl Scout Troop in Bismarck. When she filled out the application, she said, “It seemed kind of creepy for a woman with no children.” But Kristina loves kids. Plus, she said, “I think it’s important for these girls to see that you can be thirty-five and be successful in your career outside of a marriage and having babies.” For her, the Girl Scouts, “has been a vehicle to be part of children’s lives and I guess maybe exercise my parenting muscles.”
But an attachment to other people’s children doesn’t always fulfill the women who are childless not by choice, and not exactly by accident, but for some complicated set of reasons that fall somewhere between the two. It’s not that these women haven’t considered doing it on their own. As it becomes more common, it’s almost impossible not to consider doing it.
Elliott, the D.C. novelist, described a conversation with a distraught friend who is thirty-eight and not in a relationship. “She always wanted to have kids, always wanted to be married and have a family,” said Elliott. “But she has been crunching the numbers and feels like it is absolutely not possible [to do it on her own]. She’s a teacher and is barely making it month to month.”
Elliott herself moved to D.C. to be closer to her two nieces. Partly, she said, that move was about resigning herself to a future in which she would not have kids of her own. Financially and emotionally, she said, “It would be too much work to do it on my own. I was never one of those people for whom it was going to be the be all, end all. So, making my peace with not being a mother was actually easier than making my piece with not having a partner.”
In her mid-thirties, Elliott said, her maternal urges grew stronger. Then she wrote a book. “Part of why I no longer have that yearning is because I’ve given birth to another thing, and have been very satisfied, creatively.” Elliott has started a second book, and said, “Maybe things work out the way they’re supposed to. I’m really lucky to have had so much mental space to write.”
When she was thirty-nine, Dodai Stewart wrote, in Jezebel,22 of the “Ambivalence. Indecision. Fear.” she faced at the realization that she might not wind up with kids: “As friends and colleagues get hitched and have babies, sometimes I start to feel like a straggler at a party. Everyone’s gone home, what am I still doing here?” Stewart wrote of how the entertainment media bombards women with “mommy propaganda” about celebrity baby bumps and post-pregnancy weight loss, and the ongoing saga of actress Jennifer Aniston’s empty uterus, in which, Stewart wrote, “[Aniston] is not a person but a character, a woman smiling and fit and happy yet apparently deeply sad that she’s unmarried and childless.” That narrative, Stewart observed, “Is a haunting reminder that if you’re not doing what’s expected of you—pairing up, mating, reproducing—you must be doing something wrong. Actually: There must be something wrong with you.”
All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation Page 33