Rebel Without A Kid:
    Women Who Don’t Want Kids and Efficacy-Based Self-Esteem
    Kristina Barnett Te x a s S t a t e U n i v e r s i t y
    
    The traditional stereotype of family structure from the nineteen fifties has faded. Today, there is a long list of possible family structures that are at least legally acceptable if not wholly socially accepted in the West. Despite this change, oppressive gender norms linger. One notable case is when adults voluntarily do not have children. Though American culture is outwardly accepting of this choice, there is still strong social pressure to have children. Social scientists have adopted a term from demographers to label this cultural stance: pronatalism (Veevers 1980). Veevers (1980) and others (see Heitlinger 1991, for example) argue that dominant culture in the Western world is pronatalist, which refers to a collection of factors within a social milieu that serve to exert social pressure to bear children. In this dominantly pronatalist atmosphere, people who actively reject the idea of parenthood are breaking cultural norms related to gender, maturity and other cultural measures of worth. Thus, choosing not to have children has ramifications for their identities and for their day-to-day impression management. Though this affects both genders, it has historically been particularly poignant for women, a phenomenon which Russo famously dubbed “the motherhood mandate” (1976). Further, Veevers (1980) argues that motherhood is more of a primary source of womenʼs identity than fatherhood is for menʼs. As Goffman (1963) defines it, stigmatization occurs when there is a discrepancy between an individualsʼ actual self and othersʼ normative expectations of them. Thus, in a pronatalist culture that strongly associates individual womenʼs validation with motherhood, voluntarily childless women are likely to experience stigmatization. It is on these premises that the present study rests. Specifically, I sought to explore the effects of a Barnett 1
    
    childfree lifestyle on adult women in terms of how they cope with their stigmatized childless identities in their day-to-day lives, how their childlessness affects their identities, and how and why they maintain these identities despite the stigma. These issues of non-motherhood (or not-mommies, from now on) are best analyzed using a symbolic interactionist perspective. Specifically, the symbolic interactionist identity theory is a relevant perspective to use for understanding how child-free women construct their identities in the context of their cultural situation. Additionally, Goffmanʼs (1963) work on stigma management and more contemporary work that builds on it constitute an appropriate theoretical framework with which to examine the work that childless women do in their everyday life. E x i s t i n g Scholarship on Voluntary Childlessness A good place to begin an exploration of people who are voluntarily childless is with Jean Veevers (1980), who wrote a seminal book on voluntary childlessness. Based on in-depth interviews with 156 childless people, Veevers explored numerous facets of childlessness from the initial decision not to have children to the details of living a childfree lifestyle. Veeversʼ work is important in that it established voluntary childlessness as a valuable line of research for social scientists of all stripes, especially family sociologists. Her findings indicated that her respondents were part of an outlying population of individuals who had made a norm-breaking decision that entailed a subsequently stigmatized life. Her work served to debunk some of the negative stereotypes associated with people who chose childlessness and laid a foundation for a rich body of research to follow.
    
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    In the two decades since Childless By Choice was published, Western culture has experienced the enduring influence of feminism along with profound technological changes. Gillespie (2003), like Veevers before her, argues that consistent access to birth control along with greater freedom have created an atmosphere in which Western women increasingly view childlessness as a legitimate life path rather than as a deviant choice. Further, she argues that “modernity has created new possibilities for being a woman that exclude motherhood” (Gillespie 1991:134). Along these same lines, Koropeckyj-Cox and Pendell (2007) analyzed GSS and NSFH data from 1987-1988, and 1994 in order to find a relationship between gender and attitudes about voluntary childlessness. They did find a gender gap in that women were more likely than men to have a positive attitude about childlessness regardless of controls for sociocultural or structural variables such as religion, race, age, or general gender attitudes. Like Veeversʼ and Gillespieʼs qualitative studies, this quantitative project supported the idea that women with higher education levels have a more positive attitude about childlessness (although, interestingly, the gender gap rises with education level). Despite these indications of movement against the grain of pronatalism in Western culture, the dominant atmosphere has not changed so substantially that choosing childlessness is not stigmatized. With this in mind, Park (2002) studied twenty four women and men who were voluntarily childless. Using interview and focus group data, she identified and explained several Goffmanian stigma-management strategies used by the voluntarily childless including: passing, identity substitution, justification, excuses and
    
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    redefinition of the situation. Like Parkʼs work, the present study focused on respondentsʼ experiences of managing their stigmatized identities. I d e n t i t y Theory With An Ag entic Twist There is a vast body of work on identity, and much of it is contradictory. Contemporary identity theorists are divided between conflicting theories. In answer to this conflict, Hogg, Terry and White (1995) offer a comparison between two prominent theories: social identity theory and identity theory. Identity theory is characterized by a reciprocal relationship between the self and society. In identity theory, the facets of the self are called role identities, and both salience and commitment to role identities influence behavior. Moreover, identity theory, which employs a symbolic interactionist perspective, places emphasis on the idea that the self is defined through interactions with others and, in turn, defines actorsʼ behavior within social contexts. In contrast, social identity theory places emphasis upon self-categorizations in social groups and is a psychological theory. In this project, identity theory is useful to explore the ways that womenʼs interactions with others regarding their childlessness help to define their identities. Haworth-Hoeppner and Mainesʼ (2005) work regarding identity theory is also relevant in the question of not-mommy identities. These authors explored an apparent paradox in identity theory: the fact that certain culturally invalidated identities persist. They use anorexia to explain this inconsistency. In short, these authors argue for a new method of theorizing persistent invalidated identities using three concepts. First, the “discordant awareness context” (p.4), which occurs when there is a role-taking failure due to an individualʼs inability or unwillingness to accept othersʼ view of him or her. Put
    
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    differently, the term refers to a breakdown in a normal interaction that is caused by one partyʼs stigmatized identity. Secondly, Haworth-Hoeppner and Maines (2005) argue that people have dominant or master identities. Thirdly, the authors argue that master identities and discordant awareness contexts combine with Kathy Charmazʼs idea of the “fictionalized identity” (as cited in Haworth-Hoeppner and Maines 2005:5), to encourage identities that individuals would otherwise change. A fictionalized identity occurs when a person maintains a plainly distorted self-concept, such as terminally ill people who behave as though nothing is wrong, or anorexic people who believe they are overweight despite their being skeletally thin. These ideas are relevant in this project not for their applications but for their absence in voluntary childless women. These women do take some measures to cope with stigma, but there is no evidence of the extreme measures described by Haworth-Hoeppner and Maines. Though many theorists have contributed to the scholarship on constructing and maintaining identity based on our actions, relatively few have discussed implications of the things that we choose not to do. Mullaney asks just such a question regarding the identities of virgins (2001). Though this is a purely theoretical, speculative piece, because the data is from works of fiction, the author raises some critical identity issues. Namely, she points out that performing identities tends to be more important than actual actions. In the case of virgins, maintaining the appearance of virginity was more important than actually being a virgin. Further, Mullaney argues that having never done something is an assumed stage in development. Both cases are relevant for not-mommies, who are faced with choices throughout their lives of whether to play the role of one who
    
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    accepts motherhood (but, for example, cannot have it for medical reasons) and with the assumption in others that they will eventually move past their current stage. Part of not-mommiesʼ identities entail the absence of children, and yet pronatalist Western culture elevates motherhood as a defining characteristic of femininity. For example Collett (2005) wrote about how adult womenʼs process of impression management is affected by their children. Using participant observation data and some interview data, she described the ways in which the women in her sample use their children as props in their identity performances. Specifically, Collett argues that “Indirect selfpresentation techniques give mothers a chance to demonstrate the autonomy and efficacy that are vital to the development of their self-concept” (p. 342). If that is so, we are left to wonder how not-mommies fulfill the same need. The idea of efficacy-based self-esteem is perhaps the most relevant to the current research. Gecas and Schwalbe (1983) argue that identity theory leaves a gap where self-attribution is concerned. They argue that under the right circumstances, oneʼs selfconcept is not solely based on Cooleyʼs looking-glass self, which is so dominant in identity theory, but that there is an efficacy-based component. Requirements for this component include the appropriate context and meaning of actions. That is, the actor must be free, in control of her circumstances and have sufficient resources to generate her own goals and pursue them. Further, she must self-attribute the meaning of her actions rather than, for example, attributing the meaning to a god or other external factor.
    
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    R e s i s t a n ce a n d E ffic a c y In light of the efficacy component of self-esteem just discussed, it is worth exploring one last area of existing scholarship before looking at the results of the present research: stigma. Goffmanʼs oft-cited work in this area (1963) has been expanded upon by numerous studies since its publication. Though the present research does find support for Goffmanʼs initial conceptions of managing stigmatized identities, some of the more recent expansions of Goffmanʼs work are more relevant. Specifically, there is recent research on people with stigmatized identities who reject the stigma or the conception of normal rather than managing the stigmatized identity. One poignant example is Riessmanʼs work (2000) on childless women in South India. Riessman set out to research infertility in India, but came away with much more than that in a yearʼs worth of interview data and participant observation. The relevant finding in this context is that some women in India remain childless as a form of resistance. In other words, while many women in pronatalist society use motherhood as a significant source of information for their self-concept, these Indian women use their not-mommy status as an efficacy-based source of self esteem. Similarly, Kusow (2004) found that Somali immigrants in Toronto simply do not accept race-based stigma. Kusow interviewed 30 minutes Somali immigrants in Toronto regarding their reactions to racism, but he found that they had none (or very little). Though some admitted noticing discriminatory practices, they often attributed them to language or class differences rather than race. Kusow theorized that this was in part due to the fact that there is no race-based stigma in Somalia; instead there is clan-
    
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    based stigma. However, Kusow also unearthed a tendency in the Somalis he interviewed to reverse the stigma, and to reject the norms that the stigma is based upon. Kusow and Reissmanʼs work both emphasize a weakness in Goffmanʼs theory of stigma: that it is based on a single, universally accepted normative order. Both authorsʼ research indicates that not all stigmatized individuals accept a single normative order. The present research seeks to explore these phenomena among voluntary childless women. It seeks to explore their experience of day-to-day life as a voluntarily childless woman. How do they react to and cope with stigmatization? How does stigmatization manifest itself? Is their childlessness part of their identity? Do they accept the normative order of pronatalism described earlier, or do they seek to reform it like the participants in Gillespie, Reissman or Kusowʼs research? Methods This is a preliminary study, and so the sample is quite small. Though qualitative research is never intended to generalize to a population, this study is particularly limited. It is intended only to inform future work. The sample consisted of 3 white, middle class women and one woman who was part Latina and part white. They were between the ages of 33 and 51. The women resided in a medium-sized metropolitan area. No income data was recorded, but the participants were solicited in an upper-middle class neighborhood. Table 1 contains information about each woman along with the pseudonyms used in this paper. Participants were interviewed using in-depth interviews, with each interview lasting 30 to an hour. I did the interviews in the fall of 2007. All interviews were conducted in a
    
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    Table 1. Name Dina Sarah Randi Madison Age 51 33 39 43 Race Latina / White White White White Marital Status
    Long-term relationship
    
    Married Married Single
    
    local coffee shop. This research is particularly suited to qualitative methods, because the goal was to understand the participantsʼ experience rather than to count social phenomena. In-depth interviews were appropriate for several reasons. Namely, because it allowed participants to speak as long and in as much detailed as they wanted to. Further, voluntary childlessness is not something that can be observed in the field. It is also something that might make participants feel emotional or vulnerable, so reducing the number of people present for the discussion was optimal. The interview was semi-structured in that I had a list of questions but also probed the participants for further information. I designed the interview guide based on my initial research questions, which centered on voluntarily childless womenʼs identities and their stigma coping techniques. Though there were a number of themes in the interview data, several stood out. The current paper will focus on the following. First, there is support for Goffmanʼs theories on stigma, as participants practiced information control techniques and passing (1963). The second theme is what I called rebelliousness, which is when participantsʼ showed evidence of constructing efficacy-based self concepts based on their childlessness rather than treating it as a shameful component of their identity. In contrast to Goffmanʼs Barnett 9
    
    view that all members of a society share “a single set of normative expectations” (1963:127) and thus measure themselves by the same standards, the women in this study take pride in their decision and glean positive self-image from it. What follows are key excerpts from the interviews organized according to the themes just mentioned. G e t O f f M y B ac k Several of the participants in this research reported using information control or passing techniques. They reported that they commonly do or have in the past either deliberately lied to people or simply allowed people to wonder about or believe untrue assumptions about their childless status. They reported using these techniques “ just to get people off my back,” as Madison put it. The two most common of these tactics were passing as infertile or passing as selfish. These respondents put an interesting twist on the idea of passing in that most of them were not as worried about the stigmatized status of voluntary childlessness as they were about being perceived as judgmental of mothers or politically motivated in their decision. Randi offered a good example of passing as infertile in the following passage:
    I just tell them Iʼm not going to have children and let it go. Honestly? It's kind of fun to let them, like, wonder if they shouldn't have asked because maybe we can't have kids so maybe they should feel bad [cracking up]. Ahh the fun social games you can play around that.
    
    In this example, Randi shows a relatively carefree attitude about her passing technique that was common among the respondents. Though they made the effort to pass in certain situations, for the most part they did not exhibit shame or defensiveness. Madison offers another instance of passing that was less carefree for her. Barnett 10
    
    This woman who's a very good friend of mine now, eight years ago I met her right after she had her third child, and... she was nursing her baby in a restaurant- we were in a restaurant -and she was nursing her baby, which I think is wonderful and beautiful and healthy and all that jazz, but people were staring at her, and so she started talking about having babies and being a mother, and she loooooves ba-, I mean if she could, she would probably have more. kids. And I had just met her, so I knew I had better not say a word. Not a word. Because the more people stared at her the more she talked about how she loved being a mother and how she loved having children. And um, she said something kind of silly, I thought, which was, I don't know what the big deal is. Women who talk about they don't want to have children or they have problems having children, all you have to do is spread your, spread your legs! Aaaaand.... [chuckling] I wanted to say that is so irresponsible. I mean that is just... you know, you don't... aaargh! do that to your own body, to the worl- you know, but, I didn't say a word. She still, to this day, we've been friends eight years, I love her to death, but she still to this day does not know how I feel about, uhhh, over-breeding. Mmmhmmm.
    
    Though only one of the respondents (Madison) reported any significant history of political motivation for not having children, as in this example, most of them sought to avoid leaving that impression. Another method the participants in this study used was passing as selfish. That is, instead of choosing a less stigmatized status such as infertility, almost all of the women in this study reported allowing others to believe that they were selfish at some time in their lives. Sarah demonstrates in the following passage:
    I used to say that as an easy answer, like people would ask me why don't you want to have kids? And I would say Oh Iʼm just selfish. Like I would actually say
    
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    that because I think it was the answer they wanted to hear. And maybe a part of me believed that was actually true, like it's really selfish of me to not want to have to pay for my child's tuition, it's really selfish of me to, you know, not want to give up my evenings to take care of a child... like I think I believed that for a while, but I don't believe that at all anymore.
    
    R e b e l Without A Kid In a number of ways, the participants of this study demonstrated efficacy-based selfconcepts. They showed pride in their decision to remain childless, and usually associated the decision with positive attributes in themselves. Further, most of the participants described themselves as being generally non-conformists and were proud of that fact. In other words, although each of them practiced passing techniques as described above, they did so as a matter of convenience rather than shame. Further, they did not necessarily do so because they accepted the dominant cultural norm of pronatalism. In fact, their passing seemed to be more a technique of impression management (Goffman 1959) than a stigma management tactic. Thus, their behavior lent support to the ideas of Kusow (2004) and Reissman (2000). Though several of them explicitly denied that being childless was part of their identity, other statements indicated that they were proud of themselves for choosing not to have children and that they gained positive self-regard from the decision. As Sarah put it, “I think it's just who I am. I donʼt really know how to explain it any other way. I donʼt think I was trying to create this like identity for myself or anything like that.” But earlier sheʼd been talking about a friend that didnʼt understand her not wanting to have a child,
    
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    and she indicated a firm stance rooted in a solid understanding of her own childlessness.
    She's like when are you going to get pregnant? When are you going to have a baby?? It's like Melissa Iʼm not going to have a baby! [chuckles] And she doesn't understand it at all. And Iʼm like well take that, the fact that you don't understand me not wanting to have a baby, just put... like that's how I feel about you wanting to have a baby. Like, Iʼm thrilled for you. I know it makes you happy, but I don't understand why you wanted to do that. [You don't feel that...] Yeah, I don't feel that.
    
    Similarly, Randi talked about having pride in herself for rejecting pronatalism in the following passage:
    It makes me feel... this is going to sound really judgmental, and maybe it is, but I just feel like mindlessly, people go through the phases of life. Time to get married. Time to buy a house. Time to have a grown-up job. It's time to have children. And Iʼm really proud of Steve and I for continuing to question at each stage of supposed life-path if we really want to do that. And in some cases it's worked out really well. I mean professionally we've gotten to do some really cool things. I mean we've also kind of, you know, gotten in holes that we have to then dig ourselves out of. But, having the freedom to do that, because we're not responsible for other human beings is pretty awesome. And pretty central to who we are as a couple and as individual people.
    
    Later she compared herself to a coworker who sheʼd just met and was telling stories about his children:
    And, hearing people telling stories about their kids is great.... but, I would have to throw myself in front of a bus if I didn't have my own stuff to talk about. And I don't think Iʼm a selfish person. I just realize what's important to me.
    
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    Madison expressed a similar level of clarity and comfort about and with her decision to remain childless:
    I feel good.. I feel good in my decision, because I think a lot of people do give in to pressure and do things because it's expected of them. Aaaand whether it's having children, getting married, or the way they go through school or whatever it is. And so I feel pretty good about myself because Iʼm strong enough to be alright with my decisions and , you know, but it has caused problems. You know, it's not easy. And that makes me feel good too, it's like, Iʼm strong, you know...
    
    Dina, on the other hand, expressly related her decisions regarding children to her political views earlier in life and to her own sense of herself.
    I.... don't know how to explain this, but it probably makes me feel better about myself, and I think it's because... again, this is the generational thing about my friends in high school and stuff. Very much the... the sentiment in that time, when I was like growing up in the seventies, when I was in high school and stuff, was that..... having kids was kind of part of a- of what everybody called the --with great contempt-- the American nuclear family then, and nobody wanted to be a part of that. How uncool was that, or what smart person would want to do that? And so, there were all those associations with it, that, you know, and so, I probably always felt, you know, pretty good about it, because even though I don't buy into a lot of that anymore, it's probably still pretty, you know, [Built in...] deeply built in stuff. [Interesting...] So, uhhh, but the other thing is though, I think that I just- my identity is just really tied into things that don't have much to do with, I don't think, with relationships and children and things like that.
    
    In this passage, one can clearly distinguish that Dinaʼs context and the sense of meaning of her behind her behavior is conducive to efficacy-based self-esteem as described by Gecas and Schwalbe (1983).
    
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    Randi provided the last example of efficacy-based self esteem, which also demonstrates a theme among the participants in questioning the basis of pronatalism.
    Iʼm not sure that even people who've given a lot of thought to making babies think about the fact that they're creating an adult at some point. And that they're going to have this person in their lives forever. And that they're basically going to travel the path of all the difficulties with that person forever. Aaaand... I think in some ways, that could be, I mean that's a really cool idea. The idea that you're going to create this person, and help them become a fully, you know, rounded person, and chase after their dreams and go through all their problems and all that stuff, and you know that is really cool if that's what you want to do. But I think a lot of people stop at baby. And that is really not cool. Because you are responsible for that person, and you're responsible for putting them first and helping them through their shit. Your shit comes second.
    
    C o n c l u s io n s Although there continues to be a dominant pronatalist atmosphere in Western culture as there was twenty years ago when Veevers (1980) published Childless By Choice, women continue to opt out of parenting. Further, western culture has changed in other important ways, if not in the push to procreate. These changes affect women in numerous ways. Thus, examining women who choose not to have children is of continuing relevancy and interest to sociology. The present study has explored the idea of stigma management and identity, particularly efficacy-based self-esteem, in voluntarily childless women. Though extremely limited in scope due to the small, homogeneous sample-size, this study did serve to offer a preliminary look at the possibility of viewing not-mommies as having a valid life-path rather than as a population that must find methods of dealing
    
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    with their stigmatized identities. In keeping with some recent research on resistance and self-efficacy, respondents exhibited pride in their decisions to remain childless and questioned the ideas behind pronatalism. There is an important caveat regarding this research due to the homogeneity of the sample. In describing efficacy-based self-esteem, Gecas and Schwalbe (1983) conceded that it is only truly applicable to those that are located in positions of relative power. They argue that the lower an individual is in their societyʼs social hierarchy, the less likely they will experience cases of efficacy-based self-esteem. Thus, the homogeneity of the women in this study affects their experience of efficacy-based self-esteem in that they are all located in positions of relative social empowerment. The topics explored here would benefit from future research in a number of ways. First, it would be interesting given the caveat mentioned above to examine detailed demographic information on childless women. Secondly, a more extensive study of the same sort as this one with a more varied sample would reveal more valid findings as to whether there is truly a movement toward women rejecting the dominance of pronatalism.
    
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    R e f e re n ce s Collett, Jessica. 2005. “What Kind of Mother Am I? Impression Management and the Social Construction of Motherhood.” Symbolic Interaction 28(3):327-347. Gecas, Victor and Michael L. Schwalbe. 1983. "Beyond the Looking-Glass Self: Social Structure and Efficacy-Based Self-Esteem." Social Psychology Quarterly 46(2):77-88. Gillespie, Rosemarie. 2003. “Childfree And Feminine: Understanding the Gender Identity of Voluntarily Childless Women.” Gender & Society 17(1):122. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday. 
 -----. 1963. Stigma: Notes on The Management of Spoiled Identity. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall. Haworth-Hoeppner, Susan and David Maines. 2005. “A Sociological Account of the Persistence of Invalidated Anorexic Identities.” Symbolic Interaction. 28(1):1-23. Hogg, Michael A., Deborah J. Terry, and Katherine M. White. 1995. “A Tale of Two Theories: A Critical Comparison of Identity Theory with Social Identity Theory.” Social Psychology Quarterly 58(4):255-269. Heitlinger, Alena. 1991. “Pronatalism and Womenʼs Equality Policies.” European Journal of Population. 7:343-75. Koropeckyj-Cox, Tanya. and Gretchen Pendell. 2007. “The Gender Gap in Attitudes About Childlessness in the United States.” Journal of Marriage and Family 69(4):899-915.
    
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    Kusow, Abdi M. 2004. “Contesting Stigma: On Goffman's Assumptions of Normative Order.” Symbolic Interaction 27(2):179-197. Mullaney, Jamie. 2001. “Like a Virgin: Temptation, Resistance, and the Construction of Identities Based on ʻNot Doings.ʼ” Qualitative Sociology 24:3-24. Park, Kristin. 2002. “Stigma Management Among The Voluntarily Childless.” Sociological Perspectives. 45(1):21-45. Riessman, Catherine Kohler. 2000. “Stigma and Everyday Resistance Practices: Childless Women in South India.” Gender & Society 14(1):111. Russo, Nancy Felipe. 1979. “Overview: Sex roles, fertility and the motherhood mandate.” Psychology of Women Quarterly 4(1):7-14. Veevers, Jean E. 1980. Childless by Choice. Butterworths.
    
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