Women Without Children: Cultural Perspectives on a Demographic Phenomenon

Abstract

Childlessness, or the family status of not having children, is a demographic phenomenon of increasing interest to sociologists, demographers, and the broader public because of its various implications at the population and individual level. Women’s childlessness in particular also raises important questions about gender and social legitimacy today, as childbearing and childrearing have historically been central to social expectations and experiences of womanhood.This dissertation draws on 157 in-depth interviews with women in the United States and Japan to examine women’s subjective experiences of not having children. Across three empirical chapters, it makes two key arguments: being childless constitutes a process and childlessness is context specific. In the first chapter, I focus on American women, showing how and why women’s childlessness in the United States is complicated by the enduring significance of motherhood. In the second chapter, I compare Japanese and American women’s experiences, illustrating how their realities as non-mothers are shaped by broader cultural and demographic factors. Finally, in the third empirical chapter, I develop a more general, inductively derived model of childlessness that highlights its processual nature. Taken together, these chapters add to scholarship on the sociology of gender and family, as well as demographic studies of fertility and childlessness, by showing the various tensions women face in their processes of parenthood decision-making and in their subjective experiences of a non-normative family status.