We've placed motherhood on such a high pedestal we've forgotten the huge pros of being a child-free woman

Voices | The Independent: 

"In the advertising world, our vision of womanhood is barely more diverse, with the ‘Busy Working Mum’ a keen creative cliché.  ‘Housewife With Kids’ is an equally popular trope, ignoring the fact that in the 1950 working mums were the minority, and today over 70 per cent of women with children also have a career. The idea of a woman as a full-time mum is becoming increasingly redundant. 

Then, of course, there’s the political favourite: the ‘hardworking family’, just doing the best for their offspring. So what happens when you don’t fit into this paradigm? What happens when you become the Not-Mum? 

In the US elections as reported by New York magazine, single unmarried women are set to wield the most decisive influence on the run for the White House. They accounted for 23 per cent of the voting electorate in 2012, and some 40 per cent of the African American electorate."

In 2015 the Not Mum Summit was the first landmark meeting of an organisation founded by Karen Malone Wright to promote and protect the rights of those women choosing not to have children.  

Interesting!  While childfree is slowly gaining awareness as an acceptable, normal choice, this is something fairly new.  Childless women (and next, childless men) as our own demographic, our own voice, and our own agenda.  Now, getting us to agree on what our needs actually are. . . that could be a challenge.



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How I Learned Being Childfree Was A Part of My Identity

Bustle

An author realized she was feeling shame, not indecision, over being childfree. Here's how she came to terms with it.

But what if it’s not really a choice for everyone? What if some of us are simply born this way? . . . I say this not to make an argument for what some might call a “lifestyle choice,” as if it were akin to moving to Portland, but to clarify that childfree is part of my identity, a filter through which I make sense of my place in the world. This might explain why telling people about my husband’s vasectomy has felt a bit like coming out. (Incidentally, I've often wondered if my feeling of apathy toward babies at all mirrors that of non-heterosexuals watching a hetero-normative sex scene, i.e. “meh.") The fact is that childfree is not recognized as an identity — the kind of born-this-way mentality that sexual orientation and gender identity rightfully command. I can’t list how many times I’ve said in my 20s and early 30s that I don’t want children only to have it dismissed with the wave of a hand and a quick, “You might change your mind.”

Technorati Tag: childfree