Nesrine Malik has written a terrific piece for The Guardian titled "The right’s obsession with childless women isn’t just about ideology: it’s essential to the capitalist machine," which underlines the point that attacking childfree women is a red herring intended to distract from the woeful state of conservative policies and their failure to support women and families.
Malik writes, in part:
Motherhood, in other words, becomes an economic input, a public good, something that is talked about as if the women themselves were not in the room. Data on declining birthrates draws comment from Elon Musk (“extremely concerning!!”) . Not having children is reduced to entirely personal motivations – selfishness, beguilement with the false promise of freedom, lack of values and foresight, irresponsibility – rather than external conditions: of the need for affordable childcare, support networks, flexible working arrangements and the risk of financial oblivion that motherhood frequently brings, therefore creating bondage to partners. To put it mildly, these are material considerations to be taken into account upon entering a state from which there is no return.
Additionally, writes Malik, our capitalist culture has long been structured in a way that promotes men's success by subjugating women in support roles — and childfree women, especially women who also choose not to partner with men, not only challenge this structure but threaten it:
It’s an argument about political capability that dresses up a visceral revulsion at the idea that a woman who does not have a child should be vested with any sort of credibility or status. In other comments, Vance said that “so many of the leaders of the left, and I hate to be so personal about this, but they’re people without kids trying to brainwash the minds of our children, that really disorients me and disturbs me”. He appears so fixated on this that it is almost comical: a man whose obsession with childless women verges on a complex.
But his “disorientation and disturbance” is a political tendency that persists and endures. It constantly asks the question of women who don’t have children, in subtle and explicit ways, especially the higher they rise in the professional sphere: “What’s up with that? What’s the deal?” The public sphere becomes a space for answering that question. Women perform a sort of group plea to be left the hell alone, in their painstaking examinations of how they arrived at the decision not to have kids, or why they in fact celebrate not having kids, or deliberations on ambivalence about having kids.
Behind all this lies some classic old-school inability to conceive of women outside mothering. But one reason this traditionalism persists in ostensibly modern and progressive places is that women withdrawing from mothering in capitalist societies – with their poorly resourced public amenities and parental support – forces questions about our inequitable, unacknowledged economic arrangements. A woman who does not bear children is a woman who will never stay home and provide unremunerated care. She is less likely to be held in the domestic zone and extend her caregiving to elderly relatives or the children of others. She cannot be a resource that undergirds a male partner’s career, frailties, time limitations and social demands.
A mother is an option, a floating worker, the joker in the pack. Not mothering creates a hole for that “free” service, which societies increasingly arranged around nuclear families and poorly subsidised rights depend on.
Choosing to be childfree in a Western capitalist society remains a radical decision, which is why options to control our own reproduction are being targeted and threatened.
It is more important than ever to have conversations about why this option should be fiercely protected, and to amplify the stories of women who have had zero kids and have zero regrets about it.
Read Malik's whole piece here.
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