Joy B. Davis: Joy B. Davis is a Ph.D. student in the Counseling Psychology program at the University of Southern California. Her areas of interest include the intersection of ethnicity and sexuality.
In Childless by Choice: A Feminist Anthology, we find the words of an ethnically diverse group of women who have made a decision that much of our society can't comprehend, respect or validate. Writing in essays, poems and short fiction, the women describe their feelings, experiences, and reasons, which are as diverse as they. Carolyn Morrell records her disappointment with the feminist movement in journal entries, noting that it too has joined the “maternal revivalism” around her. In “Of Balloons and Bubbles”, a young lesbian spends a grueling “day” with her friends' two year old that actually lasts little more than an hour, offering a bittersweet look at the lesbian baby boom. Joyce Goldenstern is young and single. When she decides to have a tubal ligation, she meets resistance in a place where she had not expected it: her doctor's office. Ann Snitow's short review of feminist writings on the topic of childlessness should encourage more scholarship and theory on the topic.
Originally issued in 1992, this slim volume is welcome. Feminist writing is often criticized because much of it is written for academics, researchers and theorists, making it unaccessible or irrelevant to women who are not in the ivory tower. These writings are more personal than scholarly, focusing on the everyday reality of womanhood apart from motherhood. The weakness of the anthology is typical of similar works: some pieces work better than others. For instance, in my opinion, the essays surpass the poems and short stories in quality.
Thanks to technology, less restrictive adoption policies and human ingenuity, motherhood is probably available to more women today than at any other time in our history. It is important, however, that authors continue to challenge the oppressive aspects of pronatalism. The late Audre Lourde, a feminist, African American lesbian mother, noted that if she failed to recognize the woman who chose not to have children or one who could not have children…”if I fail to recognize them as other faces of myself, then I am contributing not only to each of their oppressions but also to my own.”
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