Download Week 3 Why do we Have Children?

Transformations: Gender, Reproduction,
and Contemporary Society
Lecture 2: Why Children?
Dr SherahWells
[email protected]
Why do people have children?
 ‘Natural’
OR
 Outcome of complex social, political, cultural and
economic factors, many of them gendered
Nancy Chodorow, ‘The Reproduction of
Mothering’
 Psychoanalytic account that argues that ‘Women mother
daughters who, when they become women, mother’.
 Object relations theory: women, as mothers, are primary
love objects of their children
 Boys transfer love to other women, but repress emotions
 Girls learn to transfer erotic love away from mother and
women in general, but not required to shun mother or other
women emotionally.
Critiques of Chodorow
 Assumes heterosexuality
 Class, racially biased
 Ambivalent/bad mothering
 Absent mothers
 Does it encourage sexual relationships between women?
 Will women want to ‘mother’ more than men want to
‘father’?
Why people don’t want children
Terminology
 Childless
 Childfree
 Not mothers
 Voluntarily childless
Gillespie
 Disbelief
 Disregard
 Deviance
Childless Men
What about men who have chosen not to have children.
How might they be perceived?