Beyond Mandatory Motherhood: How Childfree Women Use Digital Spaces to Redefine Womanhood

Abstract

The voluntarily childless woman is constructed in Western cultural consciousness as an aberration. Against her will, she is perceived as defective, deviant, unnatural and incomplete. However, online community spaces are providing opportunities for childfree women to connect with one another, take hold of the narrative of their lives and in doing so write into being a new way of doing womanhood that intentionally claims deviance as its defining characteristic. In this chapter, I explore the ways in which women participants in online childfree communities write their identities against hegemonic markers of ‘good’ womanhood, recasting the heroes and villains of Western culture's persistent myth of mandatory motherhood.

Citation

George-Allen, S. (2022), "Beyond Mandatory Motherhood: How Childfree Women Use Digital Spaces to Redefine Womanhood", Rumson, L. and Bentham, A. (Ed.) Divergent Women (Emerald Interdisciplinary Connexions), Emerald Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 127-137. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80117-678-120221008