Quite what Jennifer Aniston, the happily married, perennially popular multimillionairess, made of the "Poor Jen" tag that has dogged her for years was anyone's guess. Well, up until recently, that is.
“We are complete with or without a mate, with or without a child,” Aniston wrote in the Huffington Post recently. And she expanded on the issue in a chat show.
“It is always an issue of ‘Are you married yet? Are you going to have your babies yet?’ And it’s just constant,” Aniston said. “I don’t have this sort of checklist of things that have to be done, and if they’re not checked then I’ve failed some part of my feminism or my being a woman or my worth or my value as a woman.”
Aniston had hit a nerve, putting words to an unfortunate fate that befalls most women over 35: the scrutiny of the childless. The tragedy of the underused womb.
In the same month closer to home, new British prime minister Theresa May was prompted by a newspaper to enlighten readers on why a baby for her "hadn't happened".
Dubliner Eileen Reilly, who is single, child-free and in her mid-40s, is researching the lives of older single women.
“For women who are assumed to have passed the age of having children, it is normal [for people] to enquire into why not,” Reilly says. “Aside from the obvious gender bias, this line of questioning belies another assumption – namely, that marriage and family life are viewed as the proper occupation of women.”
And so it goes: the notion that mothers are selfless, beatific beings and non-mothers are selfish and questionable figures.
Going solo
“Ignoring solos without children perpetuates negative stereotypes and keeps the public ignorant about the range of lifestyles and family arrangements, which are lived by solos,” says Reilly.
Laura O’Herlihy (41) works in finance and considers herself “child-free by circumstance”.
“The main reason is that I haven’t found a partner that I’ve wanted to have children with, or perhaps more correctly I haven’t had a relationship last long enough for children to ever come up as a topic of conversation,” she says.
“I don’t think anyone’s life is ‘lesser’ because of a lack of children,” O’Herlihy adds. “My time is entirely my own to do what I will. I’m very lucky in the mum and dad friends that I have. I never feel like I’m excluded from a club or pitied because I don’t have one. I think being perpetually single has kept people from commenting on my child-free status.”
Jenny Headen (40) who works in the music industry, takes great exception to the narrative of the child-free woman as somehow inferior: “That actually makes me very angry. Do men get labelled as ‘lesser’ for not having kids? I think there’s a real stigma still attached to it, and there shouldn’t be. Just because I don’t have my own doesn’t mean I’m anti-kids. Far from it.”
Yet it hasn’t stopped people commenting on Headen’s unencumbered status.
“When I reveal in social situations that I don’t have children, I can sometimes feel a shift in the dynamic,” she says. “Either they feel that we don’t have anything much in common, as we don’t share the bond of having children – or they feel they can’t relate to me.
“I’ve also had people look at me sadly because, to them, I don’t know or understand the joys of having kids. On even rarer – thankfully – occasions, I have even been asked if I had a medical condition that prevented me from doing so.”
Radiate dislike
Even the happily coupled-up aren’t let off the hook, as Dubliner Louise Gleeson (46) attests: “Maybe I just radiate my dislike, but I don’t get asked very often about why I don’t have children, or get told I should,” she says. “When I do, I just say I don’t like them and people either look shocked or congratulate me on my honesty.
“It’s not a choice I have made,” she adds. “It’s just how it is. It’s incredibly sad that women pay attention to the conventions of society and have babies because they feel it’s what’s expected of them. Not everyone is cut out to be a good parent.”
On the other side are women for whom motherhood has been endlessly gratifying; that it is, indeed, all it’s cracked up to be.
“I do find motherhood fulfilling,” says mum-of-three Áine Baker, a freelance media professional and blogger (atthebakerfarm.blogspot.ie). “But it’s also very tough at times. Do I think women who choose not to have kids are missing out? Of course not.
“Obviously it’s very different for women who are desperate to have children but who can’t. But for women who choose not to have kids, I don’t think they’re missing out. They’ve chosen a different path, a different focus, and it’s obviously something that sits right with them. I really don’t think you could miss out on something you never had in the first place.”
Mother-of-two Hazel Larkin, a law student in her early 40s, echoes this sentiment. “As a fulfilled mother, I have huge respect for women who decide not to have children,” she says. “It takes huge guts and self-knowledge to know that having kids is not for you. I think a lot of women have children because they think they should.
“Society tells them that’s what women are supposed to do. Many people do what is expected of them without questioning too much or too hard.”
As tensions between the parented and the child-free seemingly thaw out, it appears the latter are swelling in numbers. A 2014 OECD study reveals that Irish women have the third-highest rate of childlessness in the developed world: 18.4 per cent.
Still, showbiz watchers aren’t likely to give up on “Jen watch”, in the hopes that Aniston will get her supposed happy-ever-after. How fortunate, though, that more and more people are aware, thanks to her, that happy-ever-afters now come in many different guises.
