Narrations of non-motherhood: how context shapes what it means to be childless in the United States and Japan

Abstract

In our era of low fertility rates, much research has examined factors behind delayed childbearing and childlessness. While scholars emphasize the role of macro-level context in constraining reproductive decision-making, less attention has been paid to how context shapes what it means, subjectively, to remain childless today. For women, whose childlessness has long been theorized as a deviant, stigmatized identity, this question is especially salient. Drawing on 157 interviews with non-mothers in two countries with distinct family landscapes, Japan and the United States, this paper comparatively analyzes how women experience and evaluate childlessness. Japanese participants were more likely to frame not having children as increasingly normalized and justifiable via entrenched gender inequalities whereas American participants were more likely to emphasize the socially isolating and publicly contested nature of childlessness, often drawing on moral logics to justify non-motherhood. To contextualize these divergences, I elaborate on two perceptual processes that emerged as relevant to women’s narratives: their views on the (in)flexibility of becoming and being a “good” mother and their interpretations of national demographic conditions. Together, these findings advance an understanding of childlessness as a status imbued with distinct meanings that are subject to cultural and demographic specificities.