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Reviewed by:
  • Le choix d’une vie sans enfant by Debest Charlotte
  • Gaëlle Meslay
Debest Charlotte, 2014, Le choix d’une vie sans enfant [Choosing childlessness], Rennes, Presses universitaires de Rennes, Le Sens social, 216p.

In this book, based on her doctoral thesis, Charlotte Debest puts forward a sociological analysis of SEnVols – a suggestive acronym(1) she found to designate “voluntarily childless” persons; that is, who have chosen not to become parents. She draws on a set of 51 life accounts of men and women over age 30, all of who responded to her call for interviews and therefore described themselves as voluntarily childless. Debest’s respondents either did or did not have an intimate partner and were included regardless of sexual orientation or conjugal situation.

The book fills a gap in our scientific knowledge on the question, and in so doing attests to the invisibility in French society of the absence of desire for children. That invisibility is an effect of social pressure. Voluntary childlessness levels, which can be thought of as a symmetrical assessment of fertility levels, have only been investigated in France since 1995. According to the results of the 2011 Fecond survey (Fertility-contraception-sexual dysfunctions), 5% of persons aged 18–50 and 3.5% of persons reporting an intimate partner are voluntarily childless.

In her review of the French context, where pro-birth policies together with relatively late birth control legislation have tended to favour parenthood, Debest demonstrates that social norms are always inscribed in specific historical dynamics. France seems particularly attached to an essentialist vision of the family structure, in which having children is often perceived as a natural, logical step in the transition to adulthood (p. 129). The author’s research not only performs the valuable service of exposing the forms of our French social organization, but also situates them in a gender system that “ascribes the reproductive sphere to women and … the productive sphere to men” (p. 15).

The notion of “reconciliation”, especially of family and work life, is useful in understanding how SEnVols come to conceptualize sexual inequality in the parent relationship. Mentioning examples of mothers in their families or among their friends, the women interviewed cite the constraints imposed on those women by the tasks of rearing and caring for children. More women than men report “having other priorities”. But their criticism of compulsory motherhood based on observed experience is also philosophical; in other words, these women refuse to be assigned a status that would prevent them from defining themselves as individuals. They also mention unequal task sharing, wherein women are the ones forced to reconcile their occupational, parental, conjugal and personal lives. To support this argument, they cite several examples of women – and women only – who chose part-time jobs or a fall in occupational status when their children were born. Conversely, fatherhood does not seem [End Page 715] to require men to change their schedules: a large majority maintain the same degree of involvement in their job. This explains why, in interviews with childless men, the issue of reconciling family and work life does not come up, a sign that these men do not project themselves into daily parental functions that are not first and foremost theirs. These accounts illustrate particularly well how, for the women questioned, not becoming a mother can represent the possibility of realizing individual aspirations similar to men’s.

But though these criticisms are indeed mentioned in the study, they are far from being decisive in the choice of the women questioned. The strength of Debest’s book also lies in her deconstruction of the prejudices associated with childlessness, notably the assumption that childless people lead sad and solitary lives. What comes through in this book is a positive vision of not wanting to have children, one where considerable importance is attached to the ideas of greater individuality and “freedom” in the sense of having time for oneself. Positive also because this choice enables people to refuse to take on the responsibilities involved in determining the life of another human being, in raising that person and therefore being a major source of his or her potential suffering. Also, contrary to widespread representations, the...

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