CHAPTER FOUR
Developing Mothering Desires
My original research question focused specifically on how adult lesbians choose to become mothers or remain childfree. However, as I began analyzing the data, it occurred to me that in order to understand how lesbians make their decisions, I needed to better understand how they came to want to become mothers or remain childfree. During the interviews I often heard lesbians state that they “always wanted to become a mother” or they “never wanted to have children.” Because mothering desires (i.e., the desires to become mothers or remain childfree) were integral to the identities of many of the lesbians I interviewed, I realized that the development of mothering desires is integral to the development of mothering decisions. In addition, I found that just as mothering decisions are embedded in social processes, so are mothering desires. The information the women gave me about their childhoods provided insight into a complex process based not on biological urges or socialization but on social experiences and interpretations of those experiences. Like heterosexual women (Gerson, 1985), lesbians in my study did not simply wake up one morning thinking, “I want to be a mother” or “I want to be childfree.” The process by which they developed this desire was largely based on the social and cultural conditions in which they grew up.
Because I did not plan on asking lesbians how they developed their mothering desires, I came upon this information quite unexpectedly. In organizing the questions I was going to ask during the focus groups, a fellow graduate student suggested I start each focus group with a question that would put participants at ease and generate wide discussion. Based on this advice, I decided to ask lesbians how they defined mother. I asked what the term meant to them, to their own mothers, and to the communities in which they grew up. It was a seemingly simple question, and I expected fairly simple answers like, “A mother is a biological parent who is also a caregiver.” Although I got some such answers, mostly my question sparked a rich discussion about lesbians’ childhood experiences, their relationships with their own mothers, and reflections on how they negotiated their sexual identities within their communities and families of origin. In other words, in answering a seemingly simple question, the lesbians I interviewed provided the data I needed to understand how they developed early mothering desires. These desires consisted of wanting to become mothers, wanting to remain childfree, and ambivalence toward motherhood.
Drawing on lesbians’ responses, in this chapter I focus on the first phase of the process of making mothering decisions: the development of mothering desires. Building upon the limited social science research on early childhood experiences, I found that the processes that lesbians go through involve a combination of four factors: their experiences as children, how they interpret their own mothers’ lives, their early experiences with childcare, and their experiences of racial or gender discrimination. By looking at these factors, my research clearly challenges the belief that mothering desires are based on biological or hormonal urges. In fact, my research argues that lesbians’ early mothering desires develop out of social conditions. These desires become important guides for how lesbians negotiate the social and economic barriers and constraints they face as adults in turning desires into realities.
THINKING ABOUT WOMEN’S DESIRES TO BECOME MOTHERS
There are three predominant models for thinking about women’s desires to become mothers. Perhaps the most common one is based on the belief that women want to become mothers because they are biologically programmed to do so. Most people believe that hormones and evolutionary necessity encourage women to want to procreate and give birth. Even the literature on lesbian mothers, which acknowledges that lesbian mother has historically been an oxymoron, takes for granted that lesbians, as women, will want to become mothers because their “biological clocks” are ticking (Lewin, 1993).
Sociological research conducted in the 1970s and 1980s began to question this supposed biological mandate by looking at how mothers socialize their daughters toward or away from motherhood. So the second model argues that women develop a mothering desire through socialization. The logic of this model is that mothers teach their daughters that motherhood is either something to aspire to or something to avoid. Despite many people’s acceptance of this model, research conducted by Gerson (1985) looking at heterosexual women’s mothering desires, what she calls “orientations” toward or away from motherhood, strongly critiques the socialization model. As Gerson (1985) writes:
Domestic mothers do not necessarily reproduce their own orientation toward mothering and domesticity in their daughters. Nor do nondomestically oriented mothers necessarily produce nondomestically oriented daughters. Although the importance of mothers is undeniable, the way in which they are important in shaping their daughters’ orientations is complex and open-ended . . . In the long run, daughters must make their own way in the world—informed by, but not controlled by, their mothers’ decisions and relationships with them as children. (p. 53)
In other words, although their perceptions of their mothers’ lives, as well as other factors, shape girls’ thoughts about motherhood, girls are not simply socialized into domestic roles or nondomestic roles by their mothers.
The third model is based on social structural understandings and extends Gerson’s challenge of the socialization model. This third model also seriously weakens dominant assumptions about biological mandates and looks at how social and economic factors shape adult women’s mothering decisions regardless of their mothering desires. The research tells us that women’s relationship to work, their involvement in intimate relationships, and society’s belief that women should be mothers are critical factors in shaping women’s mothering decisions. What we know, however, is mostly about women as adults, not as children, and therefore about mothering decisions and not mothering desires. In fact, we know very little about how childhood experiences encourage girls and young women to develop the desire to become mothers or remain childfree. What we do know is mostly about middle- and working-class White women (Cain, 2001; Gerson, 1985; Morell, 1994), thus overlooking how structures of sexuality and race might also impact mothering decisions. For heterosexual women, as for the lesbians interviewed in my study, childhood experiences such as mother-daughter dynamics, parental expectations, family dynamics, gender norms, class aspirations, and the wider social environment in which girls grow up help them to develop “orientations” (Gerson, 1985) toward or away from motherhood. However, among heterosexual women, early orientations are poor predictors of adult family patterns (Gerson, 1985). In other words, early childhood experiences help shape girls’ desires to become mothers or remain childfree, but those desires do not generally tell us whether a heterosexual woman will actually become a mother or remain childfree.
My work is closely aligned with the third model. For many of the same reasons as Gerson, my work strongly critiques and challenges biological and socialization models. However, I depart from Gerson, who found that baseline desires are not good predictors of adult decisions. Unlike Gerson, I found that although some lesbians were ambivalent about motherhood, many developed early in their lives strong desires for motherhood or remaining childfree. As I discuss in the following chapters, many lesbians were able to negotiate their lives in ways that allowed them to fulfill their mothering desires. Like heterosexual women (Gerson, 1985), many of the lesbians I interviewed found that additional social conditions, such as work and intimate relationships, pushed them away from their early desires. However, I also found that early mothering desires were much more salient for the lesbians in my study than for the heterosexual women in Gerson’s study. I suggest that the reason for this is that even though lesbians’ mothering decisions are made through larger social processes and are not as intentional as previous studies have portrayed them to be, they are still more intentional than decisions made by heterosexual women. This is not to say that lesbians have full control over their mothering decisions. However, because lesbians can control whether or not they get pregnant, and because their very identity as lesbians questions dominant gender and sexual ideologies, they have greater control over their mothering decisions than heterosexual women. Therefore, lesbians who have strong desires to become mothers or remain childfree are able to more actively pursue those desires than heterosexual women, even if their desires are challenged later in life.
Despite this greater control over the decision-making process, like Gerson, I too found that it is important to distinguish between the processes lesbians go through to arrive at a mothering desire from the social barriers and opportunities that help them realize those desires. Just as with heterosexual women, the interplay between the creation of mothering desires and the real opportunities to actualize those desires is key to understanding lesbians’ mothering decisions. Much like Gerson, I found that there are two connected phases of the decision-making process: childhood experiences out of which women develop mothering desires, and adult experiences out of which women actually decide to become mothers or remain childfree. I argue that both of these phases develop out of social conditions and that both are important in shaping lesbians’ decisions to become mothers or remain childfree. In addition, I question how race and sexuality, in addition to gender and class, shape those social conditions and thus shape the social processes through which lesbians both develop their mothering desires and make their mothering decisions.
HOW LESBIANS INTERPRETED THEIR OWN MOTHERS’ LIVES
When I began each focus group by asking participants to discuss their definitions of mother, many lesbians, regardless of race, class, or mothering decision, defined a mother as nurturing, providing support and unconditional love, being “there” for her children. For example, Patricia, a middle-class White lesbian, explained with great warmth in her voice:
“[Motherhood is] a pretty big thing, isn’t it? It’s like everything from the beginning of the day to the end of the day.
However, some lesbians offered a negative definition. For example, Kristy, a middle-class White lesbian, defined motherhood as being “chained” and preventing her from having her own life. Many of these definitions came out of lesbians’ relationships with their own mothers, as well as their interpretations of their mothers’ experiences. Through their answers, it became clear that how lesbians interpreted their own mothers’ lives played an important role in shaping their own mothering desires.
For the most part, but certainly with exceptions, lesbians with negative interpretations of motherhood were more inclined to want to remain childfree, and those with positive interpretations were more inclined to want to become mothers. However, because interpretations of mothers’ lives is not the sole factor shaping mothering desires, and because of social and cultural conditions that women faced later in life, some lesbians with negative interpretations early on in life did become mothers as adults, and vice versa. And as studies on heterosexual women have found (Polatnick, 1996), while ideas about motherhood as a traditional gender role clearly shaped lesbians’ interpretations of motherhood, lesbians’ interpretations of motherhood were also based on complex notions of class and race.
Many of the middle-class lesbians in my study, regardless of race, interpreted their mothers’ lives to be self-sacrificing. Some lesbians, however, interpreted this sacrifice as a reason to remain childfree, while others interpreted it to be rewarding and worthwhile, thus leading them to desire motherhood. Among middle-class lesbians of color, there were two main views. First, some saw motherhood as a self-sacrifice that is too overwhelming a responsibility to assume. Roxanne, a middle-class Black lesbian, illustrated this point:
I just look at it as I’m just too selfish to do anything like that. And I don’t think of myself as being selfish, just selfish as far as the responsibilities that come with having a child and having the ideas that I have about childbearing, being a mother, being there 24-7, taking the kid here, taking the kid there, all those things that are built into it. No, no, I can’t do that. I don’t have that. I don’t think I can do it.
The emphasis by Roxanne and other middle-class lesbians of color on the ongoing and intense responsibility of motherhood developed, in part, out of watching their own mothers struggle with raising children. Particularly among Black women, motherhood holds not only the responsibility of raising and nurturing children but also the historical responsibility of remaining in the work force and “uplifting the race” to ensure the survival of Black children (Collins, 1990; Silvera, 1995; B. Smith, 1998). The emphasis on motherhood’s enormous responsibility, along with their experiences in watching their own mothers, led many of the middle-class lesbians of color in my study to develop a desire for personal freedom that is difficult to achieve when coupled with mothering responsibilities.
In contrast, however, the second view that some middle-class lesbians of color held was that their mothers’ multiple responsibilities were a welcome challenge that allowed for maternal flexibility. This was particularly true for lesbians of color who came from single-parent families. For example, Desiree, a middle-class Latina, stated:
I was raised by a single parent, and I think she—she never married, and it was just—she’s very independent. I could never imagine her marrying, now or ever, when I was younger or in the future. Women could do it. She did everything. She took care of everything.
Rather than seeing “doing everything” as a negative condition, Desiree interpreted her mother’s responsibilities as a model for how mothers can achieve multiple goals. Other middle-class lesbians raised by single mothers had similar experiences. The result was that many lesbians of color from female-headed households were able to accept the gender roles of motherhood because those gender roles showed them that motherhood can be flexible rather than restrictive or oppressive to women. Furthermore, it gave them a model for how women can raise children outside of marriage. Given that marriage is not an option for most lesbians in the United States, and certainly not for the lesbians I interviewed in 2000, this model seemed important in shaping some lesbians’ desire for motherhood.
Like their Black and Latina counterparts, middle-class White lesbians also had conflicting interpretations of their mothers’ experiences. But their experiences differed slightly because of the structures of race that often privilege White people. Not only did they interpret the self-sacrifices of their mothers’ lives as overwhelming, but many middle-class White lesbians also saw their mothers’ self-sacrifices as instances of women’s oppression. Many discussed how motherhood means staying at home, a position they found to prevent women’s personal growth and freedom. As was true for lesbians of color, White lesbians’ understanding of motherhood often came from the historical class and race privilege of their mothers. Because middle-class White mothers have often had financial support from husbands that encouraged them not to work, motherhood for middle-class White women has historically meant taking care of children while forgoing higher education and a career (Dill, 1994). I found this also to be true for both White middle-class lesbians who grew up with two parents present and for those whose mothers were divorced or widowed. In this latter group, many lesbians interpreted motherhood as an added burden that forced their mothers into the work force so their families could maintain a middle-class status. As a result of their race and class status, many White middle-class lesbians saw motherhood as preventing their mothers from finishing their education or pursuing careers of their choice. Tammy explained this point well when she reflected upon her thoughts when she was younger:
I’m going to [have] a career first, and I’m going to be settled in a career, ’cause . . . I watched my mom raise all these children and not—I mean, she tried to go back to college and wasn’t able to do it ’cause there was just too many kids at home. There were four of us and no father, so it was her, and I just thought, “No, that’s not going to be me,” and then by 30 I thought, “I’m not going to have children.”
Based at least partially on her interpretation of her mother’s experience as preventing personal freedom in terms of work and educational opportunities, Tammy, like many other middle-class White lesbians, developed a desire to remain childfree. For example, June, a middle-class White lesbian, stated that seeing how her own mother lived and worked led her originally to not want to become a mother herself:
I had always sworn up and down that I would not be a mother. I didn’t want my mother’s life. My mother wasn’t very happy being at home and being a mother. And so I swore up and down that I didn’t want my mother’s life.
Despite June’s negative interpretations of her mother’s life, ultimately she became a mother herself. As I discuss in the following chapters, social conditions, as well as the ability of adult lesbians to renegotiate gendered ideas about motherhood, can change earlier mothering desires into different mothering decisions.
Whereas some lesbians rejected the gender role of stay-at-home mother because they saw it as oppressive, some White middle-class lesbian accepted it. The difference in response is most likely due to interpretations of mothers’ lives in combination with other early experiences such as experiences with children. For example, Grace, a middle-class White lesbian, internalized her mother’s staying at home as a positive way in which to raise children:
But my mother was home with us, and I think that that’s how I view, that’s always how I’ve always viewed, that I should be home. I’ve wanted to be home until I was home.
As an adult, Grace put her job as a nurse on hold to take care of her and her partner’s son. Her partner’s high income allowed Grace to stay at home. After being a stay-at-home mom for two and a half years, Grace was ready to move back into the paid labor force. Her acceptance of her mother’s experiences helped shape her own beliefs about mothers as stay-at-home caregivers. However, as she experienced the constraints of this gender role and as her child grew older, she no longer wanted to be a stay-at-home mom but rather wanted to pursue her career as a nurse. Grace combined her acceptance of staying at home with a flexible view of motherhood that some lesbians from similar backgrounds may not have envisioned or may not have been able to realize because of economic obstacles.
Much like Grace, Carly, a middle-class White lesbian, stated that because of her partner’s high income and focused career goals, she herself stayed at home:
We decided that I would stay home and raise the kids and she would work, and so it worked out really well for us because of our ideas about having kids which is that, um—I guess that the way I grew up, I believe that one parent needs to be home with the kids. And since having kids, I’ve kind of changed that [view]. I would love more than anything to go out and have at least a part-time job. But I love my kids, and I have a hard time thinking about going out and getting a job and not being there for them all the time, you know, so I’m constantly in a battle with that.
Since Carly did not have an established career, a return to the work force seemed more difficult to her than it did to Grace. However, her partners’ financial stability, coupled with her acceptance of the gender role that mothers stay at home, allowed her to fulfill her desire to be a stay-at-home mother.
Just as middle-class lesbians of different racial backgrounds developed distinct interpretations of their mothers’ lives, so did working-class lesbians. In addition to focusing on self-sacrifice, oppression, flexibility, and the value of staying at home, working-class lesbians talked about trying to achieve upward mobility and independence. The theme of upward mobility and achieving higher economic status than their mothers was most greatly shared among working-class lesbians of color. For example, Pam, a Latina from a working-class background, stated that having children was not just a personal burden on her mother but a financial burden on her family:
There are seven children in my family, and my mother made a lot of sacrifices for us. She stayed at home. My father’s Hispanic. He didn’t want my mother to work. At that time, you know, motherhood seemed like it was just a burden. I mean, having a lot of children but not a lot of money and seeing what sacrifices my parents had, [I] reasoned I didn’t want to be responsible for a child as someone who didn’t have a lot of money.
Pam attributes her mother’s position to her father’s racial-ethnic beliefs about gender roles in families. Although it is unlikely that women in a lesbian household would experience such strict gender roles (Sullivan, 1996), Pam’s desire for upward mobility for herself and her potential children, coupled with the “burden” of motherhood, contributed to her lifelong ambivalence about whether to have children.
White working-class lesbians offered similar interpretations, explaining that their mothers’ struggle to support and keep their families together taught them to be independent and strong. Working-class White mothers lead difficult lives, working long hours both in and outside the home. Unlike middle-class parents, working-class parents have less quality time for themselves and face more uncertainty about their children’s futures (Rubin, 1992). In my study, working-class White lesbians reported that their mothers taught them to be strong and independent, so as to achieve greater personal freedom and higher economic status. For example, Mabel stated:
My mom raised us different than she was raised. She wanted us to be strong and wanted us to be independent at a young age because she was so naive. When she was growing up she went from her mother’s home to her husband’s home and never really learned how to be her own person. She was a mom before she was even an adult, and I think she really just didn’t want that to happen again to her children. So she went kind of the opposite direction, and maybe a little too strong, to make sure that we were independent and weren’t naive or didn’t get taken advantage of, maybe, the way she felt she did.
The combination of not wanting to struggle economically as their mothers did, and having been taught to be independent and strong so they could avoid economic hardship, helped some working-class lesbians develop a desire for personal and economic freedom that contributed to their desire to remain childfree.
EXPERIENCES AS CHILDREN
In addition to their interpretations of their own mothers’ lives, lesbians’ past family experiences were important in shaping their desires to become mothers or remain childfree. These family experiences varied by race and class. Middle-class lesbians of color did not discuss their family experiences in any detail. In contrast, working-class lesbians of color discussed positive family experiences that contributed to a positive view of motherhood and of family in general. For example, Diane, a working-class Black lesbian, stated:
I just always wanted . . . I wanted what everyone else had. For years I wanted . . . I mean, I actually said it: I wanted a house, I wanted a white fence, I wanted kids and a dog and the whole family thing. I think for me it has to do with my childhood. I want to relive [my] childhood with my child. And that’s fun. There’s a lot of enjoyment.
For Diane, the experience of being raised by a single mother helped instill a positive view of motherhood and family that led her to desire motherhood.
Kizzy, also a working-class Black lesbian, echoed Diane’s desire to recreate her childhood experiences. However, Kizzy explained this desire as it relates to an extended Black family and sense of community:
KIZZY: I know some of the parts where people get raised by their grandmothers, by their aunts, by different people. I think that’s pretty widespread as far as I’ve seen in the Black community, because, I mean, it’s just normal. I mean, the person might not even be related to you. You have things where you say, “So and so is my play mother or my play brother or play sister.” So there’s this idea that it’s not just blood that can tie people together. But you can decide who you want to be your family, and take them in that way.
DIANE: I agree with Kizzy as far as the Black community. For years it’s been the family raising you. It’s not just your parents. Your uncle will come in, and people on the street. If as a child I was seen throwing rocks at a window and Betty Johnson that lives down the street, she would be on the phone calling my mother to tell me, “Did you know your daughter . . . ?” So it’s a group effort to raise the children. It was. It’s not anymore.
This discussion illustrates three themes found in the literature on Black families. First, Kizzy’s description of the flexible definition of mother within Black families helps Black lesbians form positive views of motherhood. Previous literature supports this finding that Black communities have flexible and broad definitions of mother (Collins, 1990). Second, Kizzy’s definition of mother shows that as a member of a Black community, she has learned that families do not simply consist of biological ties. Rather, the notions of “play family” or “fictive kin” (Dill, 1994) allow her as a lesbian to construct a flexibly defined family of choice (Weston, 1991). Third, Diane’s response shows her sense of the strong connection between family and community. She views that connection as a positive influence on children, one that she would like to maintain in her adult life. The powerful connection between family and community is a common theme among Black families (hooks, 1989), and this connection strongly shaped Kizzy’s and Diane’s desires to become mothers.
White lesbians also discussed family experiences. However, unlike working-class lesbians of color who wanted to recreate positive family experiences, negative family experiences led White lesbians, regardless of class, to desire motherhood. Perhaps in an effort to compensate for negative childhood experiences, White lesbians wanted to transform those experiences into a positive view of what mothers can and “ought” to be. That is, negative family experiences created an emotional void that some White lesbians wanted to fill by becoming mothers. For example, Carly, a middle-class White lesbian, stated that she wanted to mother in order to right the wrongs of her childhood:
In my family there was—they just had kids, you know. And it wasn’t that they loved us or they wanted us around or anything. When I was growing up, it was kids were seen and not heard. And I wanted six kids just so that I could treat them differently.
By mothering her two children in a more loving manner than she herself had experienced, Carly was able to live up to her idea of the mother as nurturer and at least partially make up for past family experiences.
Similarly, Martha, a working-class White lesbian, made it clear that her negative family experience while growing up shaped her beliefs about motherhood and her decision to fill a void from her childhood. Her birth mother was a drug addict, and she was put up for adoption when she was young. Although she was not particularly close to her adoptive siblings, she had a good relationship with her adoptive mother, which may also have shaped her desire to become a mother.
Lesbians’ experiences as children clearly influenced their mothering desires. Although middle-class lesbians of color were largely silent on this topic, working-class lesbians of color expressed the desire to recreate positive childhood experiences and become mothers. In contrast, the working-class White lesbians I interviewed spoke of negative childhood experiences that motivated them to create their own families through which to create positive experiences. As the above reflections illustrate, lesbians form beliefs and values about motherhood out of real experiences.
EARLY EXPERIENCES WITH CHILDCARE
Another important childhood experience that shaped lesbians’ mothering desires was their experiences with children. Many of the lesbians who discussed past experiences with children were inclined to remain childfree. Several of the lesbians I interviewed helped raise children in some capacity, particularly when they came from large families. In many cases their experiences led them to understand the responsibility of childrearing as a burden.
While there is some variation by race with respect to past experiences with children, there are more notable variations by class. Working-class lesbians were more likely to have taken care of younger siblings, family members’ children, or their partners’ children. In my study, working-class White lesbians at times found themselves in parental roles because of family emergencies. This was true for both Kerry and Sadie. Kerry and her partner served as temporary mothers to Kerry’s niece and two nephews for several years after the children’s parents separated and could no longer take care of the children. However, Kerry’s experience ended with the parents taking the children back. In Sadie’s case, the emergency foster care she provided turned into a permanent situation:
It was a distant relative, so it was a protective services case. I wasn’t a foster parent—nothing. And [child protective services] just called me up one day. I was on my way out to work, and they were like, “Take these kids. We’re taking them out of the house.” So I kind of had a panic attack, freaked out, and thought, “Oh my God! How can I do this? I can’t be a mother and I can’t be a parent.” That was a year and a half going on two years ago. And now I wouldn’t trade [them] for the world. There’s nothing like it . . . One will be 6 in the fall, and Caitlin is the youngest. She will be 2 in August. And they’re actually legally considered foster children at this point. They’re in the process of doing the termination and all that kind of thing, and then I plan to adopt if everything goes right, knock on wood.
In both cases, had Kerry and Sadie not taken the children, the larger family problems would have led to the children being placed in foster care. Their experiences most likely came out of the lack of financial support and stability that many working-class families face. Issues of economic instability as well as the inability to afford outside childcare leads working-class families to rely on family members for daily child care responsibilities and can also lead to family breakdowns that require other family members to step in as “temporary mothers” (Newman, 1988; Rubin, 1992).
In addition to lesbians’ experiences taking care of relatives’ children on an extended basis, other working-class lesbians, regardless of race, often had the experience of caring for younger siblings or their partners’ children. Terry, a working-class lesbian of color, discussed two experiences with children that shaped her desire to remain childfree:
Basically my decision was based on family. I grew up in a big family, and I guess, you know, everything had to be shared. And you learned how to get along with everybody that’s in the family itself, but once you get your little freedom, you want to keep it that way. Which is very true. I come from a family of seven children, so I think that was enough. And I’ve had a few partners, well, a couple of partners, that had children, and I love kids, so I mean that’s never been a problem. But I had one incident [when I had] to discipline the child, and I was like, “Okay, no more dealing with other people’s children, either.”
Terry’s statement shows that her experience with her younger siblings and with her previous partners’ children affected her desire, and ultimately her decision, to remain childfree.
For working-class participants, the experience of caring for younger siblings was also coupled at times with gender roles that some lesbians found undesirable. For example, Sara, a working-class Latina, explained that her desire to remain childfree developed out of a combination of past experiences with children and a rebellion against the gender roles she experienced in a household with a strongly gender-based division of labor:
You know, for me, I can remember as far back in my life saying, “I’m not having kids.” And I think it could have a lot to do with having so many siblings and being the only girl. You’re depended upon a little bit more than the boys. And my father’s Mexican, and he comes from a very traditional family lifestyle, and my mother [had] a very traditional role as a mother and a housekeeper, so I was expected to follow her path. I’ve been told you have to learn how to sew and you have to learn how to cook so you can take care of your family and take care of your husband, and then having to do that for my brothers. From the get-go I said I wouldn’t have kids. You know, I just wouldn’t have them.
Sara’s reflections illustrate how for some lesbians, past experiences with children are based on structures of gender that create certain expectations for females. These experiences create a view of motherhood as oppressive, a view that led Sara and other lesbians to want to remain childfree.
While working-class lesbians primarily had past experiences with their partners’ children, younger siblings, or the children of other relatives, middle-class lesbians tended to have experiences with their partners’ children and unrelated children. For example, Judy, a middle-class White lesbian, described how her past experience as a camp counselor shaped her desire to remain childfree:
I grew up in [the] camp systems, and the trip systems and doing stuff with the counselors and things. And what we were doing was working with children during the summer . . . We used to joke that it took us two weeks to undo what it took the parents however many years to do, to get them to play in the mud and the rain and things like that. But from that experience I think I got my concept that I didn’t want to be a parent. It was too much work, and there were too many strange things that could go wrong.
Judy’s comment shows how past experiences with children bring attention to the work involved in raising children and to the potential problems that can arise.
Although class structures created some variations in lesbians’ experiences with children, the end result was the same: past experiences with children gave lesbians insight into the responsibilities of having children. This insight helped lesbians of all classes and races formulate views of motherhood as carrying too much responsibility, being too risky (in terms of what can go wrong), or being too embedded in oppressive gender roles. Those who had negative experiences with children began to reject motherhood early on and to develop a desire for personal freedom. Clearly not all lesbians have negative experiences with children. However, the positive experiences did not seem significant enough to warrant discussion during the focus groups. In my study, it was the negative experiences that weighed most heavily on lesbians’ minds.
RACIAL AND GENDER DISCRIMINATION
One of the most disturbing experiences that shaped lesbians’ mothering desires was the intersection of racial and gender discrimination. Middle-class lesbians of color in particular focused on the impact of race discrimination on their desires to remain childfree. Many of the middle-class Black participants stated that the racial discrimination they faced as children or young adults was a major factor that deterred them from wanting children. Roxanne stated this point most forcefully and also discussed how for women of color, racial discrimination is coupled with gender discrimination:
It’s just like a reality to me not to want to give birth to a child for color reasons . . . I would not want [my child to] go through what I know what I went through as a Black female. I would not do that to my child. If I could not encapsulate it away from the way I felt from being a Black female, I can’t do that. That’s not the reality of it. So I choose not to [become a mother] just because of those reasons. That right there. I don’t know if Amy or Leslie ever think about that or ever thought about that, I don’t know, as being other Black females. I have no idea. That was, we were encapsulated in this Black family and now to know that people could be so cruel to you just because of color.
Both Leslie and Amy agreed with Roxanne. Amy said that she did not experience racial discrimination until she left her parents’ house and was in college. Like Roxanne, she emphasized that you cannot prepare a child for such cruelty.
Interestingly, working-class lesbians of color did not discuss racial discrimination as a reason for wanting to remain childfree. There are several possible explanations for this class discrepancy. First, I only interviewed five working-class lesbians of color, one of whom (Sara) was a light-skinned Latina. Second, the working-class lesbians may have grown up in racially segregated communities that shielded them from daily interactions with Whites. On the other hand, middle-class Blacks may have been somewhat integrated into White communities, thus exposing them to more White interaction and discrimination. Third, class and financial issues may have been more salient than race for the working-class group. As Terry stated, “You know, I want to be financially stable, that’s number one.” Among middle-class lesbians of color, only Pam (who came from a working-class background) mentioned money as being a salient concern. Race might stand out more clearly than class to middle-class lesbians because they are privileged by class. Rather than reporting racial discrimination as the cause of their concerns about motherhood, working-class lesbians of color reported financial issues as their biggest concerns. As I discuss in the following chapter, discrimination along lines of race, class, gender, and sexuality remained an important factor in determining whether or not lesbians actually became mothers. But racial discrimination loomed large in the minds of many women who experienced the harsh realities of racism and sexism during their girlhood years when they were forming their mothering desires.
BEYOND BIOLOGY AND SOCIALIZATION
What is interesting about how lesbians developed their mothering desires is that they drew on personal experiences, the interpretation of those experiences, and larger social relations that shaped personal experiences, to develop their desires to become mothers or remain childfree. In particular, how lesbians interpreted their mothers’ experiences, their experiences as children, their experiences with children, and race and gender discrimination all intertwined to shape how lesbians developed their mothering desires. These conditions at times intertwined in ways that left some lesbians ambivalent, not really knowing how they saw themselves in relation to motherhood. But more often than not, these experiences left lesbians with a sense of whether they wanted to become mothers or remain childfree. As table 3 in chapter 3 shows, twelve lesbians in the study wanted to remain childfree, thirteen wanted to become mothers, and ten were ambivalent.
My findings support literature on heterosexual women that challenges the idea that girls develop mothering desires simply on the basis of how their parents socialized them. I found that although mothers do socialize their daughters and that socialization does have an impact, it is not simply socialization but rather an array of additional social and economic factors—such as interpretations of their mothers’ experiences, their own childhood experiences, and discrimination—that shape lesbians’ development of mothering desires. In addition, the factors that shape lesbians’ mothering desires are themselves shaped by larger structures of race, class, and gender.
Furthermore, as this chapter demonstrates, what goes into the desire to become a mother or remain childfree is far more complicated than mere biology. Rather than focusing on biological clocks, hormones, or other biological determinants, the lesbians in my study discussed components of social decision-making processes that strongly shaped their mothering desires. In fact, biological theories offer little if any explanation for why women choose not to have children. It is only when we look at the social context within which women grow up, and then later live as adults, that we can truly understand the reasons behind women’s mothering decisions.
This chapter highlights how girls’ experiences, and their interpretations of those experiences, shape lesbians’ mothering desires. Their desires do not form simply out of biological urges or the transmission of domestic values through parental socialization. Rather, their mothering desires develop out of a complex interaction of experiences and interpretations of those experiences. And those experiences are shaped by gender, race, and class structures that guide society’s beliefs about what girls, women, and people of color should, and can, do. Those experiences are also based on the real opportunities and constraints built into class structures, whereby some families have more access to resources than other families. While this chapter focused on the development of lesbians’ mothering desires, the following chapters will explain how lesbians consider four different factors that ultimately turn their mothering desires into mothering decisions.
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