The realization that I will never give birth to a child has enveloped me gradually and aroused in me an intense, combustible mixture of emotions that follows no existing script. Children have always charmed me, and during the wonderfully free decade of my twenties, I assumed I would eventually have one of my own. Then at the age of thirty-two I had "a dream about a laughing baby," I abruptly noted in one of my private, handwritten journals on the last day of January 1975, when I was living with my boyfriend and working for a newsmagazine. The nighttime reverie jolted me because I had almost forgotten about motherhood in my absorption with other forms of love and work. Although I came to believe that I faced a private struggle between motherhood and writing, I was actually involved in a dilemma, even an ancient drama, that was important to members of my generation born during the 1940s. It is typical of Americans to feel tension between the symbolic pulls of the family and the frontier, and in the last quarter of the twentieth century, the issue of motherhood has become and integral part of this pressure. As I moved through my childbearing years, I never found a good way to reconcile my impulses toward intimacy and independence, my longings to nurture a child and explore the world. Over the past two decades, these desires have been irreconcilable to me--to my lingering regret at moments, but ultimately to my measured relief.

Who are we, those of us without offspring?

When I began this investigation into what it means to be a nonmother, or a nullipara in medical parlance, I read a great deal of history and literature, looking for clues. I came upon the stories of numerous women who had avoided childbirth for reasons of adventure, romance, spirituality, ambition, art, idealism, duty, poverty, terror, or the desire for an education. I discovered the unusual pledge of an engaged couple in the nineteenth century to pass up parenthood in favor of greater marital intimacy and equality as well as to devote themselves to the service of God. I came upon the passionate words of an intentionally childfree woman who only dared publish her argument in 1905 under the pseudonym of A Childless Wife. I found numerous foremothers whose childlessness was inexplicable, but who lived extraordinarily interesting, useful, and gratifying lives. Today most of us without children do not know that the childless woman has always existed for a multitude of reasons, both fortunate and unfortunate. We are part of an old and respectable--and even inspiring--social tradition which, like other aspects of women's history, has been neglected and forgotten. This lost knowledge of archetypes and individuals, including Greek goddesses and medieval witches, Christian celibates, and Renaissance ladies, counterbalances the paucity of contemporary images of enriched and exuberant womanliness outside of motherhood.

The rejection of parenthood is a delicate and even dangerous topic; it has an element of subversiveness to it, especially when it is the choice of happily married couples. In the past, particularly during wartime, the absence of progeny was a threat to the survival of families, ethnic groups, and nations, but although the earth is threatened by overpopulation, few of us still dare to speak openly about our real reasons for refusing to breed. We are afraid to challenge the view of motherhood as the essential female experience. An uneasy silence exists between mothers and nonmothers, since we seldom talk frankly about the motives for our reproductive behavior or the realities of our daily lives. Even those of us without offspring rarely talk about it among ourselves because we often feel isolated by our private rationales. "To this day, women without children have no common activity, no common language," Berenice Fisher, a professor of education at New York University, has observed. "They share a common stigma, but the meaning of that stigma often varies for the women themselves." Certainly many of the nulliparas and nulligravidas whom I interviewed had never talked in depth about nonmotherhood before, and their speech was as often painfully hesitant as quietly triumphant. And their words made me consider the complicated origins of my own childlessness.