In cultures that define women as primarily child-bearers and mothers, barren women are scary because we undermine the basis of gendered life.
Woman-as-womb: it sounds comically reductive, a conceptual synecdoche too narrow for anyone living in 2019 to possibly buy into, but I’ve never met an infertile woman who hasn’t expressed some anxiety around feeling less than female because of her condition. Feeling like ‘less than a woman’ is also a common theme in online support groups; after IVF and isolation, it’s one of the most popular topics. (‘I feel like a freak and a waste of womanhood,’ one writes. Another: ‘I am a baby-less monster.’) Many women, raised to reject the essentialist idea of women-as-wombs, are as distressed by the antifeminism these feelings imply as they are by the feelings themselves. ‘Let me just say that I’m not implying anyone who is child free by choice or cannot get pregnant for one reason or another is any less than a woman,’ writes one poster on Reddit:
I guess what I’m feeling is the counterpart to a man feeling emasculated? And I know that sounds so ridiculous, so please don’t judge me. I’m here because I’m ashamed of these feelings. I just … don’t feel like a proper woman. I don’t feel like a good wife. I don’t feel like a good partner … I’m just feeling a huge blow to my ego and identity that I can’t really justify, but there you have it.
But the frequency of these feelings of defeminization among infertile women suggests that, in fact, the old idea of woman-as-womb still has some hold on us. Our culture is one where essentialist ideas about women are nominally rejected but still infest daily life, from Facebook memes asserting ‘childbirth is women’s power’ (slash, breastfeeding is; slash, baby-wearing; slash, staying at home; ad nauseam) to Hillary Clinton’s insistence that the most important job she has is that of mother and grandmother. If ‘woman’ is defined by her capacity to bear and mother children, what does it mean that some women can’t do this? Are they less female? If not, then maybe we’ve gotten the definition wrong. Maybe women aren’t defined by a working womb. But if wombs don’t make a woman, what does? Does any single thing define a woman? And if not, does ‘woman,’ as a class, make any sense at all? And crucially, if it doesn’t, what is a man?
In this way, female infertility asks the key feminist question: what is a woman?
Simone de Beauvoir famously addressed the question in The Second Sex, where she theorized woman as ‘Other’: the constructed object against which man measures and defines himself, and through which he justifies his social and political power. The Other occasions the feminine ideal of the ‘eternal feminine’ – the enduring cultural myth that the woman is essentially passive, an ‘erotic, birthing or nurturing body.’ In practice, this confines women to the ‘immanent’ – the inner, limited worlds of domesticity, bodily concerns, and (of course) reproduction: ‘her grasp upon the world is less extended than man’s, and she is more closely enslaved to the species.’ Men, on the other hand, are ‘transcendent’: oriented away from themselves, toward the spheres of politics, religion, art, and production.
Yet, as this is an ‘artificial product’ – not woman’s ‘true nature in itself, but as man defines her’ – the construct of the eternal feminine is forever haunted – taunted, in fact – by its shadow figure, which takes the form of the defiant, aberrant, and devouring female: ‘If … woman evades the rules of society, she returns to Nature and to the demon, she looses uncontrollable and evil forces in the collective midst.’ The edict of patriarchy is thus to enforce women’s adherence to the feminine ideal of immanence, through proscribing ‘legitimate marriage and the wish to have children…to strengthen the idea figure of the Mother who will be concerned with the welfare of the next generation.’
De Beauvoir had little to say about infertility, but it’s easy to see how barrenness fits into her schema. Infertility is a direct defilement of the patriarchal proposition that women are to ‘bear fruit’; all childless women, in some sense, join the other archetypal ‘bad women’ of history: the lesbian, the prostitute, and the criminal (all of which she describes). More strikingly, we can see in the twin premodern figures of the barren woman, Abyzou and Hannah, interesting examples of the threat the destructive, defiant female poses to the eternal feminine. An infertile woman is not much of a woman, not only because she’s barren, but because she’s potentially angry, and anger in a woman is irrational, dangerous, and destructive. Chaotic, destructive, and, above all, active, Abyzou represents the danger of infertility to patriarchal order, rendering the woman less-than-female, and thus – because woman is the Other against which man defines himself – rendering masculinity suspect in the process. Calling into question the basis of patriarchy. A feminist sex worker once told me that society fears the prostitute because she makes visible the lie that is capitalism; in a similar way, I think, the infertile woman makes visible the lie of gender essentialism. That is quite a feat. Infertility has a lot of power.
I’ve wondered about why I never felt compelled to embrace the idea of myself as a monster – in feminist language, reclaim it. I could do this, I could wear my barrenness proudly; I could delight in the fact that my existence is the ultimate rebuke to patriarchal order.
From Lilith Fair to Tumblr posts about witchcraft as a form of self-care, Gen X and millennial women have aligned themselves with the demonic, devouring female archetypes of deep patriarchy. I could do something like this: align myself with Abyzou; write a play about Ursulina de Jesus. But I don’t; none of us do. It would require getting angry, for one, and the fact is, however difficult it is to accept anger and defiance in a regular woman, it’s impossible to accept it in an infertile one. The bad women of history, the prostitutes and lesbians and childless warriors that feminists like to reclaim, were destructive, but they were destructive toward men. But in the demonology of barrenness, infertile women are angry and destructive toward other women and, not infrequently, children. Monsters like Abyzou, who torture and kill other women at their most vulnerable, are just difficult to square with the third-wave project of reappropriation.
This idea, that anger and bitterness is particularly unacceptable in infertile women, runs through all conversation on infertility, from the Christian prayer groups to my online support groups, where all expressions of ‘negativity’ are discouraged. When I searched the boards for posts about anger, there were more than a few – ‘Warning: Angry Rant!’; ‘Angry at My Pregnant Friend’; and so forth – but the stories that followed were riddled with disclaimers and apologies (‘I know this sounds bitchy, but’; ‘I don’t normally act this way and I do love my friend, but’). And on closer inspection, these women didn’t seem angry so much as envious or lonely or hurt. Most of the anecdotes were about someone slighting or insulting the infertile woman, after which she felt appalled but refrained from doing anything rash like talk back, or yell, or publicly break down. If she did feel rage, it was expressed later, in the private, anonymous space of the support group. Invariably, the other posters met this with empathy (‘I feel this! Let it out, girl!’), but also with encouragements to stay positive and hopeful (‘Never give up on your dream. One day you’ll say, it was all worth it!’). Faced with the temptation to be vengeful and destructive, infertile women instead become Hannahs: silent, trying to stay positive and faithful, whether in God or fate or the power of our surgeons and doctors.
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