Living Single

Bella - Thank you for this in depth and honest look at The Shriver Report. As the founder of http://SavvyAuntie.com and an advocate for women without children, married or single, I am also frustrated by the slant of Report and it's focus on "mom" and marriage.

Nearly 50% of American women are not mothers. I've dubbed this segment: PANKs -Professional Aunts No Kids. We're not only influential in the workforce, we're here to support, nurture and yes, like you admit, even spoil our nieces and nephews by relation and by choice. We're part of the American family village - hugs, hands and discretionary income and time at the ready. Neglecting these women in The Shriver Report - as well as all single women - does a disservice to women, family, society, the economy and America. We haven't come a long way, after all.

This is a subject that gnaws at me in just about every conversation I have online or elsewhere. I consider myself a feminist, but to me, that doesn't ONLY mean making more allowances for women with or about to have children as so many seem to think, including some in high positions and women who I revere.

Everyone needs more flexibility in the workplace. There should be one rule for all people, and that rule should allow time to take care of life's needs, whatever they are. I am sick of hearing "It takes a village," when in my sphere it has come to mean, "I need a babysitter" or "I need more time off than you." I do not want to be anyone's village! I know what that means. It means you get Thanksgiving off, and I get to work late. I chose not to have kids, so why would I want to help you take care of yours??

Washington is simply playing to what they perceive to be the biggest demographic, but that shouldn't mean others should have the burden shifted to them at work or at tax time, where we already pay for other people's kids health and education -- and even pay more than the people with the actual families do.

More and more the attitude is that other people's children are everyone's responsiblity, whether it's giving them preference in healthcare benefits or a mother demanding a high wall be put up at a scenic national park lookout because she let her toddler get away from her. We need to get back to encouraging people to wait until they can afford it, are mature enough, and can accommodate children before they have them.

As a woman who chose to remain single and not have children, the words "unmarried" and "childless" have always seemed to me to imply failure rather than choice in our society. No one should have to defend the legitimacy of their choices one way or the other, nor yet should they feel either marginalized or entitled because of them. Yet the implication is that parenthood is a sacred and unquestioned calling, and everyone not directly involved is a seat-filler at the Academy Awards of life.

You are right -- it is so hard to come up with just the right words for different categories of people. I discussed this briefly in my posts a while back of my interview with Jackie Geller, but I should write a post specifically on this topic. (I had a section on it in an early draft of Singled Out but it didn't make it into the final version.)

This topic has come up in my workplace. I'm a teacher and despite the fact that we have very flexible work hours and lots of time off, some of my colleagues still bring up their status of having young children, as requiring special considerations and privileges.

Several of us are bothered by the fact that they do not even consider the possibility that others may be caregivers for invalid friends, relatives, elderly parents, etc.

There are a few of us who would love to address the issue the next time it comes up at faculty meetings, but we are afraid we will come across as heartless and insensitive.

If anyone has found a tactful, constructive way of dealing with this situation, I would appreciate your advice.

I'm rather horrified to read that Gloria Steinem vouched for this report. Even if we disregard the fact that the report ignored singles, we still have a report that "advocates" for women from the view that women are innate wives and breeders. How could any of the authors not notice the irony? Even if the report had included single women, the focus of the report could easily still have been largely on "how we can create the best possible circumstances for women to have babies and husbands." Granted, it's important to make sure a woman can have a full-time job and also still be an engaged, responsible mother--but that can be accomplished by reshifting our focus from the nuclear family and creating social programs and legislation that aren't built on the couple-unit. Which is not what the Shriver report seems to advocate (judging from this post).

Separately, I'd be hesitant to say that I'm "glad" Nader didn't have a wife and child during his intense advocacy period, because if someone said (conversely) that they were "glad" a high-level female advocate didn't have a husband and child, that could possibly sound sexist, as if they expect a woman to be distracted from their job by their husband and kid. However, I do think that the Nader example is a good one and in face he probably *was* able to accomplish more because of his single status (as are single, childfree female lobbyists, probably--it's just a logistical fact).

Christina at Onely

I tweaked the wording to make it clearer -- thanks.

That being the debate between parents and non-parents, which is in fact separate from that between singles and non-singles.

All too often I heard arguments about singles revolve around the issue of children, the pros and the cons.

But even though it's less common than among couples, single people can have children; in fact, 11 million do.

Thank you so much for wading through all this and pulling out and highlighting the stats that prove how American women really feel about marriage, which might otherwise have remained buried. Amazing what lengths Shriver & Co. went to to deflect attention from that!

Those survey questions were a joke! I wouldn't have known how to begin to answer questions that had no relation whatsoever to my life.

This report, to me, is like so much other conservatively slanted BS. It's the family-centric ideologues seeing what they want to see and trying to convince the rest of us to look at it through their distorted lenses.

Some people wonder why the cult of the nuclear family is dying so hard. It makes me sad to say this, but I think it's because we Americans haven't reached a stage in which we intrinsically value human life just for the sake of life itself. We have this extremist capitalist outlook that equates human life with GDP, and for some reason GDP needs to constantly increase, for which we need more workers. Therefore, it becomes everyone's sacred duty to produce more workers, and those who do are honored above those who don't. Because we don't place any inherent value on life, those whose lives don't continue this reproductive chain, like single, child-free women, are worthless.

It also doesn't help anything that for centuries women were seen as accessories to men, so any woman not serving a man by marrying him and bearing his children is, again, not important.

Despite the glaringly obvious demographic changes in the past half century, old presumptions about what is normal show surprising persistence -- even among many who don't fit the old definition of normal. Sometimes it is amusing. I'm a 56 y.o. unmarried man. In a single week no fewer than four people asked me, pretty much out of the blue, why I don’t have kids. “I'd prefer to stab my left hand repeatedly with a fork,” I responded to the first. (This didn't get a good reception, so I just shrugged in response to the other queries.) One young woman even asked me to whom I would leave my home. That one sent me to the mirror to see if I looked ill.

Like others who have commented before me, thank you for taking the time to highlight how this report marginalizes those without children. I agree with your point of view and think it's high time we found some balance and recognized the contributions of *all* in society. I referenced your piece in my latest blog post. You can find it here http://budurl.com/zzmc.

I've also written a book called Silent Sorority. It explores the challenges of living as a "non-mom" in an era dominated by helicopter parents.