women spoke about the fact that they associated being lesbian with childlessness when younger: “I came out at such an early age, it was a time when it wasn’t considered even an option that people were even aware that you could go and make a baby” (Debbie). And, for some, this association remained: “it intersects I think in the nature of the community” (Jane). The women reflected on the fact that even they conform to wider assumptions that equate lesbianism and childlessness. Debbie spoke of a female friend – heterosexual and married – and the fact that she had always wondered why this friend (Judy) does not have children: “and yet [my friend Laura] is a lesbian and is married to [Jenny] and has been with her twenty-five years, and they’ve no children, and it doesn’t even cross my mind to think why they’ve not got children… I’d not even thought about it ‘til I read the information sheet [for the study] and I thought ‘oh yeah maybe it’s because they’re lesbians,’ I didn’t even question it, whereas with [my heterosexual friend Judy] it does strike me as unusual.” For women, being childfree was ‘normal’ among their lesbian friends, they were in the majority – “most of them don’t have children” (Joanne). This sometimes meant they do not have much contact with children – a source of feelings of loss for Joanne. For Louise, one of the freedoms of childlessness was the opportunity to spend time with other lesbians (the women felt they would have spent more time with heterosexual women if they themselves had had children (see also Bartlett, 1994). Rosa Marvin felt that the same pressures and expectations that straight women experience in everyday life can also be experienced by queer women, especially if they do not look obviously queer or are not ‘out’: “there’s something about kind of being my age and you know ‘well you’ve got long hair so you’re probably straight’” (see also Gillespie, 2000;
god knows, or am I just insane?” (Jane). For lesbian participants, making sense of their relationship with pets had also been shaped by the “mad lesbian cat lady” (Debbie) “classic lesbian stereotype” (Jane), and indeed the notion that lesbians have ‘cats not kids.’ Indeed, three participants had one or more cats (one had a cat not out of choice – the cat was left by a former partner), one co-owned a dog and one wanted a dog. Pets were seen as ‘sort of’ child substitutes but our participants were as reluctant as the heterosexual women in the wider study to fully embrace that concept: If they did not completely dismiss it, they engaged with it in a humorous way as Jane did above. Rosa Marvin was very dismissive of the notion that pets are child substitutes and contrasted her desire for a dog with her lack of desire for a child; she wanted a dog precisely because it is a dog and not a child, and therefore not a child substitute. In general, pets were seen as easier than children (financially, emotionally, practically): “some responsibility but not nearly as much” (Jane). Louise shared a dog, and was very clear it was not her dog, it was shared. We argue that Louise’s dog sharing was indicative of a different way of thinking about and doing family and intimate relationships. For some participants, this approximated queer notions of ‘families of choice,’ kin-like networks of relationships based on friendship and commitments ‘beyond blood’ (Weeks et al., 2001) and a relational ethic of ‘co-independence,’ combining individual autonomy with strong reciprocity (egalitarian and democratic relationships) (Weeks et al., 2001). Their childfreedom was understood as part of this broader ‘doing family differently’ ethos. As Louise commented: “I have a slightly unusual family in that my brother’s gay as well, so my sisters are both heterosexual and have children, and my brother and his partner don’t have children, so we’ve got a normal family, but not one where everybody has children anyway, but I’ve experienced quite a lot of different forms of family during my life.”
At the same time, the relational ethic of ‘co-independence’ seemed to underpin women’s reproductive decision making, and relationships with children, in (same-sex) relationships. There was less pressure or expectation to see a partner’s children as part of their family. Debbie was in a relationship with a woman who had children (the woman was older than she was), one of the children lived with them for a year, but there was no pressure or expectation for her to develop a relationship with the child or see this child as part of her family. Likewise, Louise’s current partner had adult children and she was reluctant (and did not experience pressure) to get involved: “if you take on some responsibility for a child at any point… that’s potentially open ended for the rest of your life.” Her partner also spent regular time with a friend’s child and “I’m very much back-up on that one.” Furthermore, although women saw themselves as ‘essentially childfree’ their lives were not (generally) free of relationships with children. They engaged in social reproduction (Blackstone, 2014; Blackstone & Greenleaf, 2015) through relationships with nieces and nephews and friends’ children and through working with children. When the women reflected on the absence of their ‘own’ children from their familial and social networks and looked to the future, they spoke of the importance of having lots of (younger and older) friends and of sharing in other people’s children. They also discussed ‘compensating’ for the absence of traditional support networks – “what are we going to do to compensate for that? Well there are other ways of living” (Jane) – by creating their own networks, or families of choice. They also imagined different ways of living - “reimagining how we can live” (Rosa Marvin) – in terms of communities for older adults, and ways of doing family and caring beyond the nuclear family. General discussion and conclusions It is from the complex and often contradictory ways our participants made sense of the childfreedom that even for a group for whom childlessness is arguably still expected
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