Growing Older Without Children: Challenging the (Re)production Narrative for Older Women

Later life is often described as a women’s issue given their longer life expectancy, poorer overall health, higher odds of living alone or in care homes, and greater rates of poverty compared to older men. In addition, older women’s ‘worth’ (or lack thereof) has also been socially linked to their ability to be productive through reproduction. Consequently, deeply embedded pronatalist attitudes assume that women, as mothers and grandmothers, are ‘naturally’ well suited to be caregivers. Conversely, women without children are often pitied or portrayed as lacking. This chapter examines counternarratives to pronatalist scripts of older women as grandmothers by looking at narratives from older women without children who participated in a larger study focused on generativity in later life. Although not a major component of the original study, a question was included about how women without children felt they were viewed by women or others who have children. This chapter will therefore focus on how a subsample of older women from the larger study described their past and current choices and experiences, how they viewed older age considering explicit biases against them, and what advice they offer to other women who do not have children as they age.