When I was a little girl, aunts played a big role in my life. I grew up in an extended family, where aunts and grandparents lived with my parents, my sisters and me. This was a source of great wealth for our family and it taught me a lot about love.
In my earliest childhood my Aunt Jean, my mother’s sister, lived with us. She was not married and worked as a payroll clerk for the Pottsville schools. She was slender and dressed very stylishly. Outside of work hours, she also had time to play. She and I drew pictures together at the dining room table. Once my sister Susan and I were bigger, she took us for long walks in the woods or we roamed the streets of Pottsville, from Greenwood Hill to Yorkville.
When I was five, we moved to a house divided into apartments. My aunt did not accompany us, but she still took us for lots of walks. This time, my father’s family moved into the apartment above us, my grandparents and my aunt Mildred, who was the principal of Yorkville School. I think I spent more time upstairs than down and when my grandparents died, I moved in with my aunt.
Those years remain some of the happiest of my life. My aunt and I shared everything, the same bedroom, the same card table in the living room, where we sat and did our schoolwork while we watched my aunt’s color TV.
My aunt belonged to a bridge club and sometimes she hosted “the card-club ladies” in her small living room. On those evenings, I ran downstairs to the vestibule to welcome her guests. I led them upstairs, took their coats, and once they were seated, served them pastel mints and chocolates. Those women made a big fuss over me.
And they all had something in common. They were all teachers and childless, hired at a time, in the 1930’s and 40’s, where entering the teaching profession was comparable to becoming a nun. My mother began teaching in the early 1940’s. At her job interview, she was asked if she was planning to have children. She was not yet married. The answer was no. Had she said yes, she may not have been hired.
By the 1950’s, things had changed. The United States was in the midst of a baby boom and soldiers recently home from the war were trying to put it behind them. Everyone was marrying, creating families, returning to family life after the terrible disruption of World War II. School districts were no longer telling their recruits to remain celibate.
It was also the beginnings of consumer society and parents loved us by giving us things. Both my parents worked hard outside the home. Our aunts often picked up the slack when it came to listening or keeping us company. Those two childless women were as much my family as the mother and father who brought me into the world.
I am also a childless aunt. I will not sing my own praises, but I will say my nephew and nieces, and now my great-nieces are my precious family. I have always tried to do my best for them but, I’ll admit, times have changed. In the 1950’s and 60’s, my parents had their economic ups and downs. They didn’t always have time for us and were relieved when others stepped in to help. Nor do I think they gave much thought to what it meant to be a family. I’d say, today’s families have become more insular.
In recent years, the nuclear family has moved to center stage, and aunts and uncles have faded into the background. More recently, the choice to remain childless has been labeled as selfish. There is even a vice-presidential candidate who has suggested the life of a parent is worth more than that of a person without child. Parents should have more weight, more votes, at election time.
In my life, I’ve been asked why I “chose” to not have children. It is a callous question and when someone asks it, I brush it off as politely as I can. The American poet Emily Dickinson, childless like her contemporary Walt Whitman, wrote to a friend in 1862, “My business is to love.” This is the business of parents, of aunts and uncles, of us all.
On my bookshelves, I have two book by the French anthropologist Françoise Héritier (1933-2017). Their titles? Masculin/Féminin and Masculin/Féminin II. No need to translate. Beginning with her fieldwork in Burkina Faso in Africa, she devoted her studies to the inequalities between men and women in societies throughout the world.
The first volume of Masculin/Féminin, published in 1996, was a hard read for me. Héritier explores kinship relations, religious traditions and world mythologies. She studies the construction of sexual difference, and how societies turn learned functions and skills into the essential traits of each sex. For example, men are hardwired for working outside the home; women, for staying home and taking care of the kids.
A true researcher spends a lifetime thinking about difficult questions, proposing hypotheses, with no guarantee of finding answers. In her second book published in 2002, Héritier came up with the hypothesis that convinced me:
From time immemorial, men have observed that women have the power to reproduce not only themselves but to reproduce the opposite sex. Men cannot do this. They do not carry babies. It thus becomes imperative they control the reproductive function of women because their lives depend on it!
In earlier times, no one understood how fertility worked. From Aristotle’s day in the 4th century BC till the 1970’s, men were arguing that women were no more than the ovens where men placed the staff of life.
Now we know better. Or do we? Some men seem unable to let go of wanting to control women’s bodies and defining what women are. How could any woman, endowed with a power men envy, not use it to produce a child!
To conclude, I’ll praise fathers and mothers, aunts and uncles, teachers, friends, all whose love has been essential to making us who we are.
And I invite readers who like to travel more often between Schuylkill County and France to subscribe to my free newsletter on Substack. Here’s a link to the first article, where you can also subscribe: https://nancyhonicker.substack.com/p/first-the-skook
