similar reasons we thought that it would not be helpful to go back to our records of the women aged 50 to establish how many of these had delayed their first live birth until the age of 35 and over, as they formed such a different group from our current 35 year olds. The difficulty in classifying voluntarily childless women has been considered elsewhere.8 A woman's perception of her childless s...

We perform a content analysis of twenty marriage and family textbooks published between 1950 and 2000 to study how the voluntarily childless are presented in undergraduate courses. Throughout the time period studied, independence, pursuit of a career, and romance were prominent themes in the representation of voluntary childlessness. Other themes emerged specific to each decade - the 1950s port...

Introduction Historically, childlessness is not a new phenomenon but its demographic context and nature has changed (Rowland 2007). Currently, childlessness is related not only to being infertile or single, but more and more often it results from various external obstacles (e.g., financial, work-related) or is associated with a shift in people’s attitudes and life priorities (Hagestad and Call ...