Children make the woman

From Utopian Hell, a very nicely written essay on the joy in choosing not to have children. She hits on all the reasons that people want to have children. And then she hits on the one that is whipped out whenever a woman doesn't want children--that not having a baby makes one less of a woman. This one has always gotten on my nerves.

What many women have found hard to accept is that I do not need to have children to feel fulfilled as a woman. That comes down partly to your understanding of what it means to be gendered.
Gender, as we know, is a social construct, what it is to be a man, what it is to be a woman, largely prescribed by the society and age in which we live. I have never felt gendered. Thirty years ago, this was considered extraordinary but perhaps, post-feminism, it is less strange. While I most definitely feel both feminine and womanly, I do not think of myself primarily as a woman. I think of myself as a person.

While I think she's creating a false dicotomy (that either you see yourself first as a gender or first as a person--I think one's sense of one's self is gendered, whether you like it or not), I do like that she makes room for women to feel comfortable choosing not to have children.

I had a long, elaborate thought process on why I don't feel that my womanhood is threatened because my womb doesn't bear forth fruit and all those other nauseating, sentimental terms. But really, it comes down to two things.

Once, when I was a teenager and I told a friend I didn't want kids and she told me that it I couldn't be a "real" woman until I did, I looked down my shirt and said, "Looks like they're still there. Why is it again I'm not a real woman?" On the same thought process, I get my monthly reminder that I could have children if I wanted to. That's good enough for me. I don't need a swollen belly and then a bunch of ankle-biters so the rest of the world is as sure as I am.

Also, if I'm not necessarily a "real" woman, then how is it that everywhere I go and in everything I do, I get treated like one?