The childless aunt has always been an object of fascination in culture and literature.
When Caroline was growing up, she imagined that she would end up surrounded by children. Now in his 50s, that’s exactly how his life has turned out, although not in the way he predicted. While she was never in a situation where having children “made sense” to her, Carolina is a proud and dedicated aunt to eight nieces and nephews.
“Sometimes I describe it as my siblings having reproduced very successfully on my behalf,” jokes Caroline, a forensic psychologist who lives in Shoreham-by-Sea, in the south of England.
“I have all these adorable children around who I enjoy spending time with, and I have not had to give birth or spend nights awake.” Caroline, whose last name is not disclosed to protect children’s privacy, delights in spending time with her nieces and nephews, and feels that through them she has a tangible connection to the next generation.
For her, being an aunt is not a runner-up award, on the contrary “it feels like a total bonus”. She sees her commitment to that role as a reaction against the “fierce” push to be a mother, and would like more women to realize that being aunt can be a “perfectly valid option.”
The childless aunt has always been an object of fascination in culture and literature. Whether it’s the doting aunt who takes care of an orphan like Peter Parker’s Aunt May, aka “Spider-Man”; the bitter Aunt Lydia in “The Handmaid’s Tale”; or the sophisticated and eccentric Aunt Augusta in Graham Greene’s novel “Travels with My Aunt”, that figure has always somewhat illustrated the concept of “the other”.
Many descriptions tend to position the role of aunt as the second best option after motherhood, or as a cautionary tale about women operating outside of what a woman is traditionally expected to be “ought” to be.
Patricia Sotirin, a professor of communication at Michigan Technological University, in the US, says that “Highlights the poverty of language” not having a meaningful way to describe a woman who chooses a positive option to assume the role of aunt over that of mother.
Sotirin, who is the co-author of two books on aunts in culture and society, argues that aunts “still do not receive the respect and recognition they deserve for their importance in our lives.”
I, personally, as a loving childless aunt, have often wondered what my place is in a culture where motherhood is viewed as an indicator of adulthood. When there are more and more women who, for whatever reason, do not have children of their own, experts say that it is time that we once again evaluate the role that aunts have, and recognize it as how rewarding, beneficial and even transgressive it can to be.
“Without scripts, without references”
It’s no secret that the developed world is undergoing demographic change, which is forcing society to rethink traditional family expectations. An increasing number of women are leaving their reproductive age without having children.
In the UK in 2019, 49% of women born in 1989 reached 30 without having children. In the U.S. in 2018, more than one in seven women between the ages of 40 and 44 had not had children, and recent data from the Pew Research Center shows that a growing number of Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 never expect to have children.
But nevertheless, there is a delay in the recognition of these social changes; politics, media and traditions still center around the nuclear family. Sociologist Vanessa May of the University of Manchester, and Kinneret Lahad of the University of Tel Aviv, point out that this also means that the role that aunts – and indeed uncles – play in society and families has generally been passed. overlooked in academic research.
Socially, the role has been largely undefined. In contrast to the “strict roles and strict expectations” imposed on mothers, there are no “scripts or references” that aunts can follow, Lahad says. So, while the role can vary immensely across cultures, aunts are quite free to define their own relationships and family responsibilities.
When Lahas and May began investigating how contemporary aunts navigate their very nebulous and complicated role in families and society, they found very little data available.
However, a good source was the letters asking the website for advice. Savvy Auntie (The cunning aunt), which is promoted as “the first community for aunts.” The site is run by New York-based author, merchant and businesswoman Melanie Notkin, who in 2008 launched a bold attempt to redefine contemporary aunt.
Notkin, 52, says that after having waited to have children who never came, she found that her nieces and nephews had become “the center of my life.” And it wasn’t just her; more often, her friends were not having children. But whenever they got together, the conversation was often dominated by “chatting about our nieces and nephews.”
When she began to investigate how childless professional women were portrayed in advertising and the media, she realized that “it is almost always stereotypically that it is not necessarily a positive reflection of these women,” citing movie tropes such as the cold professional woman or irresponsible partygoer.
“I felt strongly that it was time for us to collectively begin to understand this generation of women who many times are not even recognized as a group,” she says.
As a merchant, Notkin seized on the commercial potential of this idea, launching her own renewed image of the role of auntie. Invented the acronym PANK: Professional Aunt No Kids.
She felt that the term described the well-studied, high-paying professional women she knew who, by choice or circumstance, did not see themselves as mothers, but who nonetheless loved the children of their siblings or friends, and were more than ready to share your money and time with them.
Notkin’s early work focused on Panks as consumers; She then branded her Pank concept, wrote two books, and launched her website, featuring an advice forum for aunts as well as comments on gifts, news, and guides on how to spend quality time with nephews.
But what started as a business strategy began to take on a deeper meaning when she realized that bringing that empowering angle to the role of childless aunts was deeply emotional for many women. “Did I realize how deep it would go and the self-affirmation it would give so many women? Does not say.
Through interactions on her website, Notkin found that revamping the derogatory concept of the “childless spinster” to the celebrated Pank allowed women to “recognize the role they played as meaningful.”
He remembers a woman who wrote to him saying that she had struggled with infertility and resented her sister, who had a son. “He said, ‘I want you to know that because of your work, I was able to see my role differently. You made me see that even if I don’t have a child now… I can play a valuable maternal role ”.
Other ways of living?
While Notkin’s website provided extensive material for Lahad and May’s research, they think that the Pank concept is just one piece of the puzzle when it comes to creating more recognition of the emotional, financial and social role of aunts -something that will become more punctual if the trend of women who do not have children continues.
Aunts have “responsibilities that are not worded in the same way that we think of responsibilities,” says Lahad, meaning they can be overlooked when it comes to things like taking leave to take care of nieces and nephews, or issues of inheritance. He would like the role of aunt to be recognized by legislators and society as “Equally important, valuable, meaningful, and not … just something you do because you’re bored”.
Sotirin says there are “so many different ways to be aunt” and the fact that a role that has long been stereotyped is being discussed and investigated is a sign of change. She sees the current exploration of the role of aunt as a broader reassessment of the role of women in society.
In fact, she says, because aunts don’t have to carry a defined role or social pressures from parents, they have more freedom of choice. “Take us in other directions and show us that other things can happen”; they can assume a normative maternal role if they wish or they can “free us from ideas about family relationships that hold us back, that do not recognize the realities of how we currently live.”
For Sotirin, the aunts, whether they are mothers or not, are “somehow leading the way in terms of being receptive to not only the transformation of women, but how families can change and what it means to be part of communities. ”.
Although Caroline acknowledges that for some women not having children can be very painful, she says that she would respond “very robustly” if someone were to ask her. if you feel sad about being “just” an aunt.
“I would not say that if someone saw me, my lifestyle, my relationship with children, they would feel some compassion,” he says. Instead, her experience as aunt – as a confidant and cheerleader for her siblings’ children – has made her firmly “advocate for the role of aunt.”
She says that “it almost feels like we should push this a bit more for women as a really positive option.”
Paul is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment and general news. He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established herself as a respected voice in the industry.
