by Kelly Kleiman
The only time I ever had any doubt about my decision not to have children was in the eighth grade, when I discovered that Ellen Peck was also unalterably opposed to having them. Ellen Peck was my eighth-grade English teacher. She was young and gorgeous and wore miniskirts and a peace symbol and all the boys were in love with her, so she promptly wrote an advice book called “How to Get a Teenaged Boy and What to Do With Him When You Get Him.” Of course she got the assistance of her girl pupils in writing it–me most conspicuously not among them. Hell hath no fury like a schoolgirl scorned and so I hated Mrs. Peck and disdained everything she favored, including straight blonde hair, freckle-covering makeup, and the McCarthy campaign.
But during her book tour for “How to Get a Teenaged Boy”--she got a book tour!--Mrs. Peck announced that her next book would be called “The Baby Trap,” and started getting quoted saying things like, “People ask when we’re going to start a family, and I tell them, ‘A husband and wife ARE a family,’” and “People have children for all kinds of reasons, most of them bad." I couldn’t have agreed more--except that it was Mrs. Peck.
Let me put Mrs. Peck in context. Mrs. Peck’s syllabus began, “Do not bother Mrs. Peck with questions before or after class.” She ignored all but her favorites. She seemed to prefer her dogs to the adolescents who looked to her for guidance. Mrs. Peck obviously couldn’t stand me.
Clearly Mrs. Peck was cold. Clearly Mrs. Peck was selfish. Clearly Mrs. Peck had displaced her natural and appropriate desire to have children into an unseemly dotage on a pair of yapping little beasts. And clearly all that was what would happen to me if I failed or refused to have kids.
But, Mrs. Peck was on the Tonight Show, where she held her place at the desk through an entire commercial break while Johnny Carson tried to square his image of a junior-high school English teacher from Normal, Illinois, with this Cheryl Tiegs look-alike at his side. Mrs. Peck had a best-selling book and an advice column in the newspaper, complete with picture. Mrs. Peck knew all about current affairs and high culture, assigning us to write biographies of famous people we’d never even heard of like Mies van der Rohe and Helen Gurley Brown.
Mrs. Peck, in short, didn’t do anything you were supposed to do and still--or so!--got to do everything she wanted. If we didn’t learn it from Helen Gurley Brown we could learn it from her: good girls go to heaven but bad girls go everywhere.
Yes, yes, we’ve all had influential teachers, even ones we hated. But is yours enshrined in a Wikipedia entry hailing her as the founder of the National Organization of Non-Parents--that’s “None”--which later changed its name to the National Organization for Optional Parenthood--or“Nope”? And then there are the Amazon testimonials to her 1976 book “The Baby Trap.” Regard this, if you will, as a sort of “found poetry”:
This Book Changed My Life, July 27, 2008
I found this book 36 years ago at the age of 22. It was revolutionary and singular and remains to this day the most important book I've ever read. The idea that motherhood was not compulsory for a young woman of my generation had never occurred to me.
AND
Straight talk about choosing childlessness, April 10, 2002
I read this book about 25 years ago and was profoundly influenced. . . . I was raised female
during the 50's and 60's, so naturally I thought I liked children. Then, my personal experiences called these assumptions into question. . . .
Mrs. Peck's clear, well-written book gave my questions a voice. I did choose, at that time, to be childless. Now, at age 50, I am still childless and happy with that decision. The most profound freedom afforded me by feminism is the freedom to make that choice!
Oh, my God, how this galls me. Mrs. Peck to inspire, Mrs. Peck to empower, Mrs. Peck to be the engine of our liberation. Mrs. Peck to tell People Magazine--she got a People Magazine interview!--that there’s no such thing as a maternal instinct.
Maybe not. Or maybe there’s just a complementary anti-maternal instinct, equally strong though less common, like left-handedness. Certainly I came equipped with it, recoiling from the prospect of having children for literally as long as I can remember. And apparently so did Mrs. Peck. Surely all that energy she put into crusading against parenthood proceeded from some wellspring of her being, not just from the arguments she marshaled: that children use up resources, that lots of people make lousy parents, that bad girls go everywhere.
More found poetry, this time from
People:
[Interviewer]: Why do most people have children?
[Mrs. Peck]: For all kinds of wrong reasons. First of all, it's the greatest ego trip there is. You get to see your own marvelous features re-created. And the child will look up to you. Those who feel the least sense of personal power tend to have children for this reason. If nobody else respects them, at least their child will--or at least that's what they think.
What are other "wrong reasons"?
. . . . Children also make great weapons. You can use them to tie down a husband, or to keep a woman from pursuing a career. Among educated, upper-middle-class couples, we see the phenomenon of the child as social experiment. . . . These parents view the child as something less than a human being.
What about people who want children simply because they like them?
Whenever a woman tells me she wants children because she "loves babies," I say, "Terrific, but how do you feel about 4-year-olds and 10-year-olds and adolescents?" Once you've had a child, you will never again not be a parent.
Mrs. Peck said it. So the only thing that could even make me consider anything as obviously tedious and unrewarding as motherhood was the fact that Mrs. Peck said it!
At an especially rocky point in their marriage, my mother complained to me about my father so bitterly that I asked why she didn’t leave him. Her reply: “I don’t want to be a divorcee.” That was my view about not having children: it was something I wanted, but I didn’t want to be Mrs. Peck.
But really, why was that so important? And then I got it: It wasn’t that Mrs. Peck was so
horrible BUT she agreed with me about kids; it was that she was so horrible BECAUSE she agreed with me about kids. At aged 13, I was already so socialized that a woman who wanted to do her own thing was perforce unacceptable--even if it was my thing, too--I hated her. She didn’t want to be my mother. I was a child, and people not wanting to be mothers threatened the entire foundation of my existence.
People who don’t want to be mothers threaten the entire foundation of our society’s existence, which is why we’re so vilified and pitied and censured. The good news is, the evil Mrs. Peck never did become anybody’s mother.
The better news is, neither did I.
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