IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ess/wpaper/id12077.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Womanhood Beyond Motherhood: Exploring Experiences of Voluntary Childless Women

Author

Listed:
  • Chandni Bhambhani
  • Anand Inbanathan

Abstract

This study attempts to explore the emerging issue among women in Indian cities who voluntarily chose to be childless, with an emphasis on the reasons accorded for opting out of motherhood. Findings of the study are presented by analysing participants’ narration, and Schick's Decision Theory is used to discuss the reasons and rationale expressed by voluntary childless women. The six major emergent themes that illustrate participants’ motives, values, beliefs and purposes are: Confronting selfish reasons for having children, Manifesting foster instinct, Questioning the sanctity of motherhood, Unwillingness to Bear a Lifetime Commitment of Children, Freedom of following own pursuits, and Specific attributes for the choice of childlessness. While the first three themes mainly emphasise the justification grasped from others’ experiences of being mothers, the last three concentrate on personal experiences as reasons to remain childless

Suggested Citation

  • Chandni Bhambhani & Anand Inbanathan, 2017. "Womanhood Beyond Motherhood: Exploring Experiences of Voluntary Childless Women," Working Papers id:12077, eSocialSciences.
  • Handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:12077
    Note: Institutional Papers
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.esocialsciences.org/Articles/show_Article.aspx?acat=InstitutionalPapers&aid=12077
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ess:wpaper:id:12077. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Padma Prakash (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.esocialsciences.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.