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We can not escape biology. We can however overcome biology.
When we look at a woman, by design she is set apart to give birth and nurture. She has the parts, the ability and the innate skills to do that. When we see a person with one arm we know that most humans have two arms, that is by design. Having one arm is not the norm, however that can be 'overcome'...too. In much the same way, a woman who does not have children, is not the norm. That alone does not make it "abnormal".
Men simply are not designed to give birth and nurture in the same manner as a woman. Again biology is at hand. Same rules apply and with all biology absolutes do not exist. One off examples are misleading and generalizations are more accurate.
As far as loneliness is concerned, that is much more subjective, for both men and women. A woman who never had children is less likely (IMO) to experience childless loneliness than a woman who had children and lost them. My one off example(s) is I have two sisters who both did not have children. My older sister lost multiple children (miscarriages) and was acutely affected by her/their loss and ensuing loneliness she felt as she got older especially since I have 4 children, while my other sister who was never pregnant, couldn't give a hoot.
Men and women experience lonliness differently... especially as we age.
Why is it that everyone always throws the response of, "If you don't have children or get married, you will be lonely when you grow older." This comment is always made towards young women but never to men.
What makes people think that all women want to be married with children (which I personally see as a ball and chain), and even worse - that they want to have children? The thought of having children makes me shiver because it is too much of a responsibility that I never wanted.
Also, why is "growing old and alone" a subject for women to fear, but never directed at men? Not even gay men are told that.
Here's what I think:
1. This is to put pressure on women into thinking they need a man and babies to be happy
2. Men can only feel like men if and only if women are dependent on them
3. Men who make these types of videos on YouTube fear that they are losing control over women
Also, what makes people think that if they have a family, that they will never be lonely? Seriously, this is why people cheat, divorce, and/or never visit their parents after their parents age.
A friend of mine in her 50's had the perfect husband and child. Her husband recently died of a sudden heart attack and her son is now going off to college. Now she's complaining about being lonely. Meanwhile, I'm not. I never that those losses.
Historically it was seen as shame making and a disgrace on family to have unmarried daughters. A woman who didn't marry and ended up a childless spinster was to be pitted and wept over. This applied even to females who came from or had money of their own so didn't need a man (husband) for financial support.
It simply was deemed the only natural sphere for a "decent" woman was to be a wife and mother regardless of her social station. To have been "left on the shelf" and become a "maiden aunt" was a fate best avoided.
That being said majority of elder care in this country and elsewhere historically and still today was (and or is) provided by children. A woman who never married in past (and perhaps even today) is in less of a comfortable financial position. Those without children will have to either hire help if needed during their old age or make other arrangements.
Today even with Social Security single (never married) older women including senior citizens are more likely to be in poverty than those who married. Worse those without children or close family often are in worse shape...
It's only been rather recently historically that women have begun earning anywhere near what made made in terms of compensation. Still a woman who is or was a "career girl" or "professional" often has to make choices about her life. One of them often is either not to marry (by choice or whatever) and or have children.
A man can put off marriage and having children while focusing on his career or profession from his twenties until fifties and still marry and have a family. Females have other considerations including their biological clock and fact statistically marriage rates for women into and past their thirties tend to decline.
Only reason today for people to feel pity over a woman who never married and or had children is feeling she is somehow unfulfilled and incomplete without one or both.
Even among other women there often is a cruelty shown to females who "couldn't hold or get a man" (regardless if woman in question wanted one or not) and or have children.
Commercial surrogacy has taken some of the sting out of being barren or otherwise not having children. Paris Hilton is case in point. She married rather late and has had two children via surrogacy. Ms. Hilton of course has more money than God and will one day inherit quite a bit more. For your average working women things are quite different.
Mm...I dunno. I mean, we have a view of the past that I don't think is always accurate. At least not entirely.
My Great Aunt, silent gen lady, passed away in 2012. I mentioned her earlier. She had no kids and by the point her husband passed, I think she was kind of glad. He had her feeling pretty caged. Once he was gone, she really blossomed as a person, she traveled the world and did a lot of volunteer work and was so smart and dynamic. She changed lives.
My husband's maternal grandmother, was divorced THREE TIMES. This is a woman who was...whatever the parents of silent gen were. I dunno. A young adult in the 1930s. She had one child, my husband's mother. But her one child married and went away, and eventually she stopped trying with men (after "bad luck with husbands" as everyone put it...spendthrifts, drunks, gamblers and abusers...) and when she was very old she did not have family living in the same city. Though they did travel to see her sometimes, they weren't part of her day to day life really. But you know what she did? She somehow managed to get "troubled girls" (teens) to come and work for her, and she mentored them. She'd had a career, she'd been very politically active, forever writing letters to various elected officials, she was an investor. She even had a radio show at one point!
Even "back in the old times" there were women who were doing things with their lives besides cooking and cleaning and child care. And most of the women of those generations that I know of, whether they had kids or not, had a lot more going on by the time they were old. They had careers (my grandma, silent gen, was a barber and business owner.) Poking through my husband's family's records I keep finding stories of these women who did big things with their lives. One of them pushed a hand cart with a group of Mormons traveling across the country to settle in Utah. One of them ran a luxury resort almost single-handedly.
Honestly I'm starting to think that women were DOING plenty of things, besides even the pretty demanding task of taking care of the kids and household, with our lives, all along....it's just that we were not getting any credit for it.
I don't think that widowed women have ever been looked down upon. They were free to fall in love and remarry. Travel the world or whatever they saw fit to do.
It was the women who never married who were viewed as "old maids". Of course, never married single moms were definitely frowned upon and often encouraged to give their babies up for adoption.
Divorced women also used to get the side eye by some as being "experienced" and out to get or take a man.
We can not escape biology. We can however overcome biology.
When we look at a woman, by design she is set apart to give birth and nurture. She has the parts, the ability and the innate skills to do that. When we see a person with one arm we know that most humans have two arms, that is by design. Having one arm is not the norm, however that can be 'overcome'...too. In much the same way, a woman who does not have children, is not the norm. That alone does not make it "abnormal".
Men simply are not designed to give birth and nurture in the same manner as a woman. Again biology is at hand. Same rules apply and with all biology absolutes do not exist. One off examples are misleading and generalizations are more accurate.
As far as loneliness is concerned, that is much more subjective, for both men and women. A woman who never had children is less likely (IMO) to experience childless loneliness than a woman who had children and lost them. My one off example(s) is I have two sisters who both did not have children. My older sister lost multiple children (miscarriages) and was acutely affected by her/their loss and ensuing loneliness she felt as she got older especially since I have 4 children, while my other sister who was never pregnant, couldn't give a hoot.
Men and women experience lonliness differently... especially as we age.
That's a terrible type of loss to deal with.
As for the OP's question, I've never heard people tell any woman she should have children so she wouldn't be lonely. The older childless women I know either have a spouse or they have lived with their single sibling.
And it seems that older single childless men are the loneliest of all. Most women know how to be social.
Who is "everyone"? Not sure how often this occurs as I've never personally witnessed this, though I'm a man so it's not like they would have a conversation in front of me. I'm sure men get lonely, maybe more so than women, but in our contemporary society, men are supposed to be able to take being lonely, women not as much. That's just how our culture is today.
I'm pretty much of a live and let live mindset, as long as you're not hurting anyone. There are very few absolutes in this world, but I think most women (and men) do want to have children and find a romantic partner, hence our society generalizes women as likely being happier with a partner and children. And I do happen to think it's true, GENERALLY speaking of course. I think you're overreaching about the part where men want to control women by planting this narrative that they must have children and be married to be happy. There are plenty of videos of women who give IMO, terrible advice about being "independent" without children and that age is just a number. So it works both ways. A healthy middle point would be a parent explaining to their daughter that whether she wants children or a partner is up to her, but if she does want a family of her own, there is a clock ticking and no matter what anyone tells her, age is NOT just a number when it comes to having children.
Anecdotal evidence doesn't mean much in the big picture, it just shows what's possible, not probable. I've known lonely and happy people with and without kids so there is no one size fits all approach to happiness. That said, I do believe the large majority (75-80%) of women do want their own family. This generally matches up with the percentage of women with children. Outliers exist, but they are just that, outliers. There are very few guarantees in life. Your children aren't guaranteed to visit you in your nursing home, but if you don't have children, it is a guarantee that you will not have any children visit you.
I don't think that widowed women have ever been looked down upon. They were free to fall in love and remarry. Travel the world or whatever they saw fit to do.
It was the women who never married who were viewed as "old maids". Of course, never married single moms were definitely frowned upon and often encouraged to give their babies up for adoption.
Divorced women also used to get the side eye by some as being "experienced" and out to get or take a man.
I am talking in huge generalities, of course.
Not looked down upon so much as viewed with suspicion.
Society often had no problems with older relicts; that is widows who were elderly or at least seen as past sexually active part of life. OTOH young widows were another matter.
A young widow was society's worst nightmare. A (presumably) sexually experienced woman without a husband, father or other male to keep her in check. Worst were widows who were left comfortably financially well off. They could do as they pleased with no worries about money nor needed to rush into marriage again for the protection that arrangement offered.
Fiction of course is littered with such widows; Contessa Sangalletti, My Cousin Rachel. La Marquise de Merteuil, Dangerous Liaisons and so on.
Prior to 1920's or so women rarely if ever wore black outside of mourning. Then as now many women look rather ravishing in black and a young pretty widow could let her weeds do the advertising.
As for rest of it "divorcée" once meant a woman who couldn't keep her own husband so watch out for yours when she was around. It was same thing; a woman who (again presumably) was sexually experienced but without a husband or other male relative to keep her in line. Also again if said divorcee had money she didn't need to rush into marriage again.
I don't think that widowed women have ever been looked down upon. They were free to fall in love and remarry. Travel the world or whatever they saw fit to do.
It was the women who never married who were viewed as "old maids". Of course, never married single moms were definitely frowned upon and often encouraged to give their babies up for adoption.
Divorced women also used to get the side eye by some as being "experienced" and out to get or take a man.
I am talking in huge generalities, of course.
WWI killed off about two generations of the "flower of "X" (insert England, France, Germany, etc...)" leaving a shortage of eligible young men for young women to marry.
Well into 1960's census data for say UK recorded large numbers of older to elderly spinsters. These were woman who were in their late teens or twenties during WWI period and when that event was over faced a very tight marriage market. So many young men were killed in war that it was happy hunting for the comparatively few who survived. For many young women everything was either too young (boys that weren't of age yet to fight) or too old (men too old to have enlisted). Faced with those options good number remained single. Having children without a husband of course was simply out of the question.
Even for the young men who fought and did manage to come back alive good number were maimed or otherwise physically injured. This and or were mentally scarred from their experiences that they weren't ideal husband material.
Still faced with long odds of finding anyone else many young women did marry where they could. Such was the pressure not to end their days as "Miss".
A friend of mine in her 50's had the perfect husband and child. Her husband recently died of a sudden heart attack and her son is now going off to college. Now she's complaining about being lonely. Meanwhile, I'm not. I never that those losses.
Your last line says quite a bit.
Most lonely people I know are the ones that lost what they had. Lifelong singles have been making friends and social connections their entire lives.
However, I do think one thing is different for women than men. When a young women's friends start to get married, they don't want to be the last single in their group. Men don't feel that way.
Look at the lonely old widower. Then look at the lifelong single man about the same age. Big difference.
Overall, it's part of the same old discrimination and misogyny that we know so well.
1. Religion plays a role here as most of them preach that men are the head of the household and relegate women to a supporting role; barefoot and pregnant. Churches preach 'be fruitful and multiply' and/or their usual marriage vows includes words like 'accept children willingly from God' which I recall when my sister married a Catholic man in 1972.
2. Many men are raised to think of themselves as the provider and protector of "the little lady." One of my beliefs is that in middle age, when many women hit full stride as self-actualized persons, it can make a man feel small, like he's no longer needed, so he divorces his wife and marries a woman half his age so he can be the senior partner again and be in control. How many millions of times have we seen this dynamic play out. I've been around plenty of these middle-aged women who got kicked to the curb and a lot of them are flat out world beaters whose friendship I treasure.
3. Again, I see a religious aspect to men who fear losing control over women. The best example I see are people in the middle east whose religious dictates force women to cover themselves from head to toe, are not allowed to drive, not even allowed to leave the home unless accompanied by a male family member. I cannot imagine living like that; I bet there's an ocean of anger bubbling inside millions of those women.
All this old nonsense fails to work now when the vast majority of couples need two incomes to survive.
Over the years we've had many threads, in multiple forums, mostly started by women who are fed up with being told they're selfish if they don't have children. We shot the hell out of that old pack of lies. Use of the search tool will find them.
Actually, the Bible does not teach Christians to be fruitful and multiply. That was a command and a blessing that God had for Israel and the Jews.
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