I am currently working on my dissertation, which is on women's experiences with infertility.
Dissertation Abstract
In our culture the motherhood mandate is so powerful that women often assume that pregnancy, birth and motherhood are part of the natural progression of their lives. A woman’s choice to have children takes place within a framework that includes reproduction and motherhood as a woman’s biological destiny. When women are confronted with difficulty in conceiving it can shake them to their core. The “normal” progression of their lives has been disrupted. In this research I have sought to answer the question of what happens to these women who experience infertility. What impact does infertility have on these women’s social worlds and on their identities?
Using in-depth face-to-face interviews and an open ended web survey of infertile women, I explore how infertility affects the infertile woman’s relationships with others and how that in turn affects her sense of self. I also explore how infertility’s affect on the self may be different for different types of women, for instance women of different social classes, women of different religiosity, and women who have differing views on the role of women in society. Most writing on infertility is either aimed at overcoming infertility, experiential in nature, or highly political. There has been little research that systematically explores the experiences of women who are infertile, and explores variations among women of their experiences. The current research also lacks an empirical connection between those experiences and broader issues within sociology, such as social psychological theory and the experience of illness. Previous research on infertile women has often been restricted to upper middle class, highly educated women who have come to a resolution concerning their infertility (had a biological child, adopted, or quit trying.) There has been little research conducted on women who are currently dealing with their infertility, and almost no research on women who are not upper middle class and highly educated.
Symbolic interactionists argue that the self emerges through social interaction with others, and while the way one thinks about oneself is stable when one's interactions with others remain stable, when those patterns of interaction are altered, the self goes into flux. Life course junctures of any sort are often accompanied by changes in patterns of social relationships, but a failed life course juncture can also have important implications on social relationships, and thus on the self. Infertile women "fail" to make the transition into parenthood. This is an expected transition by the dominant society and by many of the individuals close to the woman. This inability to easily undergo a life course transition affects her social relationships, and thus affects the self. Infertility constitutes a period of destabilization of social interaction. Interactions with friends and family are altered because of the infertility, and therefore lead to an altered experience of self.
Infertility is not something that just occurs within the couple, it occurs in a wider social context. Most Americans believe that married couples should have children and should want to have children. Infertile women have to live with not only their own inability to live up to the norms to which they subscribe, but they also have to live with not meeting others’ expectations derived from these norms. Rather than infertility being a static condition with psychosocial consequences, infertility is a dynamic and socially conditioned process whereby couples come to define their inability to bear their desired number of children as problematic and attempt to rectify the situation. The experience of infertility is negotiated between the couple with influences from medical personnel, relatives, friends, and acquaintances, as well as from a generalized sense of society as a whole.
In the first empirical chapter of the dissertation I discuss how women’s relationships with significant others have been altered by her experience with infertility. Being infertile not only deprives the woman of being a mother, but it often deprives her parents from becoming grandparents, her siblings from becoming aunts and uncles, her husband from becoming a father. How does this inability to meet the expectations of her significant others by having a child affect the woman’s relationships with these significant others? In the second empirical chapter I discuss how women’s relationships with other women have been altered by her experience with infertility. The women in my study describe situations in which women create community amongst themselves by talking about their children. When infertile women can’t participate in this community building, what happens to them? How do they react and feel in these situations? In the third empirical chapter I discuss the implications of these changing relationships on the women’s sense of self. How is the way that she sees herself, her goals, her future altered by this failure to make this expected life course transition into motherhood? I discuss self in a general sense, and then also focus on how infertility affects the gendered self and the sexual self. I discuss throughout the three chapters how these experiences and their implications vary for different types of women: women of different social class, women of different religiosity and women who hold different views of the role of women in society.
In sum, using a theoretical framework composed of social psychological, medical and gender literatures, my dissertation explores women’s experiences with infertility and how it affects their social relationships and their sense of self. The research contributes to the understanding of women’s infertility, the role of relationships in shaping the self, and the experience of illness.