Emma Duval | Beyond Motherhood and Christianity

ReligionChildfree

Apr 29

Written By Population Balance

Raised in a religious and pronatalist French family, author-illustrator Emma Duval (also known as Millennial Emma) knew from a young age that she did not want children. Discovering an online childfree community in early adulthood gave her the language and sense of belonging she needed to embrace the childfree choice and resist the pronatalist pressures from family and religion. Her book Unwed and Unbothered: The Defiant Lives of Single Women Through History highlights women who forged lives beyond marriage and motherhood. Now living in rural France, Emma and her husband enjoy the expansive freedom and choice of their childfree decision.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Emma Duval (00:00):
When you grow up in an environment where everybody's married and you don't know a single person who is not married with kids, aside from maybe a priest or a nun here and there, you can't envision a different future because it doesn't exist. It just seems like impossible. I have always felt I did not want to be a mother. My family's been like, Well, what? Do you have trauma, like a terrible childhood? Do you hate your mom? No, it actually has nothing to do with anybody else. It's really just about me and who I am, and I've just been born like this. Sometimes I think if I could change myself and want to want to have children, I might because it's so much easier to fit into society and everything.
Nandita Bajaj (00:48):
That was today's guest, Emma Duval. Hi everyone, and thank you for joining me. My name is Nandita Bajaj and I'm the host of Beyond Pronatalism: Finding Fulfillment With or Without Kids, an interview series in which through intimate conversations with people from diverse backgrounds, I explore how they are courageously and creatively navigating pronatalism - the often unspoken pressures to have children, whether from family, friends, or the culture at large. Each episode features a personal story, born out of liberated and informed choice, about redefining what family means, including being childfree or childless, having biological kids, adopting or fostering children or animals, or creating close-knit communities of friends and loved ones. Hi, and welcome to Beyond Pronatalism. Emma, I am really excited to be with you here today.
Emma Duval (01:46):
Hi, Nandita. Thank you so much for having me on your podcast. I'm so thrilled since we've been talking about it for a little bit that it's finally happening.
Nandita Bajaj (01:53):
Likewise. And you've already been doing a lot of work in this area of challenging pronatalism in your own way. And I wonder as way of introduction, if you can say a little bit about yourself and including sharing that aspect.
Emma Duval (02:09):
Absolutely. So my name is Emma. You might know me online through my username, which is MillennialEmma. And I recently wrote a book which was published a few months ago called Unwed and Unbothered: The Defiant Lives of Single Women Through History. And it takes kind of a specific approach to looking at women without children who never married and the accomplishments that they had, the lives that they led, and if they spoke or wrote about their decisions to remain single, which I thought was very interesting because I do have a specific interest in looking back at history, how women before us navigated the same pressures that we are facing today. So I'm 34 and I live in France. I mean, I grew up in France, but I had been living in the US for 10 years where I met my husband. I moved back to France with him two years ago.
(02:56):
So it's interesting to experience my home country as an adult coming back and having to face some of these things that maybe I had escaped a little bit by going to a completely different country, which is family pressure. Because as you know, when you're closer to family, then you can't avoid sometimes these questions, Well, you've been married? Are you having kids? And so yeah, I'm very happy to be here where we are, but France is definitely a very pronatalist country.
Nandita Bajaj (03:24):
Well, thanks for that whole background. I look forward to delving a bit more into your book and your work as an illustrator. But as you said, you being back in France and starting to feel all of those pressures again, we can go right into that aspect of your life. So you grew up in France, you said?
Emma Duval (03:48):
Oh, I actually grew up in different countries because my parents moved around, but it was all French-speaking countries in Europe. And I grew up Christian, very involved in this whole idea that life is for procreation. Marriage is for procreation. And I took my own path. I am not practicing any religion. I'm atheist. And I knew early on I did not want to have kids, but I realized that there was a name for it and it was an actual choice when I was maybe in my early 20s. So there were a few years there that were a little bit stressful when I was a teenager feeling the pressure that I needed to eventually get married and have kids when I was so stressed out by the idea of having to pursue that path that I literally thought I need to become a nun. That's the only acceptable option for me if I'm not getting married is to go into religious orders.
(04:37):
And yeah, discovered through the online community, the idea of being childfree, that has always felt kind of like a lifesaving moment to be like, Well, there's a word for it. There are communities, people who have the same experiences and same desires. And it's just been so grateful for it. And that's why I try to be involved in this community myself online and through writing because there was that community there for me when I was struggling with my place maybe in society and whether my decision was rational, was it crazy. Why do I feel this so strongly? This is not normal. Everybody around me wants to have kids. There's a lot of questioning, self-questioning that can go into it. And I feel like I've come out the other side feeling confident, if not about expressing my own choice to family, at least about how I'm living my life and feeling like I'm being as true to myself as I can be.
Nandita Bajaj (05:32):
And you said that you knew from a young age that you didn't want to do this. When did that decision concretize for you to a degree that you thought, Okay, this is a legitimate path and I can pursue other interests than just becoming a nun, for example.
Emma Duval (05:51):
I would definitely say that in my early 20s when I was in university, that I really came to the realization that I did not have to get married. Of course, it helped that I wasn't dating seriously and I didn't have pressure from somebody else because at the time I was still very religious and practicing. So I was still involved in youth groups to meet other people who were like- minded and so I'm way lucky that I didn't fall in love with somebody who might have pressured me into that lifestyle and I was able to just focus on my studies. I went abroad. I was able to be independent and really experience a different lifestyle and be like, Oh no, I can make totally different choices. I wasn't in the same circles anymore that I grew up, but as I mentioned, it's always been such a deep-seated thing in me.
(06:43):
When people ask me about it, I like to say a lot of women have told me that they've always felt they wanted to be a mother. I have always felt I did not want to be a mother. And I'm like, It's the same feeling. It's just on the other end of the spectrum. So sometimes I hope that that kind of gets working for them as an idea because I know it can be really hard to explain to people when you've had quote unquote normal stable childhood, no major issues because that's something that my family's been like, Well, what? Do you have a trauma, like a terrible childhood? Do you hate your mom? My mom's like, You hate me? I'm like, No, it actually has nothing to do with anybody else. It's really just about me and who I am. And I've just been born like this. Honestly, sometimes I think if I could change myself and want to want to have children, I might because it's so much easier to fit into society and everything.
Nandita Bajaj (07:34):
And so you were kind of swimming upstream while you were growing up because you knew from such a young age that this is not something you wanted and yet everyone around you was telling you it's the only right thing to do. Did you ever tell anybody when you were young that you did not want to be a mother?
Emma Duval (07:53):
I did. I'm laughing because I did and their reactions I got kind of ranged from people dismissing me like, You're 12 years old, you don't like boys. Of course you don't want to get married. You'll change your mind too. When I was still expressing that idea a few years in, 15, 16, people saying, Oh, you just haven't met the right person. You're just not in love. That's why you don't want that yet. To graduating high school and still having those same ideas to people starting to look at me weird and this is where the frictions really started. And I mean, even last year I went to a wedding in my family and I got asked a question like, Oh, when are you having kids? Because my aunt's son was having his first child and I was like, Well, we don't think that's for us. I'm trying to be very neutral.
(08:37):
I'm not going all like, I'm an atheist. I don't want to have kids. Leave me alone. So I try to be very neutral. It's not for us. And I was just hoping we'd be able to just afford that conversation, move to another subject, but now it got all into, You're betraying your religion, you're going against the word of God. How can you even say that you don't want to have children? And she was looking at me with a mix of pity and anger in her eyes. And I was very distressed the whole evening because of it. My husband's able to brush it off. He's just like, Ah, nevermind those people. They're not us. But to me, the problem is when it's family, it can feel very personal and you don't want to create frictions. And it's still, as I said, that's the reason I try to say that I feel like I'm living my life authentically, but I still feel like I struggle to take ownership of my choice in front of my family.
(09:26):
There's just this personal barrier that's really hard to overcome. And then in France, the government likes to get involved too. So just a few days ago, they announced that the health ministry was going to be working on a plan to ... I think they phrased it as awareness that the fertility is not a forever thing. And they're planning on sending letters to young French people who are around 29 to let them know, You should be having children. The birth rates are declining or we're all going to go into chaos if you do not have children. And so it's been interesting to watch because in my experience, French people are obsessed with babies and pronatalism.
Nandita Bajaj (10:07):
Right. Which is always the problem, right? We're kind of seen as tools for their goals. I also want to learn a bit more about your departure from your religion. Can you speak to, well, how did that decision come about? How did you know that you had a choice to not pursue that religious pathway? And did that and your decision to not have kids have any point of intersection?
Emma Duval (10:35):
Oh, that's interesting. I view them as semi-independent. Of course, there is a connection in the sense of in Christian religion, there's an emphasis on be fruitful and multiply. So yeah, there's a lot of language in the church about having children and the role of women as a wife. I felt like there's deep hypocrisy in between what I had been taught and how I was seeing it being applied. And so it was a gradual change. And while I was open with my now husband about not wanting to have children while still religious, so the atheism came kind of after I was already certain that that decision and it was more related to societal issues that we were seeing. I remember I was still going to church and I'm sitting there, like I'm living with my boyfriend now husband and the priest starts to go on a rant about women who live with their boyfriends and they're living in sin and they're ruining themselves.
(11:33):
And that was probably like a tipping point, but it was really kind of the realization that even though I had thought that my religion was something that was mostly loving, I realized that it wasn't or not in the right way. There was an ability to really twist the words so that you think you're being loving and having compassion towards others, but you're actually trying to impose your own thoughts, your own lifestyle, your own way of life onto other people in the name of your own religion. And obviously that's not only Christianity, that's not only Catholics who do it, but I felt very frustrated because I kept seeing over and over how the actions of the governing body of the church and the actions of people who are representative of the church were not matching what I thought should be interactions with people, but I also still see how those thought process impact the subject of pronatalism.
(12:30):
I'm going to give you a very concrete example. My brother's getting married. His fiance's family, and they're all great people, they're all very nice, everything, but all of them are already talking about them having kids. They already have gifts for when the child will be born. So they're already talking about what vacations will be planned because there will be a child. And it's just like, well, yeah, they want kids. Okay, that's perfectly fine, but what happens if there's a fertility issue? Everybody just already planned the next year and a half of my brother and his fiance's life, including the fact that they will have children within X amount of months and all that, maybe the names already. And I'm just like, oh my God, I mean, 30% of couples I believe have infertility issues. What happens when you've been just told over and over and over that this is your life goal, that this is your almost only purpose and then you want to have kids, but you can't. I cannot imagine when you're trying to have children and are facing all these issues and still being told you don't have kids, what's happening? And then you have to go into the details about your own life. I mean, it's a very sensitive and intimate subject that somehow is considered to be completely fine for the kitchen table at breakfast in front of people you don't maybe know that well.
Nandita Bajaj (13:42):
Totally. And I can relate so much to that being a very heavy part of my culture. The whole path is set for you. The entire family and the joint family and the extended family are all invested in your procreation and the timing of it and the future of that child. So yeah, I really like also the distinction between your becoming atheist and your decision and desire to not want to be a mother, that they were independent, because I think it gives your decision even more weight because you were so sure about this in the midst of being still a practicing Catholic and you held steadfast to that over the years. And I know in the writeup you said at one point you thought that the fact that you didn't want children would automatically mean that you would also remain single, not necessarily by choice. Can you speak to that assumption and how long you held onto it?
Emma Duval (14:48):
Yeah, I think that ties into this whole structure that we're all born into. It's different for everybody. I have at least a hundred cousins and aunts and uncles. It's a very, very large extended family. When I was young, I didn't know anybody who wasn't married with kids in my family. My only exposure to women who are single and/or without children was through friends of my mother. And my mother was a single mom and she was working. So she was friends with working women and women who had careers and all that, which was very different from the more standard stay-at-home model that many in my family grew up with. So when you grow up in an environment where everybody's married and you don't know a single person who's not married with kids, aside from maybe a priest or nun here and there, you can't envision a different future because it doesn't exist.
(15:38):
It just seems like impossible. My husband grew up Jewish. He is not practicing. He has been for a long time and he's definitely helped me kind of process a lot of these ties between the religion and pressures of the family. And I always thought it was interesting because I don't think he was aware of that as a decision for a whole other reason of men, maybe not having to think as much about it as women do. But I said, I don't want kids. He's like, Yeah, that's fine. And he's very happy now. He sees all the benefits. But it was interesting because he is what I guess people would call a fence sitter. He would've gone either way. He probably would've been fine, but it's complicated when you don't want children, but everybody you meet does or think they do. And when you get married in the church, you're supposed to say that you're open.
(16:27):
The saying is something like, Are you open to having children if God wants you to? I was like, Well, I know I have to say that I'm open to having children that God gives me. But if I'm saying God knows me and knows how I am and he's not going to give me children because he knows I don't want them, then that will be an easy decision. So I was making these convoluted ways in my head to make it all work together, right?
Nandita Bajaj (16:52):
Yeah. And even what you said earlier about your desire to just want to want so that you could just fit in because it'd be just so much easier to follow that path that's laid out for you than to fight against it constantly. So I appreciate that you, despite all of these difficult conversations and situations that are still ongoing, you've stayed totally true to that path because it's not always the case. I think it is like you're saying, even if people don't want it, sometimes they will do it because it is easier than to deal with all of the backlash. And so your boyfriend at the time, now husband clearly seemed quite open to the possibility of not having kids. Did you have to have much of a discussion to concretize your relationship or was it that one time when you said, Not for me, and he kind of just accepted it?
Emma Duval (17:55):
Yeah, it was basically that. I have to say in my life, for some things, I'm very much like this my way or the highway. So I was like, I'm not having kids. So if you find not having kids, we can be together, but if you want kids, you better go somewhere else. So that was very much something that obviously was non-negotiable. And I told him pretty early on like, Yeah, don't want kids, that's okay with you? He was like, I guess so. I'm like, Okay, great. And we've been married 10 years, so obviously everything's worked out and we're happy and now we always can look back on things and be like, We're so glad that we really stuck to that lifestyle that we didn't feel pressured. Maybe he was more childless not by choice, just by circumstances. Now I think he's definitely more on the childfree side of things.
(18:40):
Again, I don't know what would've happened if I had been with somebody at a time where maybe I could have been swayed the other way, because a lot of people in my family did tend to marry before they're 23, so in their early 20s. And we know so that a lot of changes happen in the brain and you experience different things throughout your life and getting married so young, you could end up in a situation where you have a kid because that's how everything you've been told was. And then imagine you have a kid and you're like, Oh wow, I hate this. What a terrible realization to have as a mid-20s something that you're now stuck in this and you don't know who to turn to because this is what you were supposed to do. So that's my biggest worry when it comes to the pronatalists' ideas that we see perpetuated in the media and through government is that they're not willing to let a small piece of the puzzle be that you might not want to have children and that's okay.
Nandita Bajaj (19:38):
100%. And I think what you're saying, the government, not that they don't see this as a valid option. They don't want this to be a valid option. And I think that's why the push to have people, especially women marry young, is because we are a lot more compliant when we are young. You can be pushed to do things when your brain isn't fully developed and you haven't individuated and you haven't figured out who you are. So you're a lot more likely to do things to fit into society. And this pronatalist push that sees feminism and gender equality and women becoming more independent as a threat is following that same threat, right? We are clearly at the heart of the problem is when we can think for ourselves and decide for ourselves, we become a threat because then we're no longer fulfilling that role. And I think that's so much part of your work that you've been doing for a number of years as an illustrator and as now an author about platforming the lives of all these women who have either chosen to not marry because remaining childfree was not an option otherwise, or did get married and remain childfree. Can you tell me a bit more about your book? What got you started into that project in the first place?
Emma Duval (21:10):
So I think it kind of goes back to this whole idea that I grew up in an environment where I wasn't exposed to those options outside of this whole idea of the non-religiously devoted woman who gives her life to God. And to me, looking back at history and finding these women, it was very comforting because first of all, I found so many women from the past who have not had children and or have not married. And so the more I found these women and the more I found women who left a mark on history as we know it, the more like, wow, this is not just a few people here that are maybe seen as deviant non-conformist compared to society. It has to be a percentage that's at least 10, 15%, maybe more. I mean, when you think that fertility impacts 30% of couples, but it's like, where are those stories?
(22:04):
Why don't we see them mentioned? And I realized when I started all this, I was just looking at women that I admired myself. So I was looking at authors that I like, like Jean Austin and I'm like, Oh, it's just very interesting. She got proposed to and accepted and then next morning decided she didn't want to and lived her whole life single. And seemingly because she wanted to be able to focus on her writing, knowing that if she committed to marriage, it meant a whole different lifestyle and she just projecting a little bit because she did not leave exact words, but it really seems like she was like, I could get married and have economic stability, but I want to write and I want to live my life authentically as much as possible. So I will have to remain single even if it means placing burden on my family who is going to have to support me, her father and then her brothers had to support her, her mom, her sister. All these considerations that these women had, and you see it happen over and over again.
(23:03):
And today, I mean, I can have my own money, so that's not necessarily the same pressures, but it's really interesting to see these women almost be like a life that is full of these obstacles is still a better life for me than a life that I do not want for X number of reasons. So for example, in the book, Unwed and Unbothered, I kind of divided it by chapters based on themes. So women who maybe chose to remain single for economic reasons because they were entrepreneurs. And if you got married, then under certain legal systems, then you would lose the rights to what you had. Your husband would become the decision maker. So there's, for example, Rosalba Coriera, who was a pastel portrait artist from Italy, and it really seems that she was worried that she got married and her husband was like, Well, no, you're stopping.
(23:54):
You're not doing painting anymore. You're not selling paintings anymore. We're shutting it down. They could do that. I mean, I think everybody can understand why you would really be wary of getting married if you had your own business and that getting married could mean you lose it all. So there's that. There's also women who are so passionate by something that's so encompassing that they just don't have the room for the family's life. So artists a lot of the time that are like, I don't want to get married. Now I have to be the hostess and I have to cater to my husband and probably have kids and then deal with that. Even if they're rich, they're busy entertaining, hosting. If you were poor, you probably need working to survive. And so women who are like, I want to be an artist. I want to do art. Whether I succeed or not, I will still have control over my own time. So that's another reason why a lot of women remain single.
(24:44):
Then there are some women and that comes a little bit later with the rise of what we call today, feminism who look at remaining single as a defiant act towards society and they're like, I don't want to be controlled. I feel like men are oppressive of women as a structure, so I'm not going to participate in that. So there's really, it was interesting to kind of look at all these reasons why women decided throughout cultures, throughout centuries, throughout religions to remain single, or if not by choice, at least through circumstances that seem to reflect a certain level of agency. Because to me, that's the important part is this idea of how much agency and autonomy we can have, which goes back to what you said of this idea, how many people kind of realize they are living a life that they didn't fully choose because they didn't have all the information. They didn't know they could do something else.
(25:37):
And it was important for me to be able to showcase a variety of women, of paths, of reasons why women hundreds of years ago made choices that still resonate with us today. If I can get quotes, I get so excited because that's the most precious part almost of their biographies or autobiographies is when they write about their feeling towards marriage and/or motherhood. So when you see women who are like, Oh, I wanted to have as much autonomy and agency as my brothers have, and I'm going to have to act like a man in the sense of be the head of the household, therefore I need to remain single. It's very interesting to see the thought process and it's not that different than thoughts that I've had throughout my life.
Nandita Bajaj (26:24):
Yeah, this is so fascinating and I'm grateful for you for doing all of the research work to help platform their really rich lives and the circumstances under which they would've made these very difficult decisions to remain autonomous and independent. So thanks for writing the book and thanks for continuing to work on it. I'm excited to hear about when the other book comes out. And I wonder as a way to wrap things up, if you wanted to say anything more about your life today and what your decision to remain childfree with your husband has enabled you to do?
Emma Duval (27:05):
Oh, just to tell you, right now we live in the countryside in France, rural France. We live in a little town in the countryside of Brittany, and we're able to do that because we both work remotely. It's just that we're able to make more choices in our professional life that we wouldn't be able to if we had kids. I don't even know if there's any schools nearby where we live right now. There's just all these things I don't have to think about. And it's so nice and it's like we're renovating this really old house and it's just kind of a different, fun experience. And I don't have to be in Paris because that's where the jobs are and the schools are. And I don't have to plan my whole year around the school vacations. And for us, it's just enabled us to live a relatively free, not of responsibilities, but a freer life in terms of being able to choose what we want to do and not just base it on obligations.
Nandita Bajaj (28:02):
Right. That sounds really good. And I think so many people who have made similar choices often say many of the same things. It's the freedom to take risks and pursue passions that may not be as stable or lucrative as you'd have to if you had kids.
Emma Duval (28:23):
It's the other side of the coin, right? On one hand, you know you might be a bit more of a pariah in society and be viewed differently. But in a weird way, the fact that I faced these difficult issues with my family and my lifestyle, I'm like, other choices seem so simple. I don't care as much about making choices that are not necessarily the ones that people expect, which is like good corporate job and you climb the ladder and all this stuff. I'm like, Well, my biggest lifestyle choice is already frowned upon. So who cares what I do with my life at this point?
Nandita Bajaj (28:56):
Yeah, can't mess up anymore. Exactly. Well, that's awesome. Thank you so much, Emma, for sharing your really important story. That was such a wonderful conversation. I'm glad we finally got to have this conversation after following each other's work for so long.
Emma Duval (29:14):
Thank you so much for this conversation. It's been so interesting. It always makes me feel more alive after we talk about those subjects. Thank you so much for having me.
Nandita Bajaj (29:23):
That's all for this edition of Beyond Pronatalism. To share feedback about the show or a particular episode or to share your own story on the podcast, please get in touch with me using the link in the show notes. If you enjoyed this podcast, please rate us on your favorite podcast platform and share it widely. We couldn't do this work without the support of listeners like you and hope that you will consider a one-time or a recurring donation. Thank you so much again for joining me today as we collectively discover and celebrate the many different pathways to fulfillment beyond pronatalism. This podcast is brought to you by Population Balance, the only nonprofit organization advancing the rights and wellbeing of people, animals, and the planet by confronting pronatalism and other harmful ideologies. This podcast is produced and hosted by me, Nandita Bajaj, with the support of my production team, Josh Wild and Alan Ware.