Ageing Without Children, Gender and Social Justice.

Abstract

This chapter takes Nancy Fraser’s (2000) three domains of social justice – resource distribution, recognition and representation – and applies them to people who are ageing without children. This is a relatively new area of research, with very little literature preceding the past couple of decades (Kreager and Schröder-Butterfill, 2004; Dykstra, 2009; Ivanova and Dykstra, 2015; Kreyenfeld and Konietzka, 2017a). The growth of interest reflects an increase in childless older adults in many parts of the world, which has raised questions about the factors which influence the significance, or not, of the absence of children and grandchildren for later life (Dykstra and Hagestad, 2007). Notably, studies of childlessness, as with studies on parenthood, have so far tended to focus far more on women than on men, with considerable gaps in knowledge about men’s experiences at all ages, including in later life (Schick et al., 2016). In considering these issues I will draw on my auto/biographical research into the life experiences of male ‘involuntary’ ‘childlessness’ (Hadley, 2015, 2018; Hadley and Hanley, 2011), as well as wider authorship on ageing with/without children.

Keywords: auto/biographical, ageing without children, aging, childfree, childlessness, elders, gender, grandchildren, garndparent, LGBT, involuntary childlessness, recognition, older adukts, representation, resource distribution, social justice, voluntary childlessness