Remembering Dolly and Gloria, childfree icons

“Our goddess,” wrote a poster last week on the Reddit board devoted to being childfree, “has passed.” Dolly Parton, one of the greatest benefactors to children in world history while also being a role model to those who were without them, had died at 80.

This week, Gloria Steinem, the writer and activist who renounced both marriage — for most of her life — and children died at 92 .

While both said they were influenced by having mothers who were frequently ill and in need of caretaking, they had very different paths to not having children of their own — and different paths in helping better the world for children and parents.

Parton’s path to a childfree existence was fairly convoluted in the way that bodies so often make things. She also grew up one of 12, and five of her younger siblings lived with her for a time after she left the family home. “We always have somebody’s children and we don’t want the total responsibility,” she said of those years.

But Parton came to like what being childfree could do for her, recognizing that it helped her career significantly. “I just want to be free to work. I want to think, I want to write better songs, I want to write different styles of music; I want to write Broadway plays, which I am; I want to write books, which I will,” she said in a conversation with Andy Warhol in 1984.

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“Why didn’t you have children?” Warhol asked her bluntly. “I couldn’t,” she said, and: “But I don’t miss it. I did for awhile, but I realize that I am everybody’s mother.”

Raising children is a grave responsibility, no matter how casually many take the decision to do it. It’s also probably one of the most time-consuming, expensive and emotionally harrowing journeys one can experience in America, right up there with medical school and chronic illness.

Parton became one of the single greatest forces for children — apart from her literacy work, she literally paid children to stay in high school and last year the Dollywood Foundation reported giving college scholarships to 22 local high school students.

“She also understood that for kids to thrive, they almost necessarily need more support than their parents can give them alone,” as Ashley Fetters Maloy put it in the Washington Post.

There are different ways to contribute to the welfare of children and mothers. Steinem’s life’s work on abortion was in support of choices around parenthood.

The problem with children and marriage, as Steinem saw it, is that they were all caught up in women being treated as inferior to men. “Especially,” Steinem said in an interview a few years back, “I admire women who have raised children maybe not with the equal help of men frequently. I have not had to do that and I think that is huge.” Did she have any regrets about not having children? “No. Absolutely not. No. I’m not sure why,” she said.

She saw the world changing around her over the years. Steinem married for the first time at 66 — noting that marriage had changed as an institution — and thus became, for a time, Christian Bale’s stepmother, a funny footnote in the histories of both parenthood and celebrity.

She also saw the broken dynamics of men and women having children together improving here and there because their respective spheres in society were expanding. “Raising children or being raised to raise children is the way men become whole people, just as we become whole by being active in the world outside the home,” she said to a lecture attendee in 2015.

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Steinem was always emphatic about not regretting it: “Not for a millisecond,” she said in one interview , noting that “not everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer.” This was nine years ago with the comedian Sarah Silverman, who herself noted in response that she would make “a great fun dad” but didn’t think the whole motherhood thing, as we understand it, sounded that appealing.

Without children, the home becomes something else. For Steinem, who spent so much of her life touring and talking, a private space of her own became a place to recharge.

“Home means safety, shelter, friends, sleep,” Steinem told Architectural Digest of the apartment she bought on E. 73rd Street in Manhattan and lived in for decades. She eventually bought the downstairs to expand and to get an actual full kitchen, even though “my idea of cooking is dialing.” Instead of an empty and dusty children’s room, she had a guest room that was always full of new experiences, in the form of friends and strangers alike.

上周，一位网友在Reddit上一个专门讨论丁克人士的版块发帖写道：“我们的女神去世了。” 多莉·帕顿是世界历史上对儿童最伟大的恩人之一，同时也是那些没有孩子的人的榜样，享年80岁。

本周，作家兼活动家格洛丽亚·斯泰纳姆去世，享年 92 岁。她一生中大部分时间都放弃了婚姻和孩子。

虽然两人都表示，她们的母亲经常生病需要照顾，这影响了她们，但她们没有生育自己的孩子的道路却截然不同——她们为改善儿童和父母的世界所采取的道路也截然不同。

帕顿选择丁克之路颇为曲折，正如人体发育过程中常有的情况一样。她家中共有12个兄弟姐妹，在她离开家后，其中5个弟弟妹妹曾和她一起生活过一段时间。“我们总是照顾别人的孩子，但我们不想承担全部的责任，”她回忆起那段岁月时说道。

但帕顿逐渐喜欢上了丁克的生活，她意识到丁克对她的事业大有裨益。“我只想自由地工作。我想思考，我想写出更好的歌，我想创作不同风格的音乐；我想写百老汇戏剧，而我正在这么做；我想写书，而我也会这么做。”她在1984年与安迪·沃霍尔的一次谈话中说道。

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“你为什么没生孩子？”沃霍尔直截了当地问她。“我生不了，”她说，“但我并不怀念。我曾经怀念过一段时间，但我意识到，我就是所有人的母亲。”

养育子女是一项重大的责任，无论许多人多么随意地做出这个决定。这或许也是美国最耗时、最昂贵、最令人身心俱疲的旅程之一，其艰辛程度堪比医学院学习和慢性疾病。

帕顿成为了儿童领域最伟大的力量之一——除了她的扫盲工作外，她还实际资助孩子们完成高中学业，去年多莉伍德基金会报告称，他们向 22 名当地高中生提供了大学奖学金。

正如阿什利·费特斯·马洛伊在《华盛顿邮报》上所说，“她也明白，为了让孩子们茁壮成长，他们几乎必然需要比父母所能给予的更多的支持。”

促进儿童和母亲福祉的方式有很多种。斯坦纳姆毕生致力于堕胎问题，旨在支持人们在生育选择方面拥有自主权。

斯坦纳姆认为，孩子和婚姻的问题在于，它们都根植于女性被视为不如男性的观念。“尤其，”斯坦纳姆几年前在一次采访中说道，“我钦佩那些可能并非经常得到男性同等帮助就独自抚养孩子的女性。我不需要经历这些，我认为这非常了不起。” 她是否后悔没有孩子？“不，绝对不。不，我也不知道为什么，”她说道。

这些年来，她目睹了周围世界的变化。斯坦纳姆66岁时第一次结婚——她注意到婚姻制度已经发生了变化——因此，她一度成为克里斯蒂安·贝尔的继母，这在为人父母和名人的历史上都算是一个有趣的注脚。

她也看到，随着男女各自在社会中的角色不断拓展，男女共同生育子女的传统模式在某些方面有所改善。“养育子女或接受养育子女的教育，是男人成为完整人格的方式，正如我们通过积极参与家庭以外的世界而成为完整的人一样，”她在2015年的一次讲座中对听众说道。

埃文·阿戈斯蒂尼/赫尔顿档案馆/盖蒂图片社

斯坦纳姆始终强调自己不后悔：“一秒钟也不后悔，”她在一次采访中说道，并指出“不是每个有嗓子的人都必须成为歌剧演员”。那是九年前，她和喜剧演员莎拉·西尔弗曼谈过这件事。西尔弗曼当时回应说，她会是个“很棒的爸爸”，但她觉得像我们现在所理解的那样，当妈妈这件事听起来并没有那么吸引人。

没有了孩子，家就变成了另一种模样。对于一生大部分时间都在巡回演讲的斯坦姆来说，一个属于自己的私人空间成了她充电的场所。

“家意味着安全、庇护、朋友和睡眠，”斯坦纳姆在接受《建筑文摘》采访时谈到她在曼哈顿东73街买下的那套公寓，她在那里住了几十年。后来，她买下了楼下，扩大了居住空间，并拥有了一个真正的完整厨房，尽管“我所谓的烹饪就是拨号”。她不再拥有空荡荡、布满灰尘的儿童房，而是拥有了一间总是充满新鲜体验的客房，无论是朋友还是陌生人，都让她感到宾至如归。