This paper explores regrets about childlessness in 90 older women interviewed using qualitative methods. Regrets were discussed in the context of the changing meaning of childlessness over the life course. We found that issues of regret are situated in a cultural system that renders childless women marginal. We argue that regrets should be understood in a wider cultural context that incorporates the cultural construction of the self over time.

The key relationships of never married, childless older women, that is, those relationships described as central, compelling, enduring, or significant throughout their lifetimes, were explored in this study. Analysis of qualitative, ethnographically based interviews with 31 women indicated that the key relationships they describe fall into three classes: ties through blood, friendships, and those we label "constructed" ties (kin-like nonkin relations). We report on types of key interpersonal relationships of these women and also examine limits to these key relations, describing some strategies these women have adopted for gaining kin-like relations and the problems inherent in them for the expectation of care in later life. Theoretical work by anthropologist David Schneider concerning American kinship as a cultural system is used to explore dimensions of these relationships.While much gerontological research focuses on marriage and parental status of the older person, more than 20 percent of older Americans have no children, and some 5 to 6 percent have never married. American culture is strongly pronatalist, marriage is normative, and key relations are articulated on the basis of a cultural ideology of shared biogenetic substance ("the blood tie"; Schneider, 1980). Given an alternative set of life paths that does not include affinal and filial relations, never married, childless elderly women may become involved in relationships that are central to them and enduring and that, while nonstandard, are enriching and generative.Based on lengthy qualitative research conversations with 31 never married, childless women age 60 and older, interviewed as part of a larger project on childless older women, this article has two aims. First, it reports on types of and attitudes toward key interpersonal relationships of these women. Second, it examines limits to these key relations, describing some strategies these women have adopted for gaining kin-like relations and the problems inherent in them for the expectation of care in later life. It should be noted that the theoretical perspective taken here, deriving from cultural anthropology, emphasized the role of cultural meaning in the analysis of social relations. It is different from, and must be viewed as complementary to, the approach usually taken in kinship and support studies in gerontology.A choice was made to focus here on never married, childless older women because their situations are compelling in that they lack connections of parenthood and marriage from which the pool of later-life caregivers is often drawn. Further, our focus on this group illuminates the nature and limits of the cultural ideology of kinship upon which many key relations are usually based. Certainly, the issues and findings reported here for our informants may be extended to women in other parental and marital statuses for whom these issues are no doubt germane; however, this is beyond the scope of this report. Further, in addressing these aims, we introduce a body of theoretical work o...

This article describes differences between elderly Jewish and non-Jewish women in dealing with the death of an adult child. Dimensions of difference include the meaning of the death to the mother, her expression of grief, and her conceptualization of the future in the face of the loss. Results are based on data from 12 Jewish and 17 non-Jewish women taking part in a larger study examining generativity as a predictor of well-being in women over 60. Data collection included in-depth life histories and quantitative evaluations of well-being, affect, generativity, and personality variables associated with mothering. Qualitatively, Jewish women were depressed and fixed in grief, with the loss remaining central to their lives. Non-Jewish women articulated philosophies of acceptance, putting the death in a perspective that enabled them to move beyond their loss. Well-being, affect, generativity, and personality measures statistically supported the qualitative differences found between the groups.

Theoretical approaches to conceptualising the notion of generativity have been psychologically or psychosocially based and assume generativity to be a universal phenomenon. Because psychological issues are subsumed within a cultural context, we suggest that generativity is not a universal psychological principle but rather a cultural construct. In this paper we argue that generativity must be analysed as a product of American culture and its embeddedness in individualism. Through an analysis of ethnographically based interviews with 161 older women we illustrate how generative behaviour is inextricably tied to a constellation of American beliefs about the nature of the self, the meaning of death, and attempts to attain immortality that are informed by the ideology of individualism.

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