About the Authors:
Dr. Roxane Dinkin is a licensed psychologist who was in fulltime private practice for 40 years until she retired at the end of 2019.
Education: PhD Clinical Psychology, University of Miami
License: Florida Licensed Psychologist PY6474
Professional Activities and Memberships: American Psychological Association, Florida Psychological Association
Publications:
"Living with Cancer, One Day at a Time", a LifeLights brochure that has sold over 40,000 copies.
Infertility and the Creative Spirit (iUniverse, 2011)
Dr. Robert J. Dinkin was a professor of history at California State University, Fresno, for 33 years. He taught American history and women’s history and is the author of five books on American political history. Currently he teaches locally in Sarasota, Florida.
Education: PhD American History, Columbia University
Publications:
Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the Thirteen Colonies (Greenwood Press, 1977)
Voting in Revolutionary America: A Study of Elections in the Original Thirteen States (Greenwood Press, 1982)
Campaigning in America: A History of Election Practices (Greenwood Press, 1989)
Before Equal Suffrage: Women in Partisan Politics from Colonial Times to 1920 (Greenwood Press, 1995)
Election Day: A Documentary History (Greenwood Press, 2002)
Infertility and the Creative Spirit (iUniverse, 2011)
Joy Adamson, author and naturalist, helped to change the world’s perception of the relationship between animals and humans. It was only in middle age, after years of unsuccessful attempts to have children, that Adamson began adopting and nurturing orphaned wild animals. Her story of raising a lion cub named Elsa to adulthood and successfully releasing her to the wild became widely known with the publication of Born Free in 1960 and the subsequent movie of the same name.
Toward the end of her acclaimed autobiography Blackberry Winter, the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead wrote the following: “Something very special sometimes happen to women when they know they will not have a child—or any more children. It can happen to women who have never married, when they reach the menopause. . . . It can happen to young wives who discover they never can bear a child. Suddenly, their whole creativity is released—they paint or write as never before or they throw themselves into academic work with enthusiasm, where before they had only half a mind to spare for it. . . .”1 While Mead mentioned no one specific here, her close friend and longtime colleague, Ruth Benedict, most definitely fit the description. After finding out at age thirty-two that she was infertile, Benedict, who since college had ventured forth creatively in a number of directions without real success, now became a serious student of anthropology. She soon obtained a Ph.D., and, through hard work and dedication over the next quarter century, rose to the very top of her field. Perhaps her scholarly achievements would have come about anyway, but it seems likely that she grew freer to focus whole-heartedly on her professional work only when she knew she would not have children.
Emma Goldman was a major revolutionary activist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For roughly fifty years on the public stage, she vigorously condemned capitalism and criticized many other aspects of the bourgeois western lifestyle, including conventional marriage and motherhood. At the same time, she used motherhood as a metaphor for her revolutionary activities. Throughout her adult life, Goldman worked relentlessly to establish an alternative way of living based on anarchist principles, which meant the withering away of government and other institutional controls. Her message included the demand for free speech without limits, and, even before Margaret Sanger came on the scene, a clarion call for birth control so as to free women from the burdens and risks of continuous childbearing.
The acclaimed African-American entertainer, Josephine Baker, never one to do things on a small scale, responded to her infertility in a grand fashion, by integrating mothering with social change. In midlife, she began adopting children, eventually twelve in number, of diverse origins and adverse circumstances, whom she called the Rainbow Tribe, and devoted much of her later years to raising them and promoting international brotherhood.
Frida Kahlo, the Mexican artist whose popularity has grown dramatically over the last few decades, is noted in particular for painting the trauma of infertility and pregnancy loss. Her depiction of failed pregnancy not only constituted revolutionary subject matter but also reflected a fundamental change in her creative style. More broadly, in making herself and her internal experience the focal point of many of her paintings, Kahlo communicated her psychological reality as a woman.
Juliette Low was a remarkable person. Although accomplishing little in a worldly sense in the first five decades of her life, Low in her later years helped bring new skills and new ways of socialization to growing numbers of young and adolescent girls by founding the Girl Scouts of America. A childless woman, who never raised any daughters of her own, she wound up heading a national organization that made her a virtual mother to thousands.
Hollywood actress Marilyn Monroe was one of the most celebrated figures of the mid-twentieth century, and though long departed is still among the most recognized women in the world. Through her looks, talent, and driving ambition, Monroe rose to fame in the early to mid-1950s, with a stream of hit movies and magazine photo spreads that turned her into a mega-star and sexual icon. Combining powerful allure with sweet innocence, she altered perceptions of women’s sexuality, making its open display more acceptable on the big screen and in real life as well. For a while Monroe seemed to have it all—money, celebrity, and being courted by some of the most prominent men of the time. Yet among her personal problems, one that has not received sufficient attention was the great trouble she had in dealing with her childlessness. Although not well known by the public today, this failure to bring a pregnancy to term was a central part of her growing unhappiness in the years before her death.