Interarts faculty member Miriam Schaer began her unique series of hand embroideries capturing negative views about women without children almost two years ago. Hand stitching pejorative comments like “Childless women lack an essential humanity” in red letters on white baby rompers, Schaer has been exploring societies’ longstanding and multicultural antipathy toward women without children.

Babies (Not) on Board: The Last Prejudice? has received considerable attention, and was included in the International Museum of Women’s online exhibition, MAMA: Motherhood Around the Globe.

Schaer continues to expand the series by looking into the prevalence of this attitude in historic eras and among non-Western cultures. In her research, she has discovered many examples of punitive laws against childless women, for instance:
• Pre-Christian Roman punishments against childless women;
• Banishment of childless women by seventeenth-century Hurons, in what would later become the United States;
• and, under some Indian caste rules, married women who cannot conceive can be punished with divorce and social ostracism.

This year, Schaer has begun broadening the intriguing series with still and video photography. A recent photo shoot in which Schaer dressed commercial baby mannequins and hyper-realistic dolls with her garments yielded unsettling images, in which the infant dolls seem to criticize their own existence. She was assisted in the shoot by MFA Book + Paper Program Director Melissa Potter, and InterArts MFA students Leo Selvaggio, Chelsey Shilling (InterArts Media), Jillian Bruschera, and Krista Franklin (Book + Paper).

Schaer is also preparing an artists’ book to augment her series, The Presence of Their Absence: Society’s Bias Against Women Without Children, that will include her embroideries, photos, and examples of societies’ hostility.

For more information on the artist and her work, click here.