In mid-May, a graphic in the Wall Street Journal was published on its social media platforms showing a line plummeting from the graph’s peak. “There Aren’t Enough Babies,” went the accompanying headline. “It’s Going To Change Everything.” Though the headline was presented as breaking news, the decline in birth rates has been dominating media discourse for several years now, with the blame most often falling on women.
Women have become too picky, claim columnists. Women are not religious enough; #MeToo has destroyed dating; feminism has destroyed the nuclear family. Taking place against a backdrop of a worldwide backlash against women’s reproductive rights, the discourse surrounding declining birth rates is of course political, but it’s also lacking in basic curiosity. So many column inches are dedicated to judging women for not having children, and so little writing is dedicated to listening to women without children to understand their choices and experiences. Two new non-fiction books featuring interviews with many childfree women are trying to add more voices to the conversation.
That’s “childfree”, as in a choice, not “childless”, as in a state of lack – a distinction Northern Irish writer Caroline Magennis draws in the opening of Harpy, a timely, thoughtful and layered book that focuses on building up care, community and solidarity both for and among childfree women. Magennis’s work as an academic allows her to offer fluent analysis of the representation of childfree women in pop culture and the role of the mother in the construction of society and nation. Irish mothers are venerated but neglected, Magennis notes; while Northern Irish mothers are reminders of history and so must be “portrayed on screen with two expressions – brow set in worry or shoulders hunched from weeping”.
Her tone remains light and accessible throughout. Harpy begins with the author confessing that at dinner parties she finds herself looking for “the women with a hint of devilment”. Magennis becomes that woman for the reader, her tone mimicking that of a well-informed friend moving from personal anecdote to cultural analysis to a collective call to action, as she describes how childfree women are constantly forced to navigate the expectations of everyone around them.
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Harpy’s chapters are structured thematically, exploring the childfree woman in the home, relationships, pop culture, the workplace, the cultural and moral imagination, and envisioning a more supportive future for childfree women. Each chapter includes quotations from interviews that Magennis conducted with 55 childfree women (as the author notes, mainly straight, cis, white and able-boded) who detail their experiences of feeling like outliers.
Personally, their choices are constantly doubted and interrogated by families, friends and medical practitioners. Culturally, mothers are seen as the standard of good womanhood, and so suspicion surrounds childfree women; they are assumed to be selfish, immature, flaky, judgmental of mothers, uninterested in the common good.
Magennis deconstructs the constant social messaging that portrays mothers as paragons of moral virtue and childfree women as lacking in social responsibility, observing how politicians present themselves as compassionate leaders by deploying the phrase “As a mother” – the implication being “that people without children are somehow not interested in the common good when we also live in the world, care about people and want a fair deal for them”.
Magennis is acutely aware of the societal and cultural pressure on women to have children, noting, “if motherhood is natural and inevitable for all women, the coercive language directed at anyone who dissents would not have to be quite so forceful. We would not have to be persuaded at every level, by everyone, all the time.”
However, Magennis doesn’t want to create more division or solely focus on the challenges faced by childfree women. In a sentiment reminiscent of trans theorist Jack Halberstam’s celebration of outlier experiences in his book The Queer Art Of Failure, Magennis highlights the social possibilities that come with being childfree and embracing childfree women as important members of society – though her ideas could hugely benefit from more queer perspectives on community building.
Childfree women don’t base their decision to not become mothers solely on the positive aspects of a childfree existence; they also evaluate the negative aspects of motherhood and reject them
She does, importantly, combat ideas of exceptionalism, observing that childfree women are expected to be exceptionally ambitious, career-focused or successful, to compensate for their childlessness. Highlighting the right for childfree women to live quiet, ordinary lives is a refreshing break from the individualistic, neoliberal, girl-boss rhetoric that often swirls around childfree women.
This positive, community-focused approach makes for an affirming and uplifting read, though the upbeat tone can come at the expense of more layered interrogations. Magennis observes that “there is a narrow path to likeability as a woman, and it narrows further if you don’t have children”. Sometimes the book itself feels like it has fallen into the likeability trap, determined to portray childfree women as socially unthreatening as possible.
For a book about women without children, abortion is barely referenced, which feels like a bias towards respectability. Magennis’s choice of interview quotations can also make her participants seem saint-like in their reflections. When discussing the social fractures that can occur between mothers and childfree women, her interviewees express boundless empathy and patience, never once voicing an ounce of understandable boredom or frustration with friendships that radically shift after the arrival of children.
Nor do the interviewees ever linger on what they see as the negative (or, to be euphemistic, “challenging”) sides of parenting, which even most mothers themselves would attest to: financial stress; increased domestic labour; less time for individual pursuits; documented drop-offs in career advancement and opportunities; feeling touched out and stressed; the impact children have on romantic and sexual lives; and the seemingly endless forms of self-sacrifice.
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This avoidance feels calculated towards politeness rather than realism. Childfree women don’t base their decision to not become mothers solely on the positive aspects of a childfree existence; they also evaluate the negative aspects of motherhood and reject them. By not giving voice to any negative perceptions of motherhood, Harpy misses out on the radical act of letting childfree women be as clear-eyed, opinionated, occasionally judgmental and ultimately human as anyone else.
The structure of Irish-based Brazilian writer Nicole Louie’s book Others Like Me makes more space for the gamut of childfree women’s emotions and experiences. While Magennis uses quotations from her anonymous interviewees to expand upon the specific themes and ideas of each chapter, Louie presents her 14 interviews as long, uninterrupted, first-person sections that weave through the author’s personal experience.
As Louie moves from Brazil to Sweden to Ireland, she recounts her relationship with her mother and several romantic partners, constantly wrestling with the guilt of not wanting children and the sometimes realised fear that this decision will prevent her from finding unconditional love.
Louie’s interviews include women from the US, Norway, Britain, Thailand, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Peru and Turkey, and while the author based her interviews on a questionnaire, she allows room for each interviewee’s specific experience, cultural background and personal reflection to shine through. This includes honest reflections by many of the women on their perception of motherhood and their occasional frustration with mothers in their peer groups.
[ I don’t have children, and I never will, and I wouldn’t change that for the worldOpens in new window ]
Cecilie, a Norwegian who provides Others Like Me with one of the few mentions of abortion, comments on the shifts in her friendship group as babies started arriving, and doesn’t pretend to find parenting stories endlessly fascinating. “I have great friends who have children too and I’m always open to the idea that they will go back to being interesting,” Cecilie muses, “but I think it’s like working out. It’s like a muscle, you have to exercise it.”
These interviews are digestible in length and fascinating in breadth, adding depth and nuance to Nicole Louie’s own story, which largely grapples with ideas of gender and sacrifice
Cecilie’s ability to combine exasperation and boredom with warmth, wit and a genuine commitment to maintaining her friendships feels like a fully-rounded portrait of a childfree woman. Louie’s interviews address many other forms of specificity. Women with disabilities discuss their feelings about having children; one woman speaks of how growing up in a war zone meant she always saw motherhood as being wrought with fear; and a Peruvian addresses the emotional and practical complexity of getting her tubes tied in a country where 285,000 women were sterilised against their will.
These interviews are digestible in length and fascinating in breadth, adding depth and nuance to Louie’s own story, which largely grapples with ideas of gender and sacrifice. Louie witnesses the sacrifices her grandmother and mother made for their children; feels resentful of the sacrifices she is forced to make to parent her younger brother; and struggles with asking her male partners to sacrifice having children to be with her.
While her descriptions of her childhood are lushly sensory and descriptive, dialogue-heavy scenes with boyfriends can feel airless and exposition-laden, giving us little insight into who Louie and her partners are as people beyond their debates about having children. This may be indicative of the emotional repression of the conversations, for scenes where Louie’s mother admits her own ambivalence around parenthood, and a scene between Louie and a friend who disappears after having children, feel tender, emotive and quietly revelatory.
Or perhaps some of the airlessness comes from the absence of the body in the book’s first two sections, which is remedied in its final third. Here, Louie details experiencing some debilitating medical issues, at one stage resulting in a week-long hospital stay where no one can tell her what is wrong with her – but male doctors are quick to dismiss her pain and undermine her decisions.
Medical professionals and institutions ignoring women’s pain is a documented phenomenon as recently explored in the podcast The Retrievals, but Louie doesn’t linger on a cultural analysis of this sexism – she feels it. In her descriptions of bodily pain, over-stimulating hospital stays and maddening interactions with doctors, Louie’s writing becomes far more urgent, dynamic, and embodied. Her prose, particularly the dialogue, moves from feeling overly tidy and controlled to suddenly vibrating on the page as Louie’s emotions finally come, unbridled, to the fore.
In Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, writer Sonya Huber describes the ways in which her voice changes when she is in the throes of chronic pain, transforming both her everyday and writerly voice from its prettily descriptive, metaphor-laden, carefully analytical state into something more immediate and unapologetic. “Pain Woman has a different voice,” writes Huber. “She has a kind of messianic confidence that I do not have in my normal writing or even in my normal living… Pain Woman gives no shits. Pain Woman has stuff to tell you, and she has one minute to do so before she’s too tired. Pain Woman knows things.”
Recounting her medical issues, Louie taps into her own Pain Woman, both physically and emotionally, and her writing ignites. Childfree Woman knows things. Childfree Woman has a voice – 14 voices, 55 voices. Childfree Women have stuff to tell you, and these books will make you want to listen.
Further reading
Touched Out: Motherhood, Misogyny, Consent, and Control by Amanda Montei (Beacon Press, 2023)
After becoming a mother on the eve of #MeToo, American writer Amanda Montei reflects on consent when it comes to both sex and motherhood – the pressure, sacrifice and sense of betrayal when women are asked to consent to experiences without knowing how exploitative and lonely they can be. Fierce, well-researched and truly provoking.
Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood by Ruby Warrington (Orion Spring, 2023)
Journalist Ruby Warrington reframes the idea of not having children as being a bold choice of imagination and possibility that can show us new ways to live. Tackling environmentalism, intergenerational healing and a new, feminine from of legacy, Warrington addresses the systemic lack of support for mothers, cultural lack of support for childfree women and how we can do better for all.
Motherhood by Sheila Heti (Harvill Secker, 2018)
Heti’s autofiction novel sees her narrator struggle to decide whether or not to have children. When seeking guidance from her friends and partners unearths no clear answers, she turns to mysticism and philosophy, hoping lengthy conversations with the I Ching will prove more illuminating. Witty, original and addressing questions of art, genius and spirituality, Heti makes ambivalence electrifying.
