In Ireland, where womanhood has long been synonymous with motherhood – embodied most clearly in the figure of the “Irish Mammy,” revered for her tireless devotion and self-sacrifice – a quiet revolution is under way. A growing community of women is choosing a different path – not in rebellion, but in the simple act of living life on their own terms. These women are redefining what it means to be female in a society that has, for centuries, linked femininity with fertility.
Among the women leading this shift is Tullamore native Niamh Madden, who founded Sisterhood, a social group for women without children, four years ago.
“I set up the group because I felt lonely,” Madden says. “Most of my friends were busy with their families, and I needed to find my own community. I wanted a space where not having children wasn’t the main topic of conversation, but where it wasn’t an elephant in the room either.”
Now 41, Madden reflects on her decision not to have children. “It wasn’t a lightning bolt moment. It was a slow, thoughtful process. I realised I was happy with my life as it was and didn’t feel the pull towards motherhood. I wasn’t against kids – I just didn’t feel that urge. And that, I learned, is enough.”
For wellness coach Sinéad Kennedy, the pressure to conform to a traditional life of marriage and motherhood was overwhelming. Now 52, growing up there was an assumption that little girls all wanted to eventually get married. “But not only did it not happen, I realised that it wasn’t something I wanted,” she says.
In her 30s, Kennedy was in a bad relationship but was still on track to buy a house, get married and have children with her partner. But inside, she knew this wasn’t the life path for her. The pain of suppressing her feelings and the mounting panic of committing to a life that felt like a trap escalated.
[ No baby on board: The women who choose not to have childrenOpens in new window ]
“Deep down inside, there was always this kind of inner hippie, if you like, who kind of was saying, ‘No, you’re denying it, you’re suppressing that whole side of you.’” Sinéad began to suffer from mental health issues and reached a breaking point that she has written about in her self-published book Life Is A Cycle.
“It’s the first page of the book, you know, where I’m sitting in St Pat’s psychiatric ward, going, ‘What the hell is going on here?’ And it was only when I realised I was trying to be somebody that I’m not, that I was able to get on with my actual life. I was trying to conform but actually, it was never what I wanted.”
Now, Kennedy has a life she says even she is jealous of, travelling and running wellness retreats. This year she has been to Antarctica and is planning a trip to Kilimanjaro – but for many women, it’s not that a life without children has to mean an existence of globe-trotting and excitement, it’s just about living a life of quiet contentment.
As part of an innovation course she was undertaking at University College Dublin, Niamh Madden surveyed 200 Irish women in 2019 and found that their primary reasons for not having children were simple: contentment with life as it is; concerns about climate change, and a desire to travel. Contrary to popular stereotypes, career ambitions didn’t make the top three.
“There’s this stereotype of the high-powered, career-obsessed woman who ‘chooses’ work over kids. But what I found was that most women were just content. They liked their lives. It wasn’t about replacing one traditional path with another; it was about carving out their own path,” Madden says.
Yet in a culture that frames motherhood as the pinnacle of womanhood, there is an implicit pressure to justify such a choice – or worse, to compensate for it. “There’s this expectation that if you don’t have kids, you should be doing something remarkable instead,” Madden says. “Be a CEO, travel the world, win awards. It’s like you need to prove your life is still valuable.”
This burden to validate one’s existence resonates deeply with author Nicole Louie. Originally from Brazil and now living in Ireland, Louie released her book Others Like Me last year. Louie’s insightful memoir explores her decision to not have children. She also conducted 14 interviews with women from the United States, Norway, the UK, Thailand, Ghana, Rhodesia, Peru and Turkey, all of whom elected not to have children. The interviews are presented as unbroken, first-person accounts, and each interview allows room for each interviewee’s specific experience, cultural background, and personal reflection to shine through.
The idea of having to justify your existence was a common theme among the interviews. “It’s not enough to simply be,” Louie says. “You have to excel – or risk being seen as selfish, frivolous, or worse, a failure.”
Pressure to prove your worth
Rejecting motherhood can often be seen as a rejection of both respectability and responsibility. The expectation to prove oneself as a “good” or “respectable” person without following traditional life paths weighs on many child-free women.
“It’s as if choosing not to have children leaves this vacuum you’re expected to fill with something else – philanthropy, career success, artistic brilliance,” Louie notes. “Otherwise, you’re seen as someone who opted out of responsibility entirely.”
[ I don’t have children, and I never will, and I wouldn’t change that for the worldOpens in new window ]
Women without children often feel compelled to demonstrate their worth in other nurturing roles – caring for elderly parents or acting as aunts, godmothers, caretakers. “There’s this idea that if you don’t have your own kids, you should still be mothering someone,” Louie says. “Otherwise, people question your compassion, your womanhood.”
Emily Brew is 37 and is a radio presenter for Radio Nova. Brew is aware of the myths of women without children being selfish, irresponsible or uncaring. She says she knew motherhood wasn’t for her not because she wouldn’t be good at it but because to her, being a loving and attentive parent would be too all-consuming for the life she wants.
“Not to toot my own horn, but I think I’d be a fantastic mother. I’d be an anxious mother, I would overthink every single aspect, I would just be a big ball of stress all the time. If I had to do it, if there was a circumstance where there was a child who needed a home and didn’t have a home, I think that I would do a very good job of raising them, but it would have to be forced on me. None of it appeals to me.”
Brew’s thoughtfulness around the responsibilities of motherhood comes partly from seeing how much work went into her own mother’s experience of parenthood.
“I look back at our childhood, how much love and attention and care we got. Mum stayed at home and raised the family and, I mean, fresh sheets twice a week, dinners every night, did the homework, all those kind of things. Looking at that, that’s the level of investment I would want to give to a child – and I don’t have it in me. I don’t have the grá for it.”
Domestic labour and motherhood
The idea of conflating motherhood with constant domestic labour and effort was also something that influenced Nicole Louie’s feelings about having children. Louie’s perspective on motherhood was influenced by observing her mother and grandmother’s exhaustion.
“It definitely has to do with the sense of how overwhelmed I observed my mother and my grandmother to be; how tired, how regretful, how resentful they felt about the accumulation of responsibility they had because they had children. That had quite a big weight until I was in my mid 20s; the fear of feeling as resentful towards my life choices – or lack of choices, in their case.”
Research shows that Irish women still do more domestic labour and care work than their male partners. With the gender pay gap and high childcare costs, women often sacrifice their careers. These systemic inequalities shape women’s decisions about motherhood, yet suspicion often still falls on child-free women.
Emily Brew also points to the gendered double standards. “Being child-free isn’t an identity marker for men the way it is for women,” she says. “A man without kids is just a man. For women, it becomes a defining characteristic.”
Dating and gender expectations
This difference in gender assumptions can often make dating complex for women who don’t want children. While many women enter relationships expecting open conversations about long-term goals, they often find that men are less decisive about whether they want children.
“It comes up a lot,” Niamh Madden says. “Some of the women who are looking to meet men have said that a lot of male profiles will say something vague like ‘maybe someday’. And they’re not sure if the guy wants kids or not, because the guy maybe doesn’t want to segregate himself from women who do want kids. So if you definitely don’t want kids, how do you find someone who also definitely doesn’t, when men don’t put that on their dating profile?”
This ambiguity is often strategic. Men who are unsure or indifferent about children are less likely to face the same social scrutiny that child-free women do. “Men are allowed to be undecided,” Madden says. “Whereas women are expected to either want kids or to have a really strong justification for not wanting them.”
Brew points to the deeper societal dynamics at play, where the gendered division of labour means men can be more casual about considering parenthood.
“The emotional and logistical responsibility of raising children still rests largely on women,” she says. “Even in families where the dad is super involved, it’s often the woman who’s doing the thinking and planning: researching schools, thinking about crèches three years in advance, all that. A lot of men just assume that if they have kids, they’ll do their part – provide financially, be present – but they don’t necessarily think about the day-to-day logistics.
“For women, there’s this awareness that parenthood is not just about having a kid, it’s about who’s going to plan everything for that kid for the next 18 years.”
Social exclusion and systemic infantilisation
When women choose not to have children, they often find themselves facing subtle forms of exclusion in their personal and professional lives. Friends with children may unintentionally sideline them from social events, or assume their time is less valuable. In workplaces, they’re frequently expected to shoulder extra responsibilities.
“People assume you can work holidays, take late shifts, or cover for parents,” Madden says. “It’s as if your time – and your life – matters less.”
This dynamic also seeps into cultural conversations about respectability. “There’s this bizarre idea that without kids, you’re somehow not fully adult,” Nicole Louie says. “Like you haven’t really arrived at responsibility.”
[ Emer McLysaght: I’m child-free by choice and I don’t blame you if you hate meOpens in new window ]
This sense of being infantilised, of not being treated as an adult, also emerges in how women without children find their decisions and choices are doubted, in social and systemic ways. Child-free women often face comments like “Oh, you’ll change your mind” – but the impact is more profound than just patronising small talk.
On-screen, female characters in films and TV shows who don’t want children are often saddled with storylines of an unwanted pregnancy, and the vast majority of these storylines end with them happily embracing and loving motherhood. There’s also the “second thought” portrayal of abortions, where otherwise pro-choice characters experience a deep wave of regret and decide to go through with their pregnancy, as seen in Juno, Blue Valentine and Sex and the City.
This implication that women can’t be trusted in their decision not to have children has real life implications in politics and healthcare. Abortions still have completely arbitrary and medically unnecessary waiting periods, and women often find their medical choices questioned and ignored.
Niamh Madden shares stories from her group of women being denied permanent birth control and sterilisation, their decisions dismissed as rash or immature. “Doctors have literally told women, ‘You’ll change your mind’,” she says. “Even when they’re in their 30s or 40s. It’s a paternalistic assumption that women can’t possibly know their own futures.”
This paternalism is often most visible in how the healthcare system treats women with chronic pain or gynaecological conditions.
“Women with endometriosis, with fibroids, with other kind of gynaecological conditions, they will always be told about their fertility, as if that is more important [than] the condition that is debilitating their lives,” says Louie. “As if saving or rescuing their uterus is always more important than even other parts of their body. And if you’re bleeding every day, you’re in pain every day, all of that needs to be treated in relation to fertility. Sometimes we are not even given the possibility of making decisions about our bodies ourselves.”
New ideas of legacy
Deciding to live a life without children means rethinking ideas of legacy, which is something Louie has thought about a lot. She finds inspiration in art, literature, and community-building, seeing these as meaningful ways to leave an imprint.
“I found it in friends. I found it in books. I found it in the art created by other women, photography by women, painting by women, cultures by women. What if life was just a little bit more horizontal? If we looked around as much as we look up to our mothers and fathers and down to the children – I often wonder, would we be in a better place? I’m very interested in other human beings, even if they don’t have my surname and don’t belong to my bloodline.”
Sinéad Kennedy is very aware of how societal structures often fall back on entrenched ideas about family and legacy. In Ireland, tax laws heavily favour traditional family units. “There’s a very big discrimination, particularly in our inheritance laws,” she says. “If I want to leave my house or whatever to a niece, she’ll be taxed on it much more than if I had a child. I do think you should be allowed to nominate a beneficiary and have the same rights as leaving things to children.”
This reality is particularly stark when it comes to ageing. Without children to rely on, many women worry about future care. “There’s this fear of growing old alone, of slipping through the cracks,” Niamh Madden says. “But instead of framing that as a personal failing, why not build better community support systems?”
Some countries are starting to rethink these structures. In the United States, initiatives like the New Legacy Institute advocate for policy changes that reflect diverse family forms. Madden sees similar potential in Ireland. “We need to rethink how we define family, care, and community – not just for child-free people, but for everyone.”
The quiet power of community
Madden’s group Sisterhood is a space where these conversations can happen without judgment. With more than 1,300 members, it offers solidarity and a sense of belonging. “Some women come because they want to talk about being child-free,” she says. “Others just want to meet like-minded people and never mention it. Both are welcome.”
For many, the group provides more than friendship; it offers a lifeline. “We have women who’ve never said out loud that they don’t want kids until they come here,” Madden says. “There’s a huge sense of relief in finding people who get it.”
Nicole Louie has set up book clubs for women who have read her book, as well as using her Instagram page to provide resources of books, films and TV shows that show women without children living happy, fulfilling lives – a small pushback against pervasive narratives.
I see women coming to my retreats – empty nesters, divorcees, widows – who are rediscovering their independence
— Sinéad Kennedy
In Cork, Spanish native Pilar Castellano started a child-free social group on Meetup after moving to Ireland three years ago and finding it hard to meet friends in their 30s and 40s who were free and willing to socialise.
And for globe-trotting Sinéad Kennedy, she sees the example she sets, of a life of travel, self-love and adventure, as a form of legacy. Though her retreats are open to all women, whether they have children or not, she sees the impact of gathering women together in spaces of self-love.
“I see women coming to my retreats – empty nesters, divorcees, widows – who are rediscovering their independence. It’s inspiring to see them stepping into new chapters of their lives. I see legacy in the connections I make, the spaces I create. It’s meaningful.”
At its core, this isn’t just a story about women without children. It’s about expanding society’s definition of a meaningful life. It’s about recognising that worth isn’t contingent on motherhood, that care can be communal, and that legacy can be measured in love, creativity, and connection.
“Fulfilment doesn’t have a single shape,” Kennedy says. “And happiness? It doesn’t need to be justified.”
