Without Children
The Long History of Not Being a Mother
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
A historian explores the complicated relationship between womanhood and motherhood in this “timely, refreshingly open-hearted study of the choices women make and the cards they’re dealt” (Ada Calhoun, author of Why We Can’t Sleep).
In an era of falling births, it’s often said that millennials invented the idea of not having kids. But history is full of women without children: some who chose childless lives, others who wanted children but never had them, and still others—the vast majority, then and now—who fell somewhere in between. Modern women considering how and if children fit into their lives are products of their political, ecological, and cultural moment. But history also tells them that they are not alone.
Drawing on deep research and her own experience as a woman without children, historian Peggy O’Donnell Heffington shows that many of the reasons women are not having children today are ones they share with women in the past: a lack of support, their jobs or finances, environmental concerns, infertility, and the desire to live different kinds of lives. Understanding this history—how normal it has always been to not have children, and how hard society has worked to make it seem abnormal—is key, she writes, to rebuilding kinship between mothers and non-mothers, and to building a better world for us all.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Heffington's incisive debut examines how society demonizes women without children while increasingly failing to provide the supports that make it possible to raise kids sustainably. Noting that "births were down overall" during the Covid-19 pandemic, except for an uptick among middle- and upper-middle-class white women, Heffington posits that the choice to not have children is more "determined by economic pain, lack of support, and fear about the future" than is generally acknowledged. Discussions of the most frequently cited reasons, including work-life imbalance, infertility, and environmental concerns, feature profiles of Queen Elizabeth I, American ecologist Stephanie Mills, and others who embody each challenge. Throughout, Heffington describes how Western "marriage patterns" and the rise of the nuclear family "made it less likely people would—or could—create those families at all." Ultimately, she concludes that in a society that doesn't guarantee maternity leave or health insurance and a world that does not really need more people, giving birth as a default female obligation doesn't make sense. Though women who make the choice to have children may find Heffington's approach antagonistic, she effectively blends statistical data and personal histories to counter the notion that the issue is a purely modern one, and to shift the focus from individual preferences and challenges to systemic societal failures. This is a cogent and well-supported polemic.
