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You’re listening to Insights at the Edge. Today, my guest is Ruby Warrington. Ruby is a British-born author, editor, and publishing consultant recognized as a true thought leader in the wellness space. Ruby has the unique ability to identify issues that are destined to become part of the cultural narrative. Her previous books include Material Girl, Mystical World, a book called Sober Curious and The Sober Curious Reset. With Sounds True, Ruby Warrington has written a new book. It’s called Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood, a book that asks us to deeply question our societal judgments about women without children, and instead to see the evolutionary potential of what Ruby calls this unsung sisterhood. Here’s my conversation with Ruby Warrington.
To begin, Ruby, can you share with our listeners what brought you to the point where you felt confident—I want to write the book, Women Without Kids? What were the factors that converged?
Ruby Warrington: These factors had been converging over the course of my life, but there was a very specific moment when this book entered my consciousness as the next project that I wanted to give myself to. And it does feel that way, very much, when I have an idea for a book. It’s an invitation, as Elizabeth Gilbert writes about in Big Magic. It feels like something is knocking on the doorway of my soul saying, are you ready? What do you think? And I, in that moment, was sitting on a beach in Vieques off the coast of Puerto Rico, and I had just devoured a copy of a book called The Silent Passage by the journalist Gail Sheehy. She wrote passages people might be familiar with—that very popular work of hers. The Silent Passage was her book about menopause, and it was, in the words from the back cover of the book, “a radical reframing of menopause.” And it was written, I think, in the early ‘90s.
Now I was 43 at the time and had, I suppose, just started contemplating what this transition might mean for me, and her book was incredibly galvanizing. She described menopause as the gateway to a woman’s second adulthood, rather than the end of anything, it was actually the beginning of a whole new chapter in a woman’s life. And as somebody who had never had a desire to be a mother, but who had been led to believe that there was something missing or that I had somehow missed the point and that I would very likely live to regret not becoming a mother, I realized reading this book, I’m feeling quite excited about the end of my reproductive years. I had no regrets whatsoever. The path I had taken with my life had been absolutely right for me. And the heaping piles of shame and stigma and self-doubt that I had experienced around this very central decision in my life had actually not come from inside me, had been very largely a result of other people’s projections, societal conditioning, about my purpose as a woman, honestly.
So it was really in that moment that I realized we need to talk about this. I’ve been a voracious reader from age five and I had found so few books on this subject that really few books that really got under the skin of this subject in a deep and meaningful way, that gave the subject the weight and the consideration that it deserves. And when I say that this is a subject that deserves weight and consideration, I mean whether or not to become a parent is central to our lives, it’s central to our humanity. And I hadn’t found anything that really dove into it with the level of depth that I felt ready to consider my own feelings about motherhood, my own procreate potential at this pivotal sort of time in my life. So that was the moment. It was very specific and I described that moment in the book, in the last chapter. So yes, it came from a very personal place.
TS: I noticed when you said, as someone who never had a desire to be a mother, I heard this collective gasp like, “Oh my, you never…?” And I think that’s very interesting that it still feels to me, when I sort of just was listening to you talk, that there’s a taboo, like, “You never had a desire to be a mother, really?”
RW: Not enough of a desire to go through the steps and seriously contemplate what it would mean and what it would look like in my life to take on the role of parenthood.
There were times, particularly in my 30s, whilst the volume had really been dialed up on sort of other people’s opinions about my child-free status. There were times when I could almost 99 percent talk myself into wanting that for my life. But there was always a part of me that held back and there was always a part of me that felt more true, which was just—that’s not my path. It’s not the role for me. And yes, it’s stunning to me that in 2023, this is still seen as so “other” and it’s so difficult for people to contemplate or countenance the idea that somebody who is assigned female at birth and born with the reproductive parts to birth a child would not want to do this with their life.
So I think the fact that it is still, despite all of the advances of the feminist movement, all of the advances around reproductive justice and queer rights even, that we still consider this the be all and end all of a woman’s expression specifically. So yes, I think the fact that it still produces such a collective gossip just shows so much how much work there still is to be done in really understanding why a person might feel that way.
So that’s what I attempt to do in this book, to really get very deep under the skin of all the different factors that impact how we feel about becoming mothers, how we feel about being mothers if we have had a child, and the impact our sort of societal expectations when it comes to motherhood.
TS: Can you explain more where you think the stigma comes from?
RW: I think that women without kids are very, very disruptive to the gendered status quo as enforced by patriarchy. Coming to this book, I really didn’t want to use the word patriarchy, and it was impossible not to within this context, when considering this subject. Patriarchy dictates that family looks like this: it is a heterosexual couple, a man and a woman. The man is the provider, the woman is the nurturing caretaker. And as much as we, in so many ways, have progressed way, way beyond that and we can recognize that this does not reflect who we are as human beings, our needs, desires, capabilities, etcetera, etcetera, there’s still so much conditioning around that being the “ideal normal.” So for anyone who exists outside of that very rigid cultural norm, there is going to be a degree of stigma. And I think the fact there is so much stigma shows again how far there is to go in dismantling that as the ideal normal and showing that there are many different ways to make family. There are many different ways to engage with our sexuality. There are many different ways to engage with our procreative potential. And that as a human race, we are evolving beyond that very rigid winery and often oppressively enforced setup when it comes to family life and our social structures even.
TS: Now you said it can be a very disruptive choice—it is disruptive to choose to be a woman without kids. And your book appeals to women who have made what you call the affirmative no, and I’m in that group. Proudly, no, I don’t want to have kids. It’s not my truth. It’s not what I want for my life. But there are many people who, not by choice, but by health constraints or for medical reasons or for other reasons, wish they could have kids. Many women who painfully grieve and terribly wish they could have children but are unable. Help me understand how you were able to write to both groups, because you talk about uniting these groups in what you’re describing as an “unsung sisterhood.” But I could imagine these camps feeling very separate from each other.
RW: Yes. So I come to the book from the position of the affirmative “no” that we share, just an inner knowing that this is just not my role. This is not my role, it’s not my truth, it’s not what I desire for my life. But I also was aware that what I call the mommy binary, which is this falsified honestly that exists between mothers and non-mothers. But then within the camp of non-mothers, between the ones who can’t have kids and the ones who don’t want kids, I just really felt that I wanted to address that binary and where that comes from too, where those divides come from, and to focus more on our shared experiences as women without kids than perhaps the different— I do talk about all of the different reasons that somebody might be a woman without kids, and I felt that actually to speak to all women without kids, anybody who identifies as a woman without kids as I set it up in the book, could be very healing, could create solidarity.
Because regardless of our reasons for being women without kids, we will have experienced much of the same othering, much of the same pity, much of the same misunderstanding, much of the same lack of empathy, much of the same stigma and may have internalized lots of the same feelings of shame. “I’m a failure. There’s something wrong with me.” The root of those feelings might be different depending on our circumstances, but the net results is these feelings of shame and otherness. So first and foremost, I wanted to focus on what unites us over these divisive sort of tropes around like, “Well, if you are a woman who would love to have kids but can’t, then you are deserving of our sympathy. And if you’re a woman who doesn’t want to have kids, then you are a cold, heartless—we don’t know what you are.”
But then I also wanted to, as I got deeper into my research and deeper into the writing and deeper into the excavation and the uncovering of where so much of this stigma comes from, I realized that actually, a lot of people who are making the affirmative choice not to become a parent, that is sometimes from a place of pain. I identify by sharing my own story, that my own experiences of family life were not really something I wanted to replicate. I didn’t have a relationship with my mother that I necessarily wanted to replicate. I’ve been incredibly self-sufficient from a very early age, and that, in its own way, has caused me pain.
So yes, I really wanted to try to unite this, like I said, as you’ve touched on this sort of unsung sisterhood. And if anything, just encourage conversation amongst individuals about our reasons for being women without kids.
I also identify in the first chapter a concept that I present called the motherhood spectrum, where again, we’ve had this very binary idea, you’re either an affirmative yes and you are a natural real woman who is fulfilling her duty and will find fulfillment in her children and her role as a mother, or you are an unnatural deviant woman without kids who is somehow sort of going against the natural order of things. And what I identify with this concept of the motherhood spectrum is that beyond our biological capacity to birth children, there are so many factors which will influence and have a huge impact on both our desire and our capacity to parent. Everything from our personality to the family we were raised in, to the culture we’re a part of, to social structures that we’re sort of ruled by, to our economics status, to our relationships status, to our talents, to our desires for our life. All of these things are going to factor into our ultimate decision or ability to have a child. And I don’t think we’ve had a really in-depth conversation about that. So I wanted to just kind of put that on the table.
There’s a term “childless by circumstance,” which is being used a lot more now. It has, up until now, been very much either you don’t want kids—you’re childless by choice—or you can’t have kids, usually due to fertility issues and you’re childless not by choice. But the largest cohort of women without kids are childless by circumstance. And what I point out in that book is that many of those circumstances are beyond our control, and many of those circumstances are leading us to make choices which result in us not having children. So it’s actually very nuanced and very complex, this idea of childless by circumstance. Where does choice end and circumstance begin? To me, they’re very interwoven. So I hope that by presenting this I can just engender some more empathetic and nuanced conversations around the reasons that we might be women without kids.
TS: Can you tell me more about this category, childless by circumstance? What circumstances were you able to identify were the key contributors to that category?
RW: Right. Well, the most recent research, which is about ten years old at this point—and I’d love to see a study done that’s a bit more up to date—but the research shows that of all the people who don’t have children, about ten percent are affirmative nos—this is just a no for me. About ten percent have experienced fertility issues, which leaves about 80 percent in this childless-by-circumstance category. By far, the leading reason for people to be childless by circumstance is economic. People are worried about the financial implications of whether or not they can afford to be parents. Whether due to a lack of paid parental leave, lack of free health care, lack of other affordable childcare solutions, perhaps they don’t have a supportive network of family or community who could help out with the child-rearing. I think that alone just shines a light on how unsupported so many women are in their mothering by the structures we have to live within. And within that, how devalued the work of mothering is overall in society, particularly in a country like the United States, where there are very few support structures, official support structures for women.
So economic is one of the main reasons. Then comes a desire to focus or establish oneself in one’s career before having children. To establish and then going back to not least financial security, a retirement plan to actually get a foot in the door so that you can safely take some time out of your career potentially to focus on child-rearing. So those are the two main factors.
Anecdotally, I hear a lot of people saying that they just haven’t met the right person to co-parent with. I have several friends who’ve sort of been on the brink of going the root of artificial insemination and embarking on the path of motherhood as independent mothers, as solo mothers, but then sort of getting cold feet, very understandably, at the last minute, realizing how extra unsupported they will be in that role. It’s a huge, huge commitment and will be very challenging for anyone who doesn’t have quite a lot of support structures in place.
So these would be the sort of three main reasons. And then of course, a person’s sexuality, particularly among transgender people, it can be very difficult to even get considered for things like adoption. So there are just all sorts of factors that influence, that might make somebody childless by circumstance, many of which could be addressed by making policy changes that better support parents, that better understand people’s reproductive needs and desires, and that seek to address economic inequality. I don’t think, when I started writing this book, I realized quite how big of a subject this is and how actually this topic can be a doorway into talking about all kinds of other much bigger structural issues that we are facing as a society. Because of course, the one I didn’t mention, I haven’t seen this term used but I use it in the book, for younger generations being childless by climate change is a very serious consideration as well. People who are in their early 30s and 20s are very, very concerned, understandably, about the damage that has been done to the climate and the lack of willingness on behalf of politicians and corporate interests to actually seriously address carbon emissions and avert what we are told is unstoppable climate catastrophe at this point. So childless by climate change is very, very real for younger generations, especially.
TS: Now when you subtitled the book, The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood, you’re pointing to some type of emergence that’s happening now, that this large group of women might perhaps have a special role to be playing as we face climate change, as we need women to have their creative power, energy, and resource available to, in addition, perhaps to raising kid or instead of raising kids. Talk about how you see this as an emerging powerful force in the world.
RW: Well, the revolutionary rise speaks to what is a very real reproduction slowdown globally. Over the past 100 years, and particularly in the past 50 years, since the 1970s and the advent of the women’s liberation movement, women have been having fewer children, dramatically fewer children. So in very black-and-white terms, there are more women without kids. So that’s the sort of “rise” part.
The “revolutionary” part—there’s a line in the introduction where I say, “In some ways, women without kids are the canaries in the coal mine. Our very existence points to the fact that current conditions on planet Earth are simply not conducive to child-rearing and family life.” That is child-rearing and family life as we have known them under patriarchy, with this very limited and very non-autonomous role for women and for mothers. I think that the revolutionary part in some ways comes from us boldly saying, I can’t mother in these conditions. And a lot of people, particularly the childless by circumstance, are modeling that with their actions. “I would like to mother, I cannot mother in these conditions.”
So there’s a birth strike element to that. People might have heard that term. There was an official sort of birth strike movement of women who were sort of publicly stating, we are not having children until serious action is taken on climate change. And they actually disbanded in 2020 because they were concerned that their message had been misconstrued and that they were making some kind of a statement about overpopulation. When in fact, the problem is not that we have too many people, the problem is how we consume energy as a human race and we need to seriously address how we’re organizing things as a people. But yes, I do think there’s an element of people withdrawing from reproductive duties as a way of sort of saying, this just isn’t working.
And then I also make the point that the more women without kids, the more women will have the lion’s share of their resources, whether it’s time, energy, finances, creativity, innovation, etcetera, etcetera, put into public life versus the lion’s share being used up in private life, in family life, sort of behind closed doors.
Now of course, there are amazing mothers who are doing amazing things to have a big influence outside of the home. And it’s not the case that that’s possible for a majority of women in order to be able to have it all, to do both, to really have an impact—meaning to rise to positions of power where you can actually have influence and have your voice be heard and have your creations be seen. To do that in addition to mothering, it requires a lot of resource, a lot of additional resource, a lot of additional support that is not available to the majority of mothers. So I sort of make a case, I suppose, that more women without kids means more of a feminine influence when it comes to positions of power and influence in our society.
TS: Let’s talk personally for a moment, Ruby, if that’s OK. You and I both were a part of this ten percent who said, it’s not for me. It’s not my truth. It’s not what I choose. What’s been the hardest part for you about that, and how have you made peace with your choice?
RW: The hardest part for me, and this is something, as so often is the case with our more subconscious influences, writing about things, getting it all onto the page will make very black and white, will make very clear things that have perhaps been going onto the radar in our lives and influencing us from behind the scenes.
I always very confidently knew I didn’t want to be a mother. It wasn’t until I wrote out the story of my family of origin that it really became crystal clear that, in a large part, I was rejecting so much of the suffering and oppression that had been experienced by women and mothers specifically in my lineage. It wasn’t until I wrote about my relationship with my mother and how that influenced my feelings about becoming a mother that I realized I hadn’t experienced a relationship with her that I wanted to replicate. It wasn’t until I looked at my parents’ relationship with their parents that I realized I had no relationship with my grandparents. I never received a hug from any one of my grandparents. As I touched on earlier, these realizations led to a deeply felt sense of just having lacked any kind of a model for a family that I wanted to replicate. If anything, from a very young age, I learned to look after myself, stay true to myself, and become very self-sufficient. That has served me extremely well in many ways. Our society celebrates self-sufficiency and independence and grit. But it was very painful for me to actually touch in with those sort of family origin stories and realize the extent to which that had formed my feelings about family and my not wanting to reexperience some of that.
Now, what’s been really interesting and is helping me make peace with that is that sharing the manuscript with my mother, which is probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, for anybody who reads the book and thinks to themselves, wow, you’ve really shown a lot here. It’s very vulnerable and it’s very honest. There’s so much that I removed, having been through the conversations with my mom about what actually happened, and I wanted this to represent her truth as much as it represents my truth. And having had those conversations with my mother as a result over the past year, which is when I first shared the manuscript with her, I’m starting to have a relationship with her now that I can imagine people want to replicate. When they feel a strong desire to birth a child, I could imagine that that desire is sometimes a desire to replicate that loving, accepting relationship that they’ve had with their mother or their primary caregiver. And the fact that I’m beginning to be able to experience that with my mother now at the age of, I’m going to turn 47 in a couple of weeks’ time, is bittersweet, because I’m so grateful that I’m starting to have that with her now and I’m really sad. There’s a little sadness that I didn’t have that.
So as much as I know that non-motherhood and this choice has been absolutely right for me in this life, I’m very present to the fact that that has come from a place of loss in many ways.
TS: Now, Ruby, I think this is part of my internalized view of women realizing themselves through motherhood as you’re talking, and so I want to unpack this a little together. First of all, thank you for sharing so vulnerably, so I want to thank you for that and from your heart. What I notice is, when I reflect on my own journey, where it was just very clear to me as a lesbian and as someone who never identified or wanted to birth a child, it wasn’t so much a reflection of my relationship with my mother, it just was not the right archetype for me, if you will. I never connected to it. But when I hear you share your story and I think of some other women that I know, I noticed this is the internalized part, something comes up in me, it’s like, God, I wish they had a better relationship in their family. I wish Ruby had worked this out with her mom 20 years ago, and then she could have had a kid. And then there’s part of me that thinks, what’s going on, Tami? Why do you think that Ruby having a kid would’ve been something better than the fact that she resolved this in her late 40s? So I’m curious what your thoughts are about that.
RW: It’s such an interesting reflection. All my research interviews for the book I recorded it as podcast series, which is airing now. It’s called Women Without Kids, and they’re fascinating. There were such good conversations I couldn’t just have a couple of sentences go in the book and that be it. But I interviewed a woman who’s, I think in her early 30s now, and she had had a, I think it’s called a bilateral salpingectomy, which is where they actually remove the fallopian tubes. It’s an irreversible sterilization procedure. And towards end of the interview she described to me or she let it out that if in the future she did want to have a child that she could use IVF to become pregnant, because her body still produces eggs, they’re just sort of absorbed back into her system. They never make it into the womb to be fertilized. And I felt a similar, oh, so if you do change your mind? Oh, so you could have that thing then. And I think this absolutely speaks to this very ancient conditioning that we have, which is that having a child, I think for men and women, but especially for women, is the apex of fulfillment, the ultimate fulfillment. That nothing else that we do or achieve or have or experience in our lives will ever really be able to replicate that or make up for that lack if we haven’t experienced it.
So, yes, it’s something I’m still unpacking in myself. I think it is an internalized conditioning. It’s a belief that is part of the sort of hetero, patriarchal, Judeo-Christian ideology. So yes, I’m definitely looking at that in myself still. And that’s something that I’ve been—just even in the past few weeks as I’ve been doing so many podcast interviews about the book and really reflecting on the content, talking to my mom about her feelings about the book coming out and recognizing again that I have a relationship with her now, which is just so much deeper and truer, and just bringing myself back to a place of gratitude to having experienced that with her in this life. I didn’t know that I’d ever had this kind of a relationship with her. And I’m so grateful that through engaging with the work of this book, I have been able to have that and how wonderful that she and I will be able to have that kind of relationship for as long as she has left.
And I think, yes, I’m just so incredibly grateful as well that I’ve been able to make a career and find a vocation. I do think of writing as a vocation, and I can sense that for you, your work in publishing and everything that you do in this field possibly has a similar sort of tone to it. But I’m so grateful that I’ve been able to make a life where I do feel completely fulfilled by all of the other things that I engage with.
And I also just come back to whenever that sentimental conditioning around, oh, wouldn’t it have been wonderful if I’d have reached this point ten years ago when it still might have been possible for me to have a child? I just remind myself of what some of, and it can sound a little surface but I think it’s actually really important, I’m incredibly introverted. I do not deal well with stress. I like my days to be as empty as I can make them. I need a lot of quiet, a lot of space around my interactions with other human beings. These are part of who I am. This is always how I’ve been. And I know that my basic personality is just incompatible with the demands and the lifestyle of parenting. And so I always come back to, what do I know about myself? What do I know to be true about myself and my needs, particularly my emotional needs, and how would that be impacted by becoming a parent? So yes, I’m very, very suited to the vocation of writer, not so suited to the vocation of parent.
TS: And you mentioned this notion of fulfillment, and you even said complete fulfillment in the life that you do have, and you write about generativity and how it’s possible for us to, I’ll use the language, give birth in many different ways, and I wonder if you can touch some on that. I notice in your vocation you call yourself a book doula, which is of course bringing new life into the world, helping other people bring their books forward. And here you’ve given birth to the sober-curious movement. Maybe briefly just tell people what that is. And here you are holding a torch for a new revolutionary rise of unsung sisterhood. These are big birthing exercises in my view. I’m curious how you see it.
RW: So I write about generativity in the last chapter of the book, which is called “Another Legacy,” and I’m really thinking, when I’m writing about this concept, about the mark we leave on the world. How do we make our lives count? Generativity was identified by the psychologist Erik Erickson in the 1950s. He came up with a series of phases that we experience as human beings as we go through life, and I think generativity is either the sixth or the seventh phase of eight, and it comes… It must be the sixth. Sorry if I’m getting that wrong. It’s in the book. But generativity is the phase which coincides with midlife, sort of from 40 to 60, a phase when many people are really caught up with the day-to-day of parenting. And it is when we as humans tend to ask ourselves, is this it? How can I make my life count? Midlife is the phase where naturally we sort of reflect and look back, what have I achieved? What has my mark been? What has my life been about and how can I make my life count? In particular, in terms of what will be left behind, what imprint am I leaving for future generations?
Now, even in the 1950s, Erickson did not equate or sort of say that generativity was dependent on a person being a biological parent and that there are many ways to enact generativity. And they make the point in the book that it sounds like generous activity and that actually anything which is coming from a place of generosity, which has an element of this is something I’m engaging with for the benefit of myself and others could come under the umbrella of generativity. And I really like thinking about legacy in that way. I know that having published books is sort of an obvious one.
Our books live on longer than we do. Well, for as long as they stay in print anyway. And as an author, one of the things I love about this vocation is that I will never know the impact my work has, and yet I know that it has a huge impact from the messages and the emails I do get. Imagining that for every message I get—for example, you touched on the sober-curious movement. My last book was called Sober Curious, which was inviting a different way to think about changing our relationship to alcohol individually and also collectively, outside of traditional sort of ideas about recovery and addiction. I get messages about that all the time from people telling me, “This has had a huge impact on my life. This has saved my life. This has completely transformed how I am as a parent.” And I imagine that for each of those messages, there are probably hundreds of people who’ve had a similar experience. And I know from my own experience of being so precarious and removing alcohol from my life, what a profound impact that has had on my relationships with the other people in my life.
For example, I don’t think I could have gone there with my mom in the way that I have, or with this book, actually, to the depth that I have had I still been using alcohol to numb out or shy away from some of the more painful aspects of my experience of my life, if that makes sense. Removing alcohol has really helped me to, well, helped forced me to sit with and then examine the real root causes of some of the deeper psycho-emotional pain that I experience in my life. I’ve been using alcohol to medicate in many ways. And so yes, these are ways that I think about my legacy, I suppose. But I also realize it’s very specific.
And I make the point in the book, Women Without Kids, that I don’t think any person needs to validate their existence in other ways if they haven’t had children to make up for the fact that they’re not bringing new humans into the world, they must bring other sort of creative inventions or endeavors or projects into the world. I truly think, and I make this point as well, that anybody who’s very actively engaged in their healing work is having a huge impact purely by the fact that showing up as a more healed and whole and accepting human being is going to dramatically improve your relationships with other human beings, which will have a ripple effect in your family, in your community, your places of work. And even if it’s just these people who are impacted by you making that change in your life, well, that’s a legacy worth leaving.
And just quickly to the book doula piece, yes, in my day job I work with authors to concept, gestate, and write and launch their books, and I love being that support for people who are engaged in that process.
TS: I just have to say, Ruby, you’re very brilliant. You took all the threads of my question and wove them into an answer, and you’re very, very good at doing that, taking a lot of disparate threads and weaving them all together.
Now, I noticed as you were talking about the kind of fulfillment that can exist in our lives through the creative work we do, I had this thought, once again I’ll call it a cultural interject, about like, oh, great, we get all these consolation prizes, but we missed the real thing, the love of children and their mother. And I know someone who mentioned to me, “You’ll never know this thing, Tami. You haven’t experienced, you’ll never know the incredible depth.” And as you write about in Women Without Kids, it’s this type of existential FOMO that suddenly comes up and I’m like, will I never know this certain kind of love? Am I missing something that is at the heart of a woman’s life that I’ll never know? Even though I’m deep, as you can tell, in the affirmative no category, this still came up for me as this person was sharing with me her experience as a mom. And anyway, I’m just wondering what you think about that, how we address this existential FOMO.
RW: Well, it’s interesting to hear you say you’ve experienced it too, but yes, I think that any woman without kids will have brushed up against this.
I’ll start here, my parents never expressed a huge amount of surprise that I didn’t want to have children. They never tried to pressure me into having children, which I’m very, very grateful for, because a lot of people experience a lot of pressure from their families. But my dad did once say that very thing to me, “I completely understand your life and you’ll never experience real love if you don’t have a child.” And this came up with him recently, we were on a call and in his ironic way, “Who was it who said that to you? Who was that idiot who said that to you?” I was like, “It was you, Dad.” He said, “Yes. I don’t know if I’d say that now.” And we had a conversation about love.
I think that there are many different kinds of love and that there are many different kinds of happiness, and I am accepting, I think, of the fact that as somebody who not having a child means I will not experience a very specific kind of love, that very specific love that a parent feels for their child, which, and this is sort of what came up in the conversation with my dad, is not necessarily the most pleasurable kind of love. I think based on my personal experience, based on other people in my family and whom I’m close to, I think that the love that a parent feels for their child and vice versa can be very fraught and very complicated and quite conditional sometimes as well. I don’t think that parental love is unconditional love, and I think a lot of people don’t experience it that way. I will love you if you marry this person or if you pursue this sort of a career or if you achieve X, Y, Z or if you treat me in a certain way. I think it can be quite a complicated love.
And I think a part of me is quite happy to experience the uncomplicated love that I experience with my pets, with my friends, the uncomplicated kind of love that I have for reading, the uncomplicated kind of love that I feel when I walk in nature. I sort of feel like there’s part of me that just did a sort of psychological, intuitive, cost-benefit analysis. Are there potential risks or hardships that might be down the path of parenthood for a person like me, knowing myself fully and well? Are they worth it for this kind of complicated, mysterious love that I might experience for my child?
So yes, I don’t know. There’s a whole chapter about acceptance and how whatever path we walk in life it will mean not walking other paths. And I think this is something else we realize in midlife. We’ve had enough experiences of not getting the things that we thought we wanted or we thought we deserved or we thought we had earned, and realizing I’m still here, life is still happening. I’m still here. What next? That’s life. Nobody gets everything that we want or everything that we could have. So yes, this is perhaps one of the ultimate experiences of that.
But I think that, along with, “What if you regret it one day, you might regret it,” these can be, whether intentionally or not, very coercive sort of statements to get people back with the procreative program for anyone who has deviated, who has dared to say, “That’s not for me and I’m OK.” It’s revolutionary to walk that alternative path and there are many forces at play to bring us back into the procreative program. And I think that, “You’ll never experience real love. What if you regret it,” and then the other big one, “But who will look after you when you are old?” Those big three can really be designed to stoke that existential FOMO and bring us back into line.
TS: One of the things you write about is people who have chosen to be mothers who regret motherhood, and I thought that’s a really important topic to bring forward, also very taboo. You hear a lot about, will you regret not having kids? But you don’t hear that much about what might be the sources of you regretting having kids. I wonder if you can speak to that.
RW: Yes. I found a book early in my research called Regretting Motherhood, it’s by an Israeli sociologist called Orna Donath, and she conducted a study of I think about 25 women who would openly admit to regretting having had their children, as in, “If I could have my time again, I would not do this.” As you touched on, this is one of the ultimate taboos and reading it was just incredibly—it was compelling and shocking and validating. Validating because it answered that question that you just posed. Everybody says, you will regret not having children, but what if you regret having children?
As one of my friends in the early stages of the project sort of pointed out to me, “This is one of the only decisions that we can’t unmake as human beings.” It really is. It’s an irreversible decision that will alter the course of your life forever. What if you regret it? I mean, this is worthy of considering. Again, studies show that between I think it’s between about 7 and 14 percent of parents express some regret about having had their children and having become parents. And again, those numbers are thought to be underreported because it is such a taboo subject and people often might not even be able to admit it to themselves, let alone somebody conducting a research study.
But yes, I actually believe, and again, this is particularly for women, when we have experienced a large degree of autonomy and bodily sovereignty in our lives as a result of the hard-won advances of the feminists in the women’s liberation movement, to then have that undone or taken away from us in motherhood because sadly, motherhood has not progressed at the same rate as the feminist movement, I think many women experience becoming mothers as a loss of agency, a loss of identity, and a sort of return to a very traditional idea about what a woman’s place is. And I think that that’s very painful. I think that contributes to a lot of postpartum depression, a lot of feelings of disillusionment with motherhood and potentially even regretting motherhood. Again, hugely undiscussed because so taboo and yet very, very important conversations to be having. If this is the case, then how can we improve conditions for mothers? How can we think differently about mothering and what that role means and what that role requires and what people need in that role to feel like they can still retain their autonomy and their identity and still pursue their other dreams for their lives? What does it really mean?
That, I think, is sort of part of the unfinished work of the feminist movement, and I think it’s something that particularly, after what people experienced during the COVID childcare crisis, where so many people suddenly had all of their support systems sort of taken out from under them and found themselves back in these sort of 1950s sort of scenarios, really, really crumbling without those support systems in place. Just shows, I think, how fragile some of the advances, particularly in gender equality have been. So I do think who there are multiple reasons that people might regret motherhood, but I think that’s probably a big one.
TS: I would say the gift that Women Without Kids gave me was helping me look more deeply at ways that I still hold this cultural notion that being a mother is somehow the epitome of a woman’s choice. It may not be for me, because I am clearly a deviant disruptor, but for most women, especially heterosexual women, it is their ultimate fulfillment. So I realized I still held that. I still held that. And the gift the book gave me was to say, what if I actually removed that bias and said, this is a totally open field. Women, you can choose what feels to be your calling. You are going to not get it all, no matter what you choose. You’re not going to get it all. Nobody gets it all. You don’t. Make your choice live with the consequences and accept your life and be fulfilled in the life you have. So that was a sort of open field with—I’m curious when you think of the impact, the wake the book might have in the world, what your hopes are for readers?
RW: Well, it’s very gratifying to hear that that’s what you came away from reading it with. Because I think actually what you just described, it sounds simple, but it is revolutionary, the idea that actually no individual should be confined in terms of how they find fulfillment, the things that bring them joy, what they have to offer the world, by their biological sex or their gender identity. It’s revolutionary. We are in the midst of a really progressive push in terms of gender equality, and I think this is central to that conversation. So I think yes, I would love for more people to come away with that sort of aha moment, I suppose.
Marianne Williamson is running for president again in 2024, not to get too political here or anything, but a large part of her focus is on how can we help people have the lives that they want and the families that they want? And I think that that question, which centralizes on economic inequality, is actually really central to this book too. So I hope that it sort of feeds into and sparks more conversations about how central this is to whether people are actually able to enjoy their lives, lead the kind of lives that they want to under current economic conditions.
And then similarly with climate change, I think if we can look at—well, let’s go backwards a bit. There are two conversations happening concurrently around population. On the one hand, we have people saying, “There are too many people, the Earth can’t support the number of people. We need to reduce the size of the population.” And on the other we have people saying, “We are not having enough people. We’re headed towards population collapse. We have too many old people. We don’t have enough young people to support the aging population.”
I think obviously these are two of the most important conversations that are going to be had this century, about how we organize as a society and about how we inhabit the world that we are living in. And women without kids are central to both those conversations. So I want to empower any woman or any person who is either questioning whether they want to become parents and/or confidently staking out an alternative path and thinking about, what’s my role going to be in the world? To speak up on these issues and to find each other and to start conversations in their families, in their friendship groups, in their communities, in their places of work about what we actually need to change to improve conditions for the new humans who are going to be born on the planet. And for the older humans who are transitioning out of the workforce, who are no longer seen as productive or useful to society, and yet who, thanks to medical advances that have managed to extend our lifespans, double our lifespans in the course of the past century, how do we start to revalue those elder years and not see older people as written out of the story when it comes to their value and productivity?
I think these are really big questions that I don’t have answers for, but I think it’s time for us all to talk about. I have been saying from the beginning that this book, Women Without Kids, is a conversation starter. So I want people to read it with their friends. I’m saying read it with your other non-mom friends so you can better understand each other’s position. Read it with your mom friends so you can start to heal that false divide between the moms and the non-moms. Read it with your partner as you really consider what it would mean to become parents and why you might not feel suited for that. Read it with your mother. Perhaps some of what I’ve shared has inspired anybody who’s listening, who has conflicted relationship or feelings about their mother. But yes, read it. Read it in groups, have conversations about what comes up. There’s so much in here to be discussed.
TS: I’ve been speaking with Ruby Warrington, she’s the author of the new book, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood. And what a nuanced thinker you are, and able to hold a lot of complexity all at once. I would say an integral thinker, where you’re really looking at what’s happening inside of us, what are the social forces, what are the collective historical forces, and where are we going in the future? Very brilliant, Ruby, and wonderful to speak with you. Thank you.
RW: Thank you, Tami.
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