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.