Women Without Kids
In Conversation With Author & Journalist Ruby Warrington
Let’s start this dispatch with a kind of confession; last year, I was significantly struggling. Towards the end of last year I accessed support which resulted in a diagnosis for Anxiety and a Depression episode at the time. An accumalation of events - including two reproductive health issues being investigated, one still ongoing - had had a significant impact. Sometimes the weights carried can be impossible to leave at the door.
In the middle of an inquest I attended last year I’d been reading a book mentioned over on . Women Without Kids by Ruby Warrington is a mediation on where we are right now, and why; the book felt significantly comforting. Whereas I was being told that I was ostensibly less of a woman, and conversations with medical professionals felt like a pointless, odious battle, Women Without Kids takes apart the issue of womanhood and the expectation of children with nuanced compassion. It’s something of a call-to-arms, a want for a sisterhood - as we’ll explore in a minute.
Ruby Warrington is the author of the seminal work. A journalist by training, she is also the author and podcast host of Sober Curious. This interview was conducted by voice note; any additional context has been added in bold for this reason.
Talk to me about the impetus for Women Without Kids, what was the inspiration for the book and why did you feel like now is the time to write it?
This book came from a very personal place. I never wanted to have children, I never wanted to be a mother and I always felt incredibly strange because of this. It was something that put me very much in the ‘out’ group, it was something that was sort of implied was expected to change with time. I was told that if I didn't have children I would regret it, questioned who would look after me when I get old, all of the things that anybody without children will hear. And I tried very hard to talk myself into wanting to have children throughout my 20s and 30s really, and it was only when I reached my early 40s and started looking ahead to menopause that I realised this had always been the right path for me.
I realised this because [when] contemplating the end of my reproductive years, there was no sense of panic that I had missed out or forgotten to do this very important thing, and that I should really get on it while I still had time. If anything, I felt profoundly grateful to have been born in an era and in a body, in a culture where I had enough physical autonomy to make the choice that felt right for me - which was not to have children. So I felt the need to investigate truly where all of that external pressure, where all the expectations about motherhood come from, where the idea that womanhood is in fact synonymous with motherhood, comes from. It felt like a really juicy research topic.
There were also elements of this journey which I hadn't seen written about anywhere. One example of which being the extent to which a person's experience of being mothered influenced their feelings about becoming a mother. In my research, early research, I discovered that many women who have chosen not to have children have had a complicated relationship with their mother and with their family of origin and that had been a factor in their choices. So that was something I wanted to investigate.
“The reaction to The Motherhood Spectrum has been gratitude, actually, from people across The Motherhood Spectrum.”
In terms of why the time was now, more generally speaking, in a broader sense, as much as this is a very personal book, it's looking at all of the factors for better and for worse which are driving what is an unprecedented drop in the birth rate globally. More and more women do not have children, whether it's by choice or by circumstance and I was really fascinated about what was driving this trend - especially given that it is a trend which is causing a lot of fearmongering in some circles.
While in other circles, reducing the size of the global population is thought to be an imperative in terms of addressing issues to do with climate change.
You've also written about being Sober Curious, what was the experience of both books like by comparison?
Sober Curious also came from a very personal place. I was in a period of deep questioning around my relationship with alcohol and was encountering very binary attitudes to this - namely you were either a problem drinker and therefore you needed to be sober and you needed to be in recovery for alcohol addiction. Or you were a normal drinker and any problems associated with your drinking were just ‘par for the course’ of having a social life and it struck me that myself and many people I knew actually existed somewhere in between those two poles.
It struck me actually that all drinking could be problem drinking and that a lot of problem drinking was very much normalized in our society. Becoming curious about this was what led to the term Sober Curious - and the book and the podcast - which is now a term that's widely used around the world for people who are just questioning their drinking, without any end results attached, any goals attached to that.
So in terms of the books, both came from this very personal place but Women Without Kids was by far more complex and challenging because the subject matter is really at the heart of our humanity and is so incredibly multifaceted, and it this question about whether or not to have children on a personal level and a collective level. It really touches every aspect of our lives so it was by far a much more challenging book in terms of the research. But yes, like I said, both came from a very personal place, I drew on my journalistic background to write both - combining personal stories with research journalistic, research to present a case - the case of Sober Curious. It's okay not to drink and in fact even normal drinkers can benefit from questioning their drinking and even stopping drinking and it's okay not to have kids no matter your reasons for that.
You come at such a multifaceted concept with a huge amount of empathy. How did you come to the idea of motherhood as a spectrum and what was the reaction like?
So the concept of the Motherhood Spectrum came directly out of my research and work with Sober Curious. Just as I with Sober Curious identified, well not identified because other people have identified this, but drew attention to the fact that there is a spectrum when it comes to alcohol use and abuse and that alcohol impacts different individuals differently, dependent on a multitude of factors - everything from their physiology to their cultural heritage, to their religious programming to their mental health. It struck me, actually, as I began to look into the subject of motherhood and particularly what I term the ‘the Mummy Binary’. You know, these sort of, the mums who have ticked all the right life boxes, who are doing the right thing, who are real women in a way [compared to] the non mothers who are [seen as] the aberration, who are missing out, who are cold, heartless and career obsessed. It struck me that actually it was very much a spectrum here - and that a person's both desire and aptitude for the role of mother would be subject to, again, a multitude of factors that make them the individual that they are, and that where a person orients on that spectrum may also change over the course of their life, depending as their circumstances shift and change.
“It struck me actually that all drinking could be problem drinking and that a lot of problem drinking was very much normalized in our society.”
The reaction to The Motherhood Spectrum has been gratitude, actually, from people across The Motherhood Spectrum. A lot of mums have really been able to relate to the concept that's basically saying that just because you are a woman doesn't mean that you are destined to be a mother, built to be a mother, will excel or revel in the role of mother and so a lot of mums who don't feel that motherhood comes naturally to them and who don’t perhaps enjoy motherhood or feel as fulfilled by motherhood as they believe they were supposed to [be] have found a lot of comfort in the concept of the Motherhood Spectrum.
You also refer to the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’. Is this an issue of patriarchy, and how does patriarchy benefit?
Haves and Have nots are essential for any hierarchical power structure to operate. Those who have privelege influence agency, sway those who do not, who have not any of those things. When we're talking about a hierarchical structure of power, there are individuals at the top who hold the power - these are the haves - and everybody else becomes the have nots. This is an issue of any hierarchical power structure, patriarchy being one of many hierarchical power structures that we live within in our society - patriarchy speaking to, I believe, the privileging of masculinity and masculine traits and values. Masculinity in all its forms and in all people regardless of their gender and under patriarchy people who express or embody masculine traits are the haves, the people who have agency, who have power, who have say, who have resource etc etc.
So, yes - short answer to your question, yes.
Talk to me about the myth of biological maternal instinct; how did you start to unpick this?
This was one of my big questions when I came to the book, I had never felt that ‘baby fever’ that I'd heard so many other women talk about in my life - that physical yearning to become pregnant and to give birth to a biological child, or even to adopt and nurture, raise children. I had never felt that desire and like I said the way I’d heard so many people speak about it, it felt like it was a biological urge, a yearning, a sensation almost in the body. And so having never experienced that myself I always felt like perhaps there really was something wrong with me, maybe hormonally there was some imbalance.
And it was when I heard an evolutionary biologist called Gillian Ragsdale speaking on a Radio 4 program about childlessness, debunk the concept of the maternal instinct, that I knew I wanted to speak to her. She explained to me as I point out in the book, I quote in the book that, from an evolutionarily perspective, human beings don't need to have a desire to have children. All that's needed for the continuation of the species is the human sex drive. So long as enough people are having enough procreative sex - meaning heterosexual intercourse - there will be babies and at that point there is a biological impulse that kicks in, to protect those young defenceless children, infants and children.
But in terms of the desire to copulate and to have children, she explained that this is actually an entirely, a social construct, that if you bring it back down to biology, there is nothing hormonally or in our biological makeup that actually creates the desire to have children.
I also love that you speak to the impact of a young Madonna.
[Laughs] but it was Madonna's character Susan in the film Desperately Seeking Susan - who I think was based on Madonna. Anyway..
How can we create equitable icons that don't do us a disservice? [Content note: feminist writers at the time of writing had been writing at various times about the need for icons, particularly as an anti patriachy stratergy.]
This is a really tricky question. Human beings are human beings. Human beings embody all qualities of what it means to be human - good, bad, selfless, selfish, greedy, giving, etc. And I think there is danger in creating icons who we hold up on a pedestal I suppose, and uphold a sort of [as an example of] the perfect human or the perfect image of a human.
And so how can we create equitable icons that don't do us a disservice? I mean I think, ultimately this comes back to doing whatever work we can internally to acknowledge and accept all the parts of ourselves, so that we don't feel the need to look up to a sort of a perfect human to model ourselves after. This is another issue of patriarchy, given that patriarchy really kind of stems from the advent of organized religions that put in place one sort of perfect male God figure, to sort of look up to and to model what it means to live a perfect existence. A perfect existence doesn't exist and so I think allowing our icons to make mistakes, to be fallible, to be human, is how we create equitable humans that actually allow us to to make mistakes, to fail, to not get everything right all the time, to do harm even, you know, and to redeem ourselves through our, for the better parts of our natures.
“If you bring it back down to biology, there is nothing hormonally or in our biological makeup that actually creates the desire to have children.”
We're also in a huge election year. Is there a case for hope which your book wonderfully outlines?
The longer I spend reading the news, the longer I spend looking at social media, the harder it is for me to have hope for humanity. The more time I can spend in real life with other human beings in real time, the more hope I have for humanity.
I work with other authors to help them write their books and one of my clients, Bunny Michaels, just bought a book out called Hello Higher Self. And there’s a chapter on politics and activism - her book’s about how to access a higher self perspective in all situations, and she has these little memes. So it's like me, the question and then higher self with this higher self perspective and under politics and activism she has Me: why should I believe humanity can ever change? Higher Self: because you have.
And I think that gives me hope. Human beings are evolving our worldviews, our attitudes, our approaches to things, expanding our acceptance of one another all the time, but what's so much of the media does - whether it's legacy media or social media - is reduces back down to the binaries of opposites, the have's and the have nots if you like. Because this creates fear, this creates discord, this creates outrage and these are very powerful emotions that we can't help but pay attention to. So, in the Attention Economy, it pays to stoke these emotions and in an election year it definitely pays to stoke these emotions because what's an election year if not a big competition, a big binary competition between two big players who want to seize power?
If there is a case for hope, it's humans being human together in real life, in real time, so I hope that this book actually helps bring people together to talk about what it means to [have] kids. That was one of my chief objectives, actually - I really wanted to spark conversations between people who are childless by choice, people who are childless by circumstance, people who are childless after infertility and to begin to have conversations that cross those kind of divides so that we can support each other and become what I describe as this unsung sisterhood of Women Without Kids.
Women Without Kids by Ruby Warrington is out now.
In Case You Missed It
🎪 I’m in this month’s print issue of Happiful - but some of my previous work is also now online.
🎪 In September I will be hosting a panel about how to get into publishing when you’re disabled/Neurodivergent, in collaboration with SIC and . Set your reminder to book a ticket here.
🎪 Next week is Autistic Pride Day - and July is Disability Pride Month. Support your resident disabled newsletter writer by buying a copy of The Autism Friendly Cookbook.