Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood by Ruby Warrington, published by Sounds True, 2023.

I had a hard time reading this book. The author never wanted to be a mother and that bias pervades the pages. At first, she seems to think motherhood is a dirty trick foisted upon women to take away their freedom. Once pregnant, all choices will be taken away. You will be saddled with childcare 24/7, and the father will not help. 

Yes, but . . . 

I think babies are a miracle, one not all of us get to experience. A PERSON is formed and grows inside our bodies. How could we not want to take care of them and love them forever after? That’s just my opinion. And yes, I’m Catholic, a religion that is very pro-baby.

As I read on, Warrington is not as hard-hearted as I thought. She writes extensively about how children should not be born to parents who are not ready to support them and into a society that offers minimal support to parents. No one should be forced to procreate if they would rather devote their lives to something else. 

Toward the end, she writes, “. . . accepting that you may never be ready to be a mother in this life might lead to a period of intense grieving. Not that experiencing sadness about not having kids means you can’t also be confident in the choice not to pursue parenthood. It’s okay to grieve something you will never have and to feel empowered in your decision to prioritize other things.” 

Amen. We have choices, and who is to say one is better than the other?

Warrington is much younger than I am and proof that women from different generations have grown up in very different cultures when it comes to women’s roles.

For my mother, raising children in the 1950s and 60s, mothering was her job. Full-time, no days off. If you asked her, she’d say that was exactly what she wanted to do. Her mother and grandmother did the same. There weren’t many opportunities for women outside the home anyway. We could be secretaries, nurses, or teachers, not much else. 

Of course in those post WWII baby boom days, a family could buy a home and survive on one income. Not that it was ideal. My mother often said she thought she would lose her mind in the years she was stuck at home with two toddlers all day while my father was at work. She was responsible for all childcare, cleaning, cooking, and laundry. I know she envied my “career-girl” life when I was a young woman, when I thought motherhood was just around the bend.

We baby boomers were a mix of mothers who stayed home and mothers with jobs. In the wake of the Women’s Movement, as I graduated from college and got married two weeks later, we had the ability to do a lot more different things, but that also meant trying to juggle work and family, not an easy task. And yes, the bulk of the child-related responsibilities still fell on the women. Divorce also became a lot more common, leaving single mothers trying to do everything by themselves.

My plan was to be a stay-at-home mother-writer. I would do both, writing best-selling novels while the babies were napping or at school. Easy-peasy. Instead, I worked as a journalist, supporting my first husband, supporting myself between marriages, and still working full-time during my second marriage. And yes, most of the chores fell on me.

Now, fewer couples are getting married, and fewer are having children. If you’re reading this, you are likely among them. The economy has made it nearly impossible for young people to afford a place to live, even when both partners work at well-paying full-time jobs. How can they add children to the mix? Should we bring more people into an overpopulated world that seems to be self-destructing? Plus, young women like Warrington see the responsibilities of parenting as prison and hold onto their freedom with both hands. “Just the two of us will be fine. We’ll get a dog” is a common refrain.

In the last century, couples got pregnant and figured out the financial part later. Babies were expected as the natural thing that comes after marriage. Birth control and abortion were not readily available. If parents were exhausted and wished they could shake free of their kids now and then, well, too bad. If the husbands skipped off to their jobs and left their wives doing the bulk of the work at home, so be it. In time, the kids would grow up and leave the home, and the parents could enjoy their empty nest. 

But now, we have so many choices. Birth control. Education. Living together without getting married. Careers of all kinds open to both women and men, careers that require the biggest investment of time and energy at the same age women are most able to have babies. Couples are putting off parenthood, sometimes until it’s too late. And some, like Warrington, are just saying, “No!”

My generation and those that followed have learned that you really can’t do everything at once. Choices must be made, and few of us have the luxury of devoting all our time to parenting, even if that’s what we want to do. Warrington argues that without more support for parents–flexible work schedules, affordable childcare, and maternity leave–parenting is just too difficult. 

Maybe in the childless-by-marriage situation, when it’s not a matter of biological complications, at least one of you feels like Warrington. They look at how hard it seems to be and say no, I don’t want to do that.

Dear readers, I’m grandmother-old. I have very little connection with people who are raising children. Tell me how it looks these days. Among the couples you know, do mothers still do all the childcare and home chores, or do the partners, male or female, share the load? Do you see parenting fitting into their existing lives or taking over? Is that one of the reasons you don’t have kids? Would you be happy to make whatever sacrifices were required if you could have a baby? Or is that too much to ask these days?