Womankind Needs Different

An interview with Women Without Kids author Ruby Warrington

In the United States and across much of the developed world, there are a record number of women who have never had children. This is a profound demographic shift, and it reflects a profound cultural one: As marriage and motherhood are both increasingly optional, as more women seek out partnership and are willing to wait for a great one, and as women have more freedom and more opportunities for finding purpose in our lives than perhaps ever before, children are no longer a cornerstone of an adult life, nor a requirement for social normalcy. For some women, a life without children is a bittersweet one that comes about by happenstance — the timing or the biology or both just didn’t work out. For many women, though, a life without children is a powerful and fulfilling choice, a way of saying yes to everything else life has to offer.

Ruby Warrington, a long-time lifestyle journalist and editor, has written a wonderful new book about this phenomenon, called Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood. Ruby and I chatted about the spectrum of motherhood ambivalence, the things women gain when they forgo childbearing, why the Mommy Wars are bullshit, and why womankind needs different models of adult womanhood.

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Jill Filipovic: Hi Ruby, so nice to chat with you. 

Ruby Warrington: Thanks for taking a look at my work and for inviting me. I'm really excited to talk to you.

Jill: To start, can you tell me and anyone who might be reading a little bit about you and your background?

Ruby: Sure. I'm British, and I moved to America in 2012. My husband got a job with W Hotels and we moved to New York. I didn't actually realize until writing this book, and acknowledging the significance of that move, how much it had been something I'd wanted or been excited about. My professional background is journalism. My BA is in fashion promotion, if you can believe it. But for me, that was a gateway into writing for women's magazines in the UK, where I wound up as an editor at the Sunday Times Style magazine. And then I went freelance and continued to work as a freelance journalist from New York. Essentially, I've always been a reporter on trends and that has transitioned into a career as an author in the past six, seven years. My first book came out in 2017. I now also work as a publishing consultant and a manuscript coach and I help people to concept and write and pitch their books, which is incredibly fulfilling work.

Jill: So then how did this book come about? What was the genesis for it?

Ruby: There was a distinct moment that I knew I needed to immerse myself fully in this subject, until I had answered all my questions about being a “woman without kids.” A book is essentially a research project, especially if you're coming at it from a more journalistic mindset. And that moment came ... I think I was 43 maybe at the time, and I had found a 1992 book by Gail Sheehy called The Silent Passage. In it, Sheeny reframes menopause, not as the end of a woman's life, but rather the gateway to her second adulthood. I found myself reading the book feeling kind of excited about what menopause might have in store for me. And within that came the realization that I had zero regrets about not having had a child. That I did not feel I had missed out in any way, and it did not feel like there was anything missing from my life. There was no panic that it was now or never. And on the tail end of that realization, wow, then all that questioning I did in my twenties and thirties, the self-doubt and the internal gaslighting about not wanting to be a mother; it was all necessary and part of my story, but it hadn't come from inside me. It was all the result of other people's expectations and projections about what I should be doing with my procreative potential. 

Everybody had always asked me, “why don't you want kids?” And I suppose having got over the hump of the emotional turmoil I had felt around that question, I felt like now was the time in my life where I could, from a more detached standpoint, actually really look into: why did I never want to be a mother? Given that this is something that people who are assigned female at birth and raised or socialized as women are not only expected to want, but are told is our biological imperative, why did I never want to do that thing? So there was the personal piece. 

And then from a more anthropological perspective, I noticed the birth rate has been in steep and steady decline for the past century, and even going back a bit further. We know that this global demographic shift is going to have a huge impact on societies as we move forward. What is less often discussed is that this is the result of millions and millions and millions of women making deeply personal, often very fraught decisions about whether or not to have children, and how many children to have. And it just didn't seem to me that this conversation was being given the weight that it deserved. I hadn't found any books that really got under the skin of this issue. So there was that very personal piece and then the wider societal piece, which made it feel like “this is my next project.” 

Jill: Most folks who are reading this are probably not going to have read the book (yet!). So I'm wondering if you can give us some of the toplines. I do think women who don't want to have kids are often challenged on that question of why — just saying ‘I just don't want to’ doesn't seem to be good enough. And so, as somebody who has thought through that question for your whole adult life, and thought through it again in the process of writing this book, what did you come to when answering that big central question?

Ruby: What I landed on is there are actually many, many very valid reasons not to be a mother. I think that all of those factors play a role in our decisions about whether or not to have children, and they'll impact different people to a different degree depending on their circumstances. In my case, I think that not wanting to repeat the dysfunction of my family of origin was a really big one. That is not something that's very much acknowledged. But I conducted an online survey as part of my research, where I had people answer questions about their feelings about motherhood or not becoming mothers, and something that came through as a really strongly was that for women who had been raised in households where there was some degree of family dysfunction, now that they had the option to pursue alternative paths, were questioning, quite naturally: do I want to replicate this? Is becoming a parent actually going to mean diving back into cycles of family dysfunction that I now have the opportunity not to repeat? 

Personally, I also get huge value from my career. I'm so grateful that I actually get to make a living doing something that I feel really uses my gifts, engages my brain, and brings me so much pleasure. In fact, “career” sounds too cold. It's more than that, it feels like a vocation. And to pursue the vocation of writing fully alongside the responsibilities of parenthood is just not something I ever thought I'd have the capacity for. And of course, plenty of people do. And in the beginning of the book I talk about how, for every thing that I think I couldn't do as a mother, there are mothers out there doing it, and thriving doing it. 

I also have a lot of fear of financial instability, and am very money focused as a result of being raised in a home where there wasn't always enough. Something that I know would be exacerbated in parenthood. So these are a few personal reasons, out of of many other factors, that I’ve discovered are shared among many women without kids. For me, concerns about the environment hadn't necessarily factored so much into my decision, but that's definitely something that younger generations are really, really concerned with, and being very vocal about. 

Jill: You write this line in the intro to the book: “If women without kids are seen as different, then good: womankind needs different.” You’re pointing out that for all of human history, more or less, women have had kids, and that’s been the primary role of the female half of the species. And that’s changing so incredibly and so rapidly. But it is still – I don't think taboo is the right word, but it still is unusual, and certainly in a global context, quite unusual, to be a woman who chooses not to have kids. So can you elaborate a little bit on what you think women who don’t have kids are they bringing to the table that’s different?

Ruby: Why does womankind need different? For the same reasons we still need feminism. Not only we witnessing a disturbing backlash to the feminist gains of the previous half-century, with the rise of misogynistic figureheads such as Trump and Andrew Tate, but powerful forces are actively seeking to roll back hard-won rights to bodily autonomy and self-authorship that many Western women have come to take for granted. This is not even taking into account countries where the concept of "women's rights" is a non-conscious ideology—and where women's sole role is still the bearing and raising of children. For all the gains of the feminist movement, this shines a light on the fact that the bearing and raising of children is where the buck stops when it comes to gender equality. Women without kids therefore are symbolic of true gender equality—our mere existence is a powerful reminder of all women’s right to freedom of choice, bodily autonomy, and self-authorship. But feminism isn't just about equality between men and women—its wider mission is equality for all beings, and ultimately womankind needs different because humanity needs different. Needs a world where the lion's share of human ingenuity is not being channeled into building systems that benefit a (shrinking) privileged few, and where safety, ease, and abundance, are upheld as the birth right of all beings.