Women Without Children

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About the Guest

 

Peggy O'Donnell Heffington is Assistant Senior Instructional Professor and Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Chicago. She teaches and writes on feminism, women's movements, and motherhood in American and European history. Her first book is called Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother (Seal Press, 2023). Her writing has also appeared in Jezebel, the Boston Globe, Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She received her PhD in History from the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Transcript

 

Intro – 01:09

 

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: I felt much more fraught about being a woman without kids before I wrote this book. Worrying, am I making the right decision? Am I going to regret this? The things those of us without kids are really worried about. But women for a very long time have been living lives without children that are rewarding and challenging in their own ways.

BLAIR HODGES: "Childless cat ladies" have been in the news lately. The label is intended as an insult, but there are plenty of women who are proud to take it on. History is full of women who never gave birth to children. What often gets lost in the controversies surrounding these women are the reasons they give for not having kids. It could be economic or environmental concerns, infertility, or even just a simple lack of desire.

Historian and proud childless dog lady Peggy O'Donnell Heffington says her research about women without children made her feel more settled about her own choice not to have kids, but it also surprisingly made her feel greater solidarity with women who make the opposite choice. Peggy joins us now to talk about her book Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother.

There's no one right way to be a family and every kind of family has something we can learn from. I'm Blair Hodges, and this is Family Proclamations.

BLAIR HODGES: Peggy O'Donnell Heffington joins us today on Family Proclamations. Peggy, thanks for joining us.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Thank you so much for having me.

 

Woman Doesn't Mean Mother – 02:51

 

BLAIR HODGES: We're talking about your book Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother. It opens with a short author's note about vocabulary. You point out English has a term for women with children, which is “mother,” but it doesn't really have a great term for a woman without children, and this is part of why you wrote the book in the first place. Talk a little bit about the language around women and mother.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Well, first, thank you for having me. The book is titled Without Children, which is a descriptive term, rather than a term in itself. That's intentional, because the two words we have available for women without children are “childless”—which often carries a negative connotation. It's implying you're lacking something. The other term, which has become increasingly popular with people who don't have children, is the term “childfree,” which implies there's a choice. It's something you opt into that you might actually want.

BLAIR HODGES: It's also highlighting freedom from something.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: I note in the book “sugar-free gum” is the kind that doesn't make your teeth rot. It sounds like a positive reframing, and for many people it is.

But as a historian, that posed a bit of a problem to me because the word “childfree” emerges in the 1970s in a very specific context. To use it before that felt a little anachronistic, but also it really captures just one of what I think are many experiences of not having children. It's an important one—people who have opted in. They feel free to make the choice to not have children. There's joy implied. There's liberation implied. But the book wanted to make the point that is not the only experience of not having children.

For many women without children, it encompasses both joy and pain, or it's something that is entirely not a choice, or didn't feel like a choice, and so in that sense, the term childfree didn't seem to fit the range of experiences I wanted to capture in the book either. What I tried to do was use terms like “a woman without children,” or “a woman who did not have children,” or “a woman who experienced infertility,” or “did not become a mother,” sort of factual phrases that in some cases are kind of awkward, but do a better job of trying to explain women how they lived, rather than trying to put a label on them that didn't necessarily fit.

BLAIR HODGES: What was the label someone proposed that was changing the “mother” word? Do you recall what I'm talking about?

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: I cite what I think is this really brilliant line from Sheila Heti's 2018 book Motherhood where she proposes we all use the term "not ‘not a mother’" for mothers. The “not not” cancels each other out. It's a double negative. But for women without children, it becomes “not,” like “I am not.” Then in quotations, "not a mother," meaning my non-motherhood doesn't define me. She proposes that as a term we can share.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you think that was tongue in cheek for her or really in earnest? Because it works both ways. Motherhood is fundamental to how so many people think what it means to be a woman. So to propose “not ‘not a mother’” is to challenge the status quo even more directly.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: It's almost suggesting the thing we have in common is our non-motherhood, or some sort of rejection of motherhood or of that as the identity. Sheila Heti—that book is very witty. It's very think-y. It's probably a little bit tongue in cheek, but I found it to be profound because at least since the 1960s feminists have been trying to search for that term we can share. There we go. There is one.

BLAIR HODGES: It does call attention to how much motherhood is assumed to be the proper role of women.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Absolutely. I think a copyeditor might bristle at trying to use that term throughout a book, but I agree. It's the idea of having a term that works for the full range of experiences with and without children, and also that, as you say, calls attention to the centrality of motherhood, to the assumed identity of women. I think it's lovely.

BLAIR HODGES: Your book points out early on that millennial women in the US are childless at historic rates. Lots of people have opinions about why this is the case. Broadly speaking, I think all these reasons can break down into two areas. There are individualistic reasons and there are social or structural reasons. We're obviously going to unpack this more in depth, but give us a preview of these different reasons and how they broke out in your book, how you decided to cover them.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: The book centers around two ideas that seem like they're in a little bit of tension, but I don't think they are. I think they work as a book. One of them is to say, not having children is not new. Women have been not having children for a whole variety of reasons for a long time. The other piece I wanted to get across with the book is precisely what you say, that millennial women, young women today, are not having children at quite as high rates, and this is an intensifying trend. It is not new, but it is intensifying.

I structured the book around the reasons why women have not had children today and in the past. The thing that really struck me was when you look at surveys that ask young women today why they are not having children, they tend to say the same things, and those are the individual and societal reasons you suggest. They don't have enough societal support, they can't afford it, they want to prioritize their jobs. They're worried about the environment. They are experiencing infertility.

The striking thing is, those are many of the same reasons women in the past didn't have children. So each chapter of the book takes one of those reasons and goes back in history and contextualizes it, suggests this is a reason young women today share with women in the past.

 

Because We’ve Always Made Choices – 09:00

 

BLAIR HODGES: We're going to go through these in turn. Each is fascinating. Let's begin with the chapter called “Because We've Always Made Choices.” As you mentioned, fertility rates have risen and fallen in different places, in different times. As a historian, you've been interested to see what's behind those changes.

Let's go really far back in time. Your book goes back to Egyptian Papyrus recipes and Rome condoms and Talmud breastfeeding ideas. Talk about some of these ancient things you dug up when it came to childlessness or not having a child.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: This first chapter was one I didn't initially intend to write, because for me as a historian it seemed self-evident that some people have not been having children for a very, very long time. But I found as I was writing the book, people asked me, how can you write a long history of not being a mother? Wasn't the pill invented in the 1950s?

BLAIR HODGES: That was my thinking.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: It's an understandable way to think. The idea of being able to choose not to have children, to control your fertility, was something that was new.

This first chapter, as you said, goes way back, and I found this delightful because the ways people were trying to manage and control their fertility were so ingenious and must have resulted from trial and error, and yet very often they were things modern science suggests would have worked at least some of the time.

In ancient Rome a common contraceptive device would be to take half a lemon and squeeze out the juice and then use that, insert it in front of the uterus, basically as a cervical cap, like a diaphragm or something like that. Not only is that a barrier method, but it turns out that citric acid from lemon juice has spermicidal properties. They were presumably using trial and error, and yet were finding something that would have worked sometimes. There are also stories about Roman soldiers making condoms out of goat intestines and experimenting with all different kinds of barrier methods.

People had a relatively sophisticated understanding of how conception happened and what contraceptive methods might look like. In the Talmud, certain categories of women are not only allowed to use birth control but are commanded to use birth control. These are very young women who have just gotten married but are quite young. They're women right after having had a child, the idea being if you have a baby, that baby is going to be more likely to thrive if you don't immediately have another baby. The Talmud talks about barrier methods, usually strips of fabric inserted in front of the cervix to work as a barrier method.

Then there's all kinds of herbs in medieval German medical treatises. They list hundreds of herbs and plants you could use to either prevent conception or, quite often, cause an abortion, terminate a pregnancy. Scientists have gone back and looked at these and concluded that at least a quarter of them would work at least some of the time, and these were things women would have known about, mothers would have taught their daughters about. They're things women would have grown in their gardens.

They would have been used, not just by women who didn't want children at all, but also by mothers who were trying to control the size of their family. We see this in birth records over the early modern period in Europe, people start having kids further apart. They start having their last kid a lot younger. There's a lot of evidence people are controlling their fertility actively, and it's working.

BLAIR HODGES: This stretches into the nineteenth century. There are writers from the 1800s like Jane Austen and the Brontës, these famous figures who famously didn't have children. Some of them may have been experiencing infertility, but there are a lot of them, and it suggests also that women were making fertility choices for themselves in the nineteenth century as well.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: If we can look at birth records and see women who were having children were spacing them out more than nature might, or once their family reached a certain size they were stopping and not having children up to the end of their fertility, I think it's all the more likely women who never had children, maybe who weren't married, were actively controlling their fertility, because the cost of having a child as an unmarried woman would have been far greater than a mother accidentally having a fourth child.

I think it's all the more likely these women we know of who didn't have children were actively controlling it. And as you say, certainly some would have experienced infertility, some would have practiced abstinence. But I think there's enough evidence to suggest those aren't the only reasons.

BLAIR HODGES: The nineteenth century is when choice became all the more controversial as well. You point out, any time women were making reproductive choices, there was often blowback. You bring up Anne Lohman as an example in the 1840s, a famous abortion trial in New York. Give us an idea of that and how laws against abortion came to be, because prior to 1820 there really weren't any laws against that in the United States, you suggest.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Prior to the nineteenth century there were no laws restricting abortion anywhere in the United States. In fact, in 1812 the Massachusetts Supreme Court rules that abortion prior to “quickening,” which is when the mother starts to feel the fetus move, which is fifteen to twenty weeks, could not be punished under common law. It was the woman's business. It doesn't have anything to do with the law.

Across the eighteenth century, state by state, laws get put into place criminalizing abortion. By the 1870s it's a felony everywhere in the United States, and in fact becomes a federal crime as well. This period, though, interestingly, corresponds with all the available evidence suggesting a massive increase in the proportion of pregnancies that are aborted. As it's becoming increasingly illegal, it's becoming also increasingly used.

This is due to a lot of factors, but in part, you have social mobility. You have people moving to cities. You have industrialization. Women working in factories before they get married. People are experimenting with sex. They're getting pregnant in contexts that maybe didn't make it possible to have a child, and they're seeking out abortions and contraception.

Anne Lohman was an abortion provider who lived in New York City. She practiced for almost four decades there and she offered contraceptives, herbal contraceptives, herbal abortion pills, basically, and she could refer women to surgical abortion providers if they were too far along in their pregnancy for herbal methods. She is arrested a number of times.

In the 1940s she's charged with causing the death of a woman who had an abortion a year earlier and who later died of tuberculosis. Even the court can't figure out how to connect these things well enough to convict her. She goes back to practicing even as the punishments for providing abortions continue to rise, both at the state level and at the federal level. In the 1870s she's finally arrested and charged with a federal crime, and she ultimately commits suicide before her trial. But she is someone who had a thriving business that was entirely illegal for decades, where women of all socioeconomic statuses, mothers, non-mothers, were coming to her to end pregnancies.

I think there's a lesson in Anne Lohman for us, which is to suggest that making it illegal to control your fertility does not make women stop wanting to control their fertility, and they are very eager to seek out ways of still doing so.

 

BLAIR HODGES: Again, the chapter's called, “Because We've Always Made Choices,” regardless of what the legal status of those choices has been.

You also mentioned the pill, this was a real watershed for women being able to control their fertility. This came out in 1957. Feminism was really on the rise at this point. But what surprised me in your research here was fertility was actually already dropping before the pill and before Roe v Wade, so fertility was already on a downward trend at this point.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: In the United States in the nineteenth century there is this really dramatic drop off of fertility. Across the nineteenth century, 1800 to 1900, some groups in the United States cut their fertility in half. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, American women were having an average of seven children. By 1900 they're having an average of three and a half. It's a really dramatic drop off. This is a half century before the pill.

This trend then accelerates during the Great Depression, where, for financial, for economic, for survival reasons, you see a dramatic drop off in births and a rise in childlessness. Currently, the highest rate of childlessness in the United States was during the Great Depression, where it was between one in three and one in four women who were in their fertile years and never had children. Which suggests there's a real economic component in people feeling able to have families.

The trend reverses after World War Two, during the baby boom, there's this twenty-year reversal of the drop in fertility. But then, as you suggest, by the mid-1960s you have feminism on the rise. You have the introduction of hormonal contraceptives. The trend continues. It reverses again, and fertility starts to fall.

Because We’ll Be On Our Own – 18:43

BLAIR HODGES: This connects us to chapter two here. It's called “Because We'll Be on Our Own.” This chapter is looking at how family structures and child rearing communities have changed throughout time in ways that have made it harder for a lot of people to have kids. You talk about the rise of this isolated, nuclear family model. The idea of what a family actually was changed, and it impacted how many kids people wanted to have. You call this the “European family model.”

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: This was one of the things I found most interesting and most surprising about doing the book, because as Americans sitting here today in the twenty-first century, the idea of a family being comprised of a mother, a father, and their biological children—that just seems, I don't know, almost definitional. But as I was researching, I learned this is a relatively new family model. The sociologist Patricia Hill Collins puts it really succinctly when she says it's not only the most unusual model of parenting in the world, it's also the most stressful. And this trend towards the nuclear family began in the middle of the nineteenth century in Northern Europe.

In the 1960s there was this economist named John Hajnal who was researching demographics in Europe. He was looking at birth records and death records, and he started noticing in the middle of the eighteenth century the births in Northern Europe start to change. People start waiting longer. They start spacing their kids out. They start stopping earlier. He's trying to figure out why this would be, and he starts to understand Europeans in that period were moving away from multi-generational family units—getting married and living with your in-laws and all of your brothers and sisters and their spouses and their kids, and instead they started moving to individual family homes.

This meant you had to wait longer before you had kids because you needed to be able to support them economically. You probably wanted to have fewer kids because you had less people around. There are a lot of reasons for this trend. A lot of them have to do with the industrial revolution, that people were striking out on their own, but this move towards a more isolated family unit arrives in the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century. Prior to that, American colonists would have not really recognized that as the family unit. They thought of the family and the community as much more intertwined. They raised each other's kids. They sent their kids to go live with other people. There was a much deeper integration between the community and the family.

In the United States, this family model arrives in the early nineteenth century, and very quickly comes to seem obvious. It comes to seem like the natural way of creating a family, for all kinds of ideological reasons. But the effects of this are something we're still living with. Now it's not considered normal to rely on the community outside of the nuclear family. It becomes the sole responsibility of the two adults, and often the mother, to raise the children within the home, rather than relying on her sisters, her friends, her neighbors.

In the twentieth century this trend intensifies yet again. In the baby boom, where you have suburbanization. You have people moving out of cities and into large individual family homes that are far from their original communities, or their siblings, or anything like that, and that intensifies the isolation of the family.

I think we're living with the legacy of this. The idea I try and get out in the chapter is that one of the reasons women today cite for not having children is they don't think they're going to have the support necessary to do it, at least unless they can afford to pay for it, which many people can't. This stripping away of support systems around the nuclear family has become a fairly major reason why people say they’re opting out of having children entirely.

BLAIR HODGES: The book talks about how family supports and social supports start to fall away. If people think just parents, isolated nuclear families, are responsible for their kids, that also plays out in policy because we don't invest in childcare, universal childcare. We don't invest in paternal or maternal leave. We're not investing in healthcare that would support families. If we’re all so individually responsible, then there's a sense in which social support is either an invasion of privacy or unfair to other people, like everyone needs to just take care of themselves. I was thinking, why would we make that trade? Why would we trade off communal support for privacy and control? But that's exactly what it seems like we've done, here especially in the United States.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: There was a really striking clip from the North Dakota State Legislature earlier last summer, which voted against expanding the free lunch program in schools, and one of the lawmakers actually said on the floor, "If those parents are failing to feed their kids, I don't see why that's our problem."

To me that's an incredible distillation of this idea that if a nuclear family unit is supposed to be able to care for itself, then needing outside support represents a failure, which is not the way it would have been seen, even in our American past, as a very normal thing, that of course you would offer support to people who needed it and receive it when you needed it. But absolutely, we've traded that community support for privacy and autonomy, and I think we see the costs.

BLAIR HODGES: It really knocked the wind out of me when you were talking about in the 1970s there was a lot of momentum to revolutionize support for the American family with universal daycare. This would have made such a difference for women and men, for all people to be able to have a more stable family, to be able to afford care for their children. It had bipartisan support. It passed the Senate, it passed the House, and then President Richard Nixon singlehandedly killed it. He vetoes this thing, and then it just dies.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: This was the early 1970s and as you say, there was a bipartisan bill to build a system of universal daycare that would be on a sliding scale, so based on your income. In some ways it would have been an extension of the public school system. Lawmakers were talking about it as a real expansion of the Head Start programs. If this had come to pass, and this had actually been built, it boggles the mind to think about what a different world we would be living in and what a different conversation we would be having.

As you said, for many conservative lawmakers, this seemed like a pro-family policy. For many on the political left, it was feminist, or it was pro-labor because it allowed parents to go to work. But Nixon vetoes it and he takes the very unusual step of writing a letter to Congress chastising them for having sent this bill to him. His argument is basically, “This is communism. We don't want our women to go to work. They should be at home. We can't create a system that encourages women to leave the home and put their kids in daycare.”

But if we think about what would have happened if that bill had passed and that system had been built, it's hard to imagine what it would look like.

BLAIR HODGES: You say his claim that this is going to encourage women to work and then they won't have kids has been proven wrong by what's actually happening in different European countries, where the more public supports there are, the better public supports there are, the more people are having children, because they can.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Absolutely. As you said, Nixon was concerned that in making it easier for women to work, they would choose work over motherhood, but absolutely, again and again in various countries, it's clear that making women make a choice between work and motherhood results in more women choosing work than motherhood, and if you have supportive policies that make it possible to do both, then actually fertility is higher. People feel much more comfortable having children.

BLAIR HODGES: I was also really drawn in this chapter to the story of Ella Baker and Black kinship networks, Black Americans who had different kinship models. Ella was born at the turn of the century in 1903. Her childhood was fascinating. She was raised in this communal system where aunts would be involved—all these different women would help each other with different children, and women could work, and men were involved. It's a really fascinating model that seems to have been stomped out by political policy and other things. But it was a fascinating part of this chapter.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Ella Baker was one of my favorite people I got to write about because she was not a mother. She was also a civil rights pioneer. She was in the national leadership of the NAACP from the 1920s to the 1940s. Those two things don't necessarily seem like they are related, but to her they were very much related.

As you said, she grew up in this context. She described it as “family socialism,” where, in her town, people helped each other. They shared things they had. They didn't consider their homes to be these bubbles that were owned by one family. They passed in and out of each other's homes. That becomes a guiding principle for her in her civil rights work, that she thinks about what would happen if we thought beyond just one town in North Carolina? What if we thought about this as a way of improving everyone's life?

The model of Black kinship she describes from her childhood, many Black scholars have pointed out the roots of that model are in slavery—where you have families being torn apart and no choice but to care for each other's children, to help each other, because parents are being separated from their children. The roots of that are not only in survival, but also in West African parenting practices, which are much more communal than European models.

So you have this lineage of West African parenting practices being brought with enslaved people to the United States, where they become a form of community survival, and then surviving the end of slavery and shaping people like Ella Baker's childhood. But even Ella Baker acknowledges that in the late twentieth century, in the world we've built, those are really, really hard to maintain. In a world that assumes a family is a unit that shouldn't need any help, it's really hard to fight against that trend.

BLAIR HODGES: Ella was also one of my favorite people in the book. I loved being introduced to these women who didn't have children of their own, but who were such powerful and interesting people. In Ella's case, she did “mother,” in a sense. She raised her niece and found other ways to be involved with family, because she had a more expansive vision of family. But I really loved meeting all of these different women who weren't defined by being "biological" mothers or whatever.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: With Ella Baker in particular, but with a lot of the women in the book, they don't have children of their own, which gives them a lot of time and emotional resources and financial resources to care for their communities in other ways. Sometimes that means being a mother figure to another child in their life, but sometimes it means a more expansive vision of what it means to care for your community.

Ella Baker did both. She raised her niece. She also advocated for this care and investment in her community's future, that if we thought about mothering as this broader way of caring for the community and the future, she mothered in many ways by that definition.

 

BLAIR HODGES: That's Peggy O'Donnell Heffington. We're talking about her book Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother. Peggy is an instructional professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where she teaches historical research and writing methods and also Gender and Women's History.

 

Because We Can’t Have It All – 31:24

 

BLAIR HODGES: Peggy, let's talk about the chapter about having it all. This idea that women can have it all today usually means a woman who has a career, a fulfilling personal life, a loving partnership, and a child or children. Some women are defining "having it all" as including having children, and other women don't.

But you talk about how for most of history, women were expected to bear kids and also economically contribute to the family. If we were to take a time machine back and ask women, “Do you think it's more important for women to work or to have children?” They would be like, “What? How are you dividing those things? That doesn't even make sense.”

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: The idea of having it all, as you said, is commonly understood to mean a job, a husband, and kids. If we went back two hundred years and talked to a woman in the American colonies or someone who lived in London, or a woman on the west coast of Africa and said, “Do you have kids or do you contribute to your family economically?” They would have been baffled by the question. Everyone's hands were necessary to support families.

The thing that has changed is not that women are trying to work and have kids. The thing that has changed is the way we work. Other historians have mapped how in the nineteenth century—earlier in Europe and a bit later in the United States—work, in a profound way, moves out of the home. Families that would have maybe made artisan goods in their home? Now the father figure usually is leaving the home to go perform work elsewhere in exchange for wages.

This separation of work and the home has really profound consequences for women, because it becomes understood that work is something that happens outside of the home. Women are expected to stay in the home, and therefore what happens in the home is not work, which was a really profound change. Supporting one's family by cooking food, having a garden, raising children, teaching children, would have been considered part of domestic labor. But once work moves out of the home, that becomes not-work.

I think we can see the legacy of that in the way in which care work, domestic labor, is really devalued today—that we talk about a stay-at-home mom as someone who “doesn't work.”

BLAIR HODGES: Yes. And I can hear some listeners resisting this. “Well, no, of course, it's work!” Yes, but are they compensated for it in a capitalistic society? Are we compensating the person who's staying at home? Are we finding ways to support them? There is a big difference between “work” versus what people are doing at home. You can see it. Just follow the money. That's where you can see it.

You also point out the rise of this nuclear family model, especially into the 1950s, really amplified this idea of men being breadwinners and women being homemakers, and that was also really a very temporary social construct. There were policies that were passed to make it possible. The economy was such that it was possible for a man to go and work and would make enough money to support a family.

Those conditions don't exist anymore, but so many people still want to believe in that idea of, “it's the man's duty to provide and the woman's duty to stay home and nurture,” when that was such a temporary experiment in the United States, and it's been really challenging then and now. It's impossible today for so many people.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: One of my mentors in grad school once said that, historically speaking, the breadwinner/homemaker model is a blip. It's basically only somewhere in the nineteenth century to somewhere in the middle of the twentieth century that it was ever really possible or expected. Yet, in our national social imagination, it is the ideal—even though it was, as you said, quite a short amount of time where that was even possible.

BLAIR HODGES: And even at the time, only for certain people. Wealthy white people.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Of course. One historian, Stephanie Koontz, has pointed out that in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, only about a third of families could afford to have just one income coming into the home. She very pithily says, “Leave It to Beaver was not a documentary,” that most families were not able to survive there. Yet, it's almost mythologized into the ideal way of having a family.

Because of that, the modern family today is held up against that standard, where in most places in the country even two professional salaried families are struggling with the cost of daycare, for example. Very, very few families in the United States today can function on one salary.

BLAIR HODGES: It's so backwards. When you mentioned the cost of daycare—it could cost almost the salary of one of the partners in the relationship, and then also people who are actually doing that work are often underpaid themselves. It's not like people are making out like gangbusters to run daycares. They're not often receiving subsidies.

There are ways we could invest as a society, through government, in these ways of helping people, in these ways of tending to children and making daycare affordable, and also better paying for the people that are doing that labor. We're doing neither of those things. We're just leaving it on the backs of families. The math just does not work here when you think about having it all, and that's what you're pointing out with a lot of women today.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: The average cost of daycare in the United States, the most recent figure I've seen is about $16,000 a year per kid, which is about the income of someone working at minimum wage. Then, as you point out, daycare workers are being paid close to minimum wage, so certainly could not afford daycare for their own children.

This is a place where the math on an industry level just doesn't work. It's too expensive for parents and too underpaid for workers. That's where society needs to come in and say, it's really important to us as a society that we have a next generation, that we care for our next generation, that we help parents raise the next generation. That's where government intervention is necessary.

But absolutely, on an individual level, this is something women are thinking about. Can I make the math work? What does that mean for paying off my student loans if I have a kid and have to pay $1,600 a month? It's definitely something that comes into play with people limiting the size of their families. There have been a lot of stories recently about the third child as a “luxury item,” that it's the new BMW or something. Because if you can afford to have a third child and pay daycare for them, the idea of people not having children they want because they can't afford to care for them while they keep their jobs, to me that's just a self-evident societal failure.

BLAIR HODGES: This boils down to policy. Here’s something you write in the book: "In Western Europe today, fertility is higher in countries with a higher percentage of women in the labor force." You're quoting from a journalist from a French newspaper who's saying that fertility in Europe is higher in countries where women go to work. “Here we have generous maternity leave policies, prenatal and postpartum support, free daycare, shorter workdays for nursing mothers, and all of these ways of accommodating women who want to have kids and making it economically possible for them to do what they want to do.”

There's a stereotype today of seeing women who don't want to have kids and assuming either they can't or that they're selfish, they just want to party or do their own thing. When really, a lot of these people—and men are sometimes involved in these decisions as well of course—are making these choices, because again, there's not the kind of social supports that make it possible.

Just to conclude here, you end this chapter by quoting a researcher at the Institute for Population and Development in Berlin, who says, "The question today is not if women will work, the question is if they will have children."

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: The statistics about Europe are really striking. The countries like Spain or Italy, where there is more support for a traditional family model, there aren't policies to support working mothers. Their fertility is significantly lower than that in Scandinavia, in Sweden, in France, where they have policies that support women. To me it's just logical that if you don't force women to choose between their professional ambitions or basic economic stability and having children, maybe they won't feel the need to choose. Maybe they'll do both.

 

Because of the Planet – 40:05

 

BLAIR HODGES: The chapter on "Because We Can't Have It All" was really eye opening in terms of some of the possibilities where we could be more supportive of families and make it more possible for people who want to have kids to do that.

The next chapter, though, chapter four, is called “Because of the Planet,” and it's about environmentalism and childlessness. You say this is a really big consideration for young people today. This is showing up in a lot of polls. There was a recent global survey of ten thousand young people aged sixteen to twenty-five and they're afraid of having children because of climate change. But your chapter shows this concern isn't actually a new thing. This is something that goes back generations.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: The idea of limiting family size or not having children because of concern for the natural environment is an old one—at least two centuries ago people were talking about it.

The origin figure for this is usually cited as Thomas Malthus, who is around the end of the eighteenth century, turn of the nineteenth century. Late 1700s into 1800. He is living in Britain. He's watching the Industrial Revolution. He's watching forests get clear cut. He's watching the sky get polluted, the air get polluted. He ultimately writes a treatise where he makes the argument that human population will grow at a pace outstripping their ability to create natural resources to provide for it, and then there will come a critical moment where something will happen that cuts the human population back down, whether it's war over resources or disease or famine. He says this cycle will repeat unless people take a really active role in limiting population. He is advocating for abstinence. He is advocating for families—in particular, for poor families—to have fewer kids.

BLAIR HODGES: People will be shocked to find out that he's kind of racist and classist.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: He's not a great guy! He's really mostly concerned with poor families and how many kids they were having. He's got his issues. But his ideas are later used by even more objectionable people to make more explicitly racist arguments as the eugenics movement starts up in the nineteenth century and is used to suggest that certain kinds of people should be the ones whose fertility is most limited.

The history of Malthus's ideas are—well they weren't great to begin with, and then they were used in explicitly racist ways. But he was pointing out there is a limited number of natural resources, and a crisis will come if we have too many people who are not respecting the natural limits of the environment they live in.

I don't think that is a particularly radical idea. Across the world and across time, you see people limit fertility in times of famine or in times of crop failure or in times of major weather events or war. People saying, “Can my farm support another person? Probably not. Another baby may endanger the survival of the rest of my family.” So this is not a totally radical idea.

BLAIR HODGES: Your book does a great job of giving us that Malthus background, and then also showing how environmental concerns re-emerge at different periods. You're taking us now up into the 1960s and 70s. Talk about what's happening at this point.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: In the 1960s and 1970s you still have people who are talking about pollution, who are saying we need to limit the number of children we have in the United States because our air, our water, is polluted. At this strange moment in the late 1960s you have agreement on all sides of the political spectrum, from the political right to the leading edge of the environmental movement, that “too many people” is either a national security concern, or it is an environmental concern.

But also at the same time you have people starting to articulate that it's not only that having more people will contribute to continued damage to the planet, but you have young people starting to articulate that the planet is damaged. Water is polluted. Air is polluted. Is that a place I want to bring a child into?

It's that intellectual lineage I think we really see today in that survey of ten thousand young people who say they're afraid to have children because of climate change. They're thinking not that my own kid is going to damage the planet, but actually that we have put a whole chain of events in motion by not caring for the planet in the past, and these are things the next generations are going to have to deal with.

There becomes this ethical question of, Is that something you want to subject a child to? Is it ethical to bring a child into this? The damage has been done, and what are the implications of bringing a child who's going to have to live in that world?

BLAIR HODGES: I appreciated how you pointed out that minority communities have always been dealing with these concerns more directly. They've always wondered, is the quality of the world such that bringing children into it is unethical or would harm these kids?

It's interesting that white, middle class, and upper-class folks are now starting to reckon with what more disadvantaged people have been worrying about for decades and decades: Is this world a place where I want to bring these kids into it? The chickens are coming home to roost for more privileged people as we're looking at climate change, temperature fluctuations, extreme weather, and all of these other things that make parents today wonder even more than ever whether they want to bring kids into this.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Absolutely. The writer Mary Heglar has an essay where she makes precisely that point, where she says for decades, for generations, Black people in the United States, they greeted the birth of a new child with joy but also fear in the context of Jim Crow and lynchings. She's basically saying, “Welcome to the party. Welcome to living in a context where you have to be concerned about what the quality of a child's life is going to be.”

I think that just speaks to the scale of what we're dealing with, that we're talking about fires in the Arctic, we're talking about one hundred and twenty degrees in Texas. These are things that, even the most privileged may not be able to escape from. As you suggest, I think that reckoning is something you're seeing in young people saying they're concerned about climate change as a reason to not have kids.

BLAIR HODGES: I think the pandemic contributed to this as well. There's a quote from you here in this chapter that I'll read. It says, "The assumption that your children will be okay, the ability to trust in the future that awaits them, is an innovation of the modern world, and even here, it's only ever been a domain of the privileged." I think more people than ever are wondering do I want to bring people into this?

This chapter does a great job showing these shifts of historically going from concern over limited natural resources, concerns of harming the planet and polluting the planet, and now concerns of being in a planet that's already endangered and difficult, and in some ways seems to be collapsing, and now worrying about whether bringing kids into that is even right to begin with, rather than whether bringing kids hurts it or not. It's an eye-opening chapter.

Again, the book that we're talking about is Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother.

 

Because We Can’t – 47:35

 

There's another chapter here I wanted to talk about. It's the "Because We Can't" chapter, and this focuses on women who want to bear children but who can't for a lot of different reasons. The first thing that comes to mind for a lot of people is probably infertility, there's some biological issue that prevents pregnancy or prevents successful childbirth.

Talk about confronting this chapter, because it seems like one of the more emotionally fraught ones. People who want to have kids but can't. It can feel so devastating to them. What was it like writing about infertility and other reasons why people can't have kids when they want to?

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: This chapter was important for me to include, because I think women experiencing infertility often get left out of the conversation of women without kids because we conceive of a woman without kids as the one who wants to travel the world and just have a grand old time. It was very important for me to include that experience because the book really wanted to talk about the full range of experience of not having kids, and that includes joy and freedom.

It also includes in this chapter, great pain. This chapter was also the hardest one to write, in part because I knew I could really hurt people, because this is probably where most of the pain in the book resides, and also because the history I tell of people attempting to correct infertility is a complicated one.

The motivations for doctors since the late nineteenth century who have been trying to fix infertility—they're not always just benevolent, attempting to help women. Very often they were doctors who were concerned about the racial composition of the country, and therefore well-off white women who were married and wanted kids but couldn't have them were of great concern to people who cared about well-off white people reproducing in the United States.

Also, because the rise of the nuclear family and the idea that the only way to make a family is by creating biological offspring, that created an incredible pressure on women to be able to have biological children, or else they couldn't really be a family. They couldn't contribute to the lives of children at all.

It's a complicated history that lands us today in fertility treatments and supporting women experiencing infertility. I wanted to give voice to the real and genuine pain women are feeling, and also tell this history that, like I said, is complicated.

BLAIR HODGES: Sure is. I mean, even the first known example of artificial insemination, you point out, was nonconsensual. This was a doctor who just had an idea, had a theory about why a particular woman couldn't conceive, suspected it might be the husband, and looked at a semen sample, saw that, sure enough, it was sterile. Then just grabbed a medical student and some semen, and artificially inseminated this woman without even telling her or her partner what was going on until after it was successful. Even some of these scientific breakthroughs could happen in very questionable ways.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: The first artificial insemination was an ethical nightmare! 1885. The doctor invites the woman in after he concludes it's probably her husband, chloroforms her, tells her he needs to do an examination, and then takes a semen sample from a medical student and inseminates her. She does get pregnant. He only ever tells her husband, and her husband makes him promise not to tell her, so presumably she died having no idea this child wasn't from her husband.

Later, one of the doctor's medical students defended this way of going about things by saying, people might be squeamish about this, but once people recognize this is a way of uplifting our race, that she was an able-bodied, well-off white woman who couldn't have children, we have a racial imperative to have her have children.

He's suggesting her autonomy and consent were outweighed by the urgency of having her have children, which really encapsulates a lot of how complicated that history is.

BLAIR HODGES: Another thing you bring up here is in vitro fertilization, IVF, and you’ve got a lot of interesting little facts here as well. I didn't know in vitro means "in glass,” for instance. This emerges in the 1970s and it's controversial at the time. Talk about the rise of IVF and some of the complications around it.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Around the world in the 1970s scientists are experimenting with trying to fertilize a human egg outside of the body. "In vivo" would be "in the body." They're doing it “in vitro,” “in glass,” in a petri dish on a lab table.

They understand this is theoretically possible, but no one can make it happen. It's a couple of doctors in the UK who are ultimately able to do it. They fertilize an egg, implant it back into a woman, and in 1978 the first in vitro baby is born. It's a woman named Leslie Brown in the UK. This news rockets around the world, and almost immediately it's greeted as a miracle. She's seemingly completely normal as a baby. She grew up to have a normal life and so that washes away a lot of concern that had been happening earlier in the 1970s about the ethics of doing this.

You have scientists who have qualms about whether it's coming too close to “playing God,” that humans shouldn't be meddling in stuff like this. You have scientists who are concerned about, we don't know if this will actually create someone who is genetically complete or genetically normal. What are the ethics of having babies born who are suffering a whole variety of things because we created them this way?

Then also in the United States you have concern from the anti-abortion movement in the early 1970s about how it is creating fertilized human embryos that are then, at least in research, disposed of. Which sounds a lot like abortion.

Once Leslie Brown is born in 1978 this almost immediately disappears. Within a couple of months, the United States lifts restrictions which had been placed earlier in the decade on IVF research. It lifts restrictions, and it becomes something that is celebrated as a good thing.

But you still see some sort of discontinuity in people who are opposed to abortion who will talk about the sanctity of human life, that human life begins at conception, that it is murder even when we're talking about a couple of cells. Even people who consider themselves anti-abortion, pro-life—a very small percentage of them are opposed to IVF, even though functionally we're talking about human embryos, some of which get destroyed, some of which get put in freezers.

To me, in that difference of approach to abortion versus IVF, you see this deep historical expectation that women become mothers, that even though in both cases we're talking about destroying human embryos, one of them is preventing a woman from becoming a mother, and the other one is helping her become a mother. The latter is ethically acceptable and the former is not in many circles.

BLAIR HODGES: This is where you see the privileging of having kids matters more to some people than the life or personhood of an embryo. Of course, there are some anti-abortion folks who are opposed to IVF as well. I think they're in the minority within that movement, but they do exist. But the pro-natalist side of things sees that as an acceptable sacrifice to help people become genetic parents, which to some people is so important, and it's why people will spend so much money and time and pain and effort to do this.

You point out this new technology can give the illusion that being a mother really is more of an available choice than it might be, because it doesn't always work out. But now people assume if you really want to have kids, there are ways to do it for anyone. So if you don't have kids, then you must just not want them or whatever.

But IVF, it's an imperfect method that promises a lot. It can really deliver for some people and for others it can be really painful and expensive and be a dead end. It's a fraught process. It's a fraught chapter. I feel like you handled it really well, respectfully and carefully, and I could sense throughout the course of the book, that this had to have been a very tricky one for you to write.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: I'm really glad you brought up that piece about IVF creating this illusion that everyone who doesn't have children chose it, because, look, we have this magical technology, which is actually truly incredible—the fact we can ever do that, it's incredible. But that doesn't mean we've fixed infertility, or we've solved it, or every woman experiencing infertility can fix it.

The majority of women who experience infertility do not pursue treatment, and that is in large part because it is so expensive. It's rarely covered by insurance. There's only a few states that require any of it to be covered by insurance, and so it can cost tens of thousands of dollars, and especially as a woman's age goes up, the success rates drop off really dramatically. You can do five, six rounds, all of them at great cost, and statistically still not ever end up with a baby.

I think in some ways it's made the experience of infertility more invisible because we have a way to “fix” it, at least in the cultural imagination, and for people who are going through fertility treatment and it continues not working, that's a repeated sense of failure and an extended pain.

There was a woman I encountered in my research who was interviewed by a newspaper in the 1960s about her experience of infertility, and she was like, “It just never happened for me.” I'm sure that caused her a lot of pain, but she lived in an era where there weren't treatments for her to pursue, and maybe for her that offered a kind of peace, that there wasn't anything that could be done. Now we have lots that can be done, but it requires great cost and great sacrifice.

 

Because We Want Other Lives - 58:19

 

BLAIR HODGES: I sense throughout the chapter, there isn't a feeling of you trying to tell women or anyone what the right position to take on these particular issues are, or criticizing women who want to have a genetic connection to their children or those who don't, or whatever. That attitude continues throughout the book.

Chapter six is called, "Because We Want Other Lives." It talks about Ellen Peck, this national phenomenon from the seventies, this feminist, Cosmo, cool, sexy woman who wrote this book called The Baby Trap. She's arguing like, “Hey, it's actually awesome to be childfree!” She wanted this carefree life. You're surprisingly contrasting her with people like Christina of Markyate, an eleventh century Christian who swore a vow of celibacy as a child as a way of being devoted to God. You're talking about women who want other lives than being a mother. This is a category that includes women like Ellen Peck—professional, sexy, hip women—and these Christian celibate women like Christina, who see being without children as a form of religious devotion.

What's fascinating is that broader society fought both of those women about their decisions. Christina was fought about it. Her parents hated that she decided to do that, and applied so much pressure. And Ellen was loathed. I didn't get the sense America embraced her! She was kind of seen as this firebrand pariah, which I think is an identity she also loved and embraced as well.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: The last chapter is really about the women who chose very explicitly not to have children. You'll notice it's the thinnest chapter. I devote the least amount of time to this active choice. I think that surprised some readers. That's what they expected the whole book to be about. But most of the book is actually about a much grayer area.

But even within this chapter about choosing a childfree lifestyle, Ellen Peck is the origin of what our current society thinks of when they think of a woman without children. As you said, she really celebrates the lifestyle. In her book, The Baby Trap, she talks about how because she and her husband don't have kids they're able to travel the world, and they have three houses, they go to the French Riviera, and they travel on yachts. She doesn't really consider that they might just be rich, and that doesn't actually have anything to do with not having children.

BLAIR HODGES: It's also sex, too. She enjoys sex without a connection to any children.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: For people who identify with the childfree label, she really created space to celebrate not having children as an active lifestyle choice. “It's not something you're supposed to pity me for. In fact, it's something you're supposed to be jealous of because my life is so awesome! I have great sex, I travel, I have all these houses, I have fun.”

BLAIR HODGES: Childfree pride movement, basically.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Exactly. She's deeply important for that. She also really contributed to the popularization of the term "childfree." She founded an organization that did a lot of work to try and get the idea of being childfree in front of Americans, try and normalize it as a lifestyle choice.

But I also talk in that chapter, as you said, about other women who made the active decision to not have children. Long before Ellen Peck came on the scene to create this modern version, Christina of Markyate is fascinating. She's an eleventh century girl born in Britain into a wealthy family, and she announces at fourteen she has married Jesus and she will not be marrying a man and she will not be having children. And to her parents, who were well-off British merchants, having a daughter marry into another family was a really important business proposition. It increased family's influence. They were not fans of this idea.

BLAIR HODGES: I kind of loved Christina for this.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: She goes through all of these heroic ways of avoiding getting married and having kids, including refusing to consummate her marriage when they do make her get married, and then running off and living with a bunch of monks for a few years before her parents give in and are like, “Okay, fine, you can be a nun.”

One way to read Christina's story is she was a woman who was genuinely devout, that she genuinely wanted to devote her life to God. I don't doubt the genuineness of that devotion. But also she was very actively and from a young age selecting the other “socially acceptable” path. She knew she would otherwise have to become a wife and a mother and run a household, and this was the only way out.

She's very clear she does not want to be a mother, she does not want to be a wife, she doesn't want to run a household, and in choosing a life of being a nun, she doesn't have to do any of those things. She ends up writing and teaching and having a bunch of disciples and learning. So even if we think her religious devotion is genuine, she is also making an active choice for a very different kind of life than was available to most women in her period.

BLAIR HODGES: I like how that was contrasted with Ellen Peck's group, the National Organization of Non-Parents. This wasn't religiously devoted in a godly sense anyway, but I think there was some religious ideology behind it in the sense of this being their driving purpose, and this was what they ordered their lives around.

But you point out Ellen Peck's brand of being childfree was pretty narrowly focused on a privileged kind of childfree life, and they tried to rebrand at some point to be more choice-centered, to be like, “We're not trying to say having kids is bad. We're just saying everybody can have a choice.”

By then, though, her movement was already so tied with being “anti-kids” in the public imagination that it fell apart. The National Organization of Non-Parents was seen as this anti-kid organization. That's just not going to get any legs, as you point out, across the spectrum. Even many feminists at this time were embracing motherhood. Motherhood could be a very crucial part of being a feminist as well, rather than the stereotype of feminists who are angry women who don't want kids or husbands or anything like that, but rather, the feminist movement was also embracing motherhood in a way that kind of sidelined some of the feminist women who didn't want to have kids, including some lesbians.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Ellen Peck ruffled the feathers of traditionalists, political conservatives, of course, but she also was not particularly popular among feminists. That was in part because she denigrated motherhood. She really didn't understand why anyone would become a mother, and framed it as anyone who had children was just being a sheep and not thinking for herself and wasting her life. That's not really going to endear you to many.

But as you say, motherhood in the 1960s and 1970s was something that, as I put it in the book, feminists wore as a shield. It was protection from the accusation that feminists were just a bunch of angry shrews. They were like, “No, we're married, we have children, we take our kids to church. But we also want political participation, and we want access to the professional workforce.” It was a defense. It gave them a sense of respectability that they weren't looking to really overhaul anything. They were just asking for political and professional access and rights.

For that reason, women like Ellen Peck were a little bit dangerous. They were playing into stereotypes about feminists from political conservatives that made people bristle at the idea of feminists. You do have women like Betty Friedan, who was one of the leaders of the feminist movement in the 1960s, and much later in her career she looks back, and she's like, “We really should have thought harder about non-motherhood as a choice people would have made and supported that.”

In the 1960s a lot of feminists, including Betty Friedan, see women without children as a symptom of how poorly society treated mothers. They are thinking, “If we fight to improve the circumstances under which women become mothers, then everyone will become a mother, and this whole problem of not having kids will go away.”

Friedan does come to realize that was narrowminded on her part, to not think about it as an active choice and a lifestyle that was valid and something feminists should be supporting.

 

Different Paths on the Same Road – 1:07:14

 

BLAIR HODGES: You bring us up to the present with a group you found that started about a decade ago, called “Not Mom.” This is a big-tent approach to not having children. You compare that to the National Organization of Non-Parents, and you say this movement is really about trying to be supportive of women wherever they're at, whatever choices they're making, because even Betty Friedan was saying “pretty much everybody will become a mom.”

Well, that's actually probably not true, and maybe that's okay. Maybe we should make the experience of motherhood better for its own sake for the people who want to be invested and involved in that, and also make life meaningful and see the meaningfulness in the lives of people who choose not to have kids as well. It seemed like Not Mom, this online group, was trying to thread that needle.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: The founder of that group was someone who always thought she wanted to have kids. She always imagined herself having a large family. It just never was in the cards for her. She got married late. She pursued her career.

She said she was casting around on the internet to find friends, to find support, and she realized she didn't fit in infertility support groups, because that wasn't really her story. She also didn't fit in the joyfully childfree, the Ellen Peck lineage groups, because that wasn't her story. She didn't fit in—at the time she was in her fifties—in empty nester groups, because they had a different life experience.

She decided to create this online community that was for—its tagline is, "We're all on different paths, but on the same road." The idea being that there are many, many ways of landing in a place where you don't have children, and this group is for all of them. They try to connect joyfully childfree people with people experiencing infertility and fence-sitters and people who never found a partner, or whose lives just didn't shake out that way.

In a lot of ways, the structure of the book and the way I focus on the gray area of not having kids was inspired by this broad thinking on the part of the Not Mom group, that there are many ways of coming to this reproductive status. The thing we have in common is this reproductive status and we can recognize all of the ways we got there.

BLAIR HODGES: People that check out the book can learn even more about that group. The book is called Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother.

Peggy, when I got to the conclusion of the book, the chapter title made me brace myself a bit: "And If You'll Forgive Me for Asking, Why Should We Have Children?" So here I expected maybe a full-throated endorsement of not having kids. Maybe you were going to make a personal case or really sing the praises. The whole book itself is definitely a sympathetic and historically rigorous look at why different people don't have kids. But I thought, “Okay, she's going to tell us now. She's going to tell us. She's going to make her case.”

But what I found here instead was you, as a person yourself who doesn't have children, expressing a lot of solidarity with people who do.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: I got the book contract in February 2020, and then the whole world changed.

BLAIR HODGES: Within a month!

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Within a month. So most of the time I was writing the book I was in COVID lockdown, teaching my classes on Zoom, and that experience really profoundly changed the book I ended up writing. I think I would have written something very different.

The conclusion is where I really lean into the ways the book changed by having lived through COVID, because my pandemic experience was hard, everyone's was hard, but to me it really highlighted the ways in which we as a society leave parents, especially parents of young children, totally adrift. That they're not supported. Their pandemics were really hard, and that got me thinking about all these reasons for not having kids I had just spent so long writing about. I started realizing those reasons are some of the same reasons that make parenting hard.

This is something we have in common, that we all lack social support. If you don't have kids, maybe that's the reason you didn't have kids. If you have kids, that's why it's so hard to parent in the United States today. Money, same thing. The way in which work doesn't line up with parenting. I realized, far from us being completely different in our life experiences, in fact we're all grappling with this same set of societal factors that make parenting hard, and then we’re making different decisions based on those factors. But we're all living with them.

The conclusion became much more about what we have in common and what solidarity we can build to ask for a better world for all of us that would allow people to have children if they wanted them, and allow people who do have children to feel supported in that. The conclusion recognizes the extent to which we have built a society that does not support parenting, that makes it very difficult to parent in a whole variety of ways, and then having recognized that, asks what do we do? How do we move forward from that?

The argument I make is, rather than creating divides and saying there are women with children and women without children and they can't even talk to each other, they're living totally different lives, but rather, we should be thinking about, what do we have in common? How can we support each other and build a better world?

BLAIR HODGES: It's a moving conclusion, to learn a little bit more about you and your experience, and then to see your call for solidarity and for better social supports. You point out that studies show parents in the US report being less happy than people who don't have kids, but you point out there are other countries where there are more social supports, and people with kids often report being happier. There are a lot of reasons to reconsider how we treat parents and also to address some of the stigmas around people who don't want to be parents.

Your book spends most of its time doing that second thing, of destigmatizing and contextualizing what it's like not to have kids, which is very important! But it's also not championing that as the “one way to be.” It's just saying, this is another way to be. That’s why your book fits so well with Family Proclamations, which is really trying to advocate for the many different ways to be a family—families that have kids and families that don't, people that want to get married and have a family that way, people that don't. There are a lot of different ways, and all of us can support each other.

I wondered, as you were writing the book if you personally identified with any of the figures in particular. Did you see yourself at any point in any of these chapters?

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: That's such a good question. I think the answer is no, not any individual figure. However, I think the experience of writing the book was a deeply comforting one for me. I felt much more fraught about being a woman without kids before I wrote the book. Worrying, am I making the right decision? Am I going to regret this? What's going to happen when I'm old? The things those of us without kids are really worried about.

It was deeply comforting for me to go through this book and realize I am not the first person that has ever lived this kind of life. In fact, women for a very long time have been living lives without children that are rewarding and challenging in their own ways, and also just seeing the sheer variety of what those lives could look like—it gave me a sense that we're all out here trying to build lives we like based on the crappy circumstances we find ourselves in, and prioritizing the things that need to be prioritized, or best fit our desires, and life shakes out a whole variety of different ways.

For me, it was just seeing that variety that was really comforting. It made me think maybe I'm not totally screwing it up, because there's a million different ways to do it right.

 

Peggy’s Choice – 1:15:31

 

BLAIR HODGES: I did wonder, did you always get the sense kids weren't something you wanted, or was this something you arrived at as you saw more of the conditions of what being a mom was like in this country?

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: I think it's a little bit of both. If I look back to myself as a younger girl, as a younger woman, I think I was always sort of a fence sitter, maybe leaning no. But I am not someone who knows in the core of my being I don't want kids. I'm not someone who really identifies as “childfree.” For me, I could imagine living a very happy life as a mother, just like I can imagine living a very happy life not as a mother.

For me, it's been a very gray thing, and I think it's been about priorities. I've chosen a career that required me to delay lots of things about adulthood until I was thirty-five or something. But also, the partner I met and the circumstances of his life, and thinking financially does this fit into my life, and what are all the other things I want to do?

It's something where I guess it's a combination. My sister, who is the very happy mother of three boys, has gently suggested to me if I had really, truly wanted to have kids, I would have figured it out. I think she's probably right, but also all of these other factors played into my decision. I could imagine if I lived in a different world or a different society that didn't make me have to prioritize things so starkly I might not have had to figure it out. It might have just been a part of my life that fit more neatly.

BLAIR HODGES: Do you still have to wrestle with the sense your decision will be interpreted as a judgment against other choices? Because you're kind of in between, like people who think having kids is great, people who think having kids is a disaster. You don't seem to identify on either side of that, per se, so it seems like both of those camps could be puzzled by you and be like, wait a minute. Or assume you're on the other side—oh, she hates kids, or whatever. How do you experience that as a person who lives in that ambiguity, rather than having just a deep in your gut knowledge of for or against?

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: I think that's a really astute point. I had a funny moment at a book event a couple of months ago where a very young woman raised her hand and identified herself as twenty-three and she's like, “Well, on TikTok what they're saying about your book is you're not giving enough credit to childfree. You're not celebrating the childfree lifestyle as much as we would like you to—we, Gen Z, would like you to.”

Primarily, I was excited they were talking about my book on TikTok! [laughter] For her and for the people she was listening to, my book is sort of small "c" conservative—it doesn't go far enough in celebrating this as an alternate lifestyle. But also, I think, the title Without Children is a forceful title, and so I've also gotten through having written the book, but also just in living a life.

You're right. People with children interpret my existence, my reproductive choices, as a judgment on theirs, and I'm not totally sure why that is.

BLAIR HODGES: I don't either, but I have to resist that a little bit myself, even as a person with kids. That's something I try to be conscious about. Because I think there's a little gut instinct of feeling like other people’s choices must be a judgment.

And I think maybe there's a little “grass is greener” jealousy. We can't unpack all of our psychology about what we're experiencing. But I do think it's fascinating, and I think it's wonderful to have a historian like you who can give voice to that ambiguity, because I don't think that's talked about as much. We're a polar society. We're polarized. We want to talk about the extremes, and you don't live in the extremes. Some people want you to, as you said, but I think it's valuable to hear a voice, to have a historian who can tell the story from a perspective of ambiguity and letting things be on a spectrum of color rather than black and white. For that, especially, I think this book is very valuable.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: I really appreciate it. That's the primary thing I was trying to do with this book, was to suggest there's a lot of gray area. One of the things that surprised me in publishing the book and hearing from readers, is I've gotten a lot of positive feedback from mothers who identify with the complicated and ambiguous relationship to having kids. They feel seen in that part of the book as well, which is really validating.

BLAIR HODGES: They don't feel that gut, “I fell in love with you at first sight” in all of this. For me as a parent, it's funny—my fear about this show is people might only dip into the episodes they think apply to them. My hope is people will lean into the episodes that seem foreign to them and find all of the obvious resonances they didn't know about before and explore some of the big differences between their life choices, and be able to sit with those different experiences.

I hope people will do that, because for me, reading your book as a person who wanted to have kids growing up, I'm happy to have kids, I love my kids, but to spend time with your book, this is one that has stuck with me, and that I keep thinking about. Especially with friends who choose not to have kids. And some who can’t. I hope this gets a wide reading.

 

Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises! – 1:21:22

 

BLAIR HODGES: I could talk to you forever about this, Peggy, I really could—

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: [laughter] Sure.

BLAIR HODGES: —But I want to go to the final segment, Regrets, Challenges, & Surprises. This is an opportunity for you to choose your own adventure. You don't have to speak to all three of these things. It's really up to you. What do you regret? What would you change about the book now that it's out? What was the most challenging thing about writing it? You mentioned COVID. Maybe that's it. Then, was there anything as you're researching that just surprised you? That was just like, wow, kind of an "a-ha" moment?

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: I'm going to start with regrets and challenges, and then I'll try and come up with a surprise. The regret is something that seemed totally fine and noncontroversial when I turned in my copyedits, and by the time the book came out politics had moved so fast that it didn't age well, and that is that I didn't have the foresight to take Anthony Comstock more seriously. We talked about Comstock a little bit.

BLAIR HODGES: Really quickly, this is the politician that passed laws to try to prevent birth control from being sent in the mail. He was this nineteenth-century pro-natalist reformer. Anti-pornography, but he was trying to control people's sexuality and sexual expression. Okay, go ahead.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: He advocates for and gets a law passed in 1873 called the Comstock Act, which makes it illegal to send anything through the mail that could be used for an abortion or contraception. Tons of people are prosecuted under this law between the 1870s and the 1920s. People are sentenced to hard labor. He used to brag about how many people committed suicide when they were charged with his law.

Then, slowly, it stops being enforced. In the 1930s condoms become a thing, and they stop arresting people for mailing condoms. In 1965 the Supreme Court deems access to birth control a right of married couples. In 1972 it makes it a right of all Americans. Then in 1973 obviously there's Roe v Wade, which gives access to abortion. Slowly those supersede the Comstock Act. But it is never repealed. It remains on the books.

I say in the book that eventually Anthony Comstock and his act just get swept into the dustbin of history and we never think about him again. But this year, as the book is in print, this year, Anthony Comstock and his act have been resurrected by anti-abortion groups who see it as a very available path to a national abortion ban.

Back in the spring when the judge in Amarillo, Texas wrote the ruling that revoked FDA authorization of mifepristone, the abortion pill, he cites the Comstock Act at least a dozen times as if it is established law, which it actually kind of is. It was never repealed.

I wish I had had the foresight to take him more seriously and not see him as this archaic figure we don't have to worry about anymore. But what I really wish is that politicians had taken it more seriously and maybe done a symbolic repeal of this act at some point in the past, because it is still on the books. That is something scary we're going to have to be dealing with.

In terms of challenges, and maybe I'll roll this into a surprise too, I was really trying to write a book that was accessible to a broad audience beyond fellow historians who are paid to read each other's books, and that would be entertaining and accessible and enjoyable and clearly communicate this history.

BLAIR HODGES: The tens of historians who would read your book you wanted to reach beyond? [laughter]

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Exactly. I wanted to reach beyond those seven people whose names I know. I have that on the one hand, and then on the other hand I have the scale of the thing, where, in the period I'm talking about, women without children range from about a low of ten percent, which is during the baby boom, to a high of about thirty-three percent, one in three of the American population, with an average of about one in five. I'm trying to write an eighty-five-thousand-word book that's accessible to a wide audience about basically the life experience of twenty percent of Americans for the last two hundred years!

That became a real challenge because I realized the range of experiences of women without children was basically the range of experience of American women, that it encapsulated every kind of profession, every kind of race, every kind of socioeconomic status, every kind of life experience. There were women with and without children and so that became a challenge. How do I do justice to these life experiences when what I'm talking about is so broad?

Initially I had structured the book around groups of people, but I realized that was just folly, because I would need twenty-five chapters, and even then I wouldn't have scratched the surface. I had to restructure the book around reasons. But even so, I'll get feedback like, “What about this group? What about this kind of experience?”

I did my best to pack it in there. I guess even as an author who was sitting down to write a book about this, I hadn't realized how broad the range of experience would be.

BLAIR HODGES: I think it's a real triumph, truly. Splitting it up into reasons was a stroke of brilliance. It's not just a chronological history where you take us through time and then particular reasons crop up. I don't even know if that would have worked anyway, because as your work shows, a lot of these various reasons existed simultaneously. There really isn't this even neat development of reasons why women haven't had kids. It's been a lot of different reasons in a lot of different eras over time, and so breaking it up into these chapters of reasons—I really loved this book. It was an easy read in the best ways, an incredibly engaging history. I can't recommend it enough, Peggy. Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother.

PEGGY HEFFINGTON: Thank you so much. I really appreciate the chance to talk with you about it.

BLAIR HODGES: Thanks for listening to Family Proclamations, and thanks to Camille Messick, who edited this episode's transcript. You can find this transcript and others at our website, familyproclamations.org.

Also, again, I invite you to take a second to rate and review the show on iTunes. Recommend it to a friend. There's a lot more to come on Family Proclamations. We're just scratching the surface here, so stick around or check out episodes you haven't listened to yet. Mates of State provided our theme song. Family Proclamations is part of the Dialogue Podcast Network. I'm Blair Hodges, and I’ll see you next time.