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It’s a subject that, depending on who you ask, is either everywhere these days or taboo as ever: the subject of choosing not to have kids. Laura Carroll is a writer and researcher who’s made a specialty of this topic. Her many projects about childlessness by choice include the book Families of Two, for which she surveyed a large and diverse number of couples on their choice not to become parents, and The Baby Matrix: Why Freeing Our Minds From Outmoded Thinking About Parenthood & Reproduction Will Create a Better World. She’s also conducted a longitudinal study, tracking women who decided not to become mothers over 10 years of making that decision.
Laura’s new book, A Special Sisterhood, is comprised of 100 short profiles and illustrations of women throughout history–going back to ancient times–who never had kids; Women like Queen Elizabeth I, the photographer Margaret Bourke-White, opera legend Jesseye Norman, and Jeanette Rankin, the first woman elected to Congress, to name a few. Not every woman in the book made this choice deliberately, of course, and the book is not making a political point or issuing a grand call for visibility. But I enjoyed it as a series of fun and fascinating sketches of 100 very different women, and Laura and I spent the first half of the interview talking about some of them before switching gears to talk about Laura’s research and some of the ways the dialogue around human procreation has changed over the last few years.
Note: This is not a policy discussion! If you want to hear the pro-natalist position you can go over to my other podcast A Special Place In Hell, where my co-host will talk about population collapse with unparalleled puissance!
