Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood by Ruby Warrington

What is “woman” if not “mother”?

Anything she wants to be.

Forgoing motherhood has traditionally marked a woman as “other.” With no official place setting for her in our society, she has hovered on the sidelines: the quirky girl, the neurotic career obsessive, the “eccentric” aunt. Instead of continuing to paint women without kids as sad, self-obsessed, or somehow dysfunctional, what if we saw them as boldly forging a first-in-a-civilization vision for a fully autonomous womankind? Or as journalist and thought leader Ruby Warrington asks: What if being a woman without kids were in fact its own kind of legacy?

Touching on themes like intergenerational healing, feminism, environmentalism, and more, this personal look and anthropological dig into a stubbornly taboo topic is a timely and brave reframing of what it means not to be a mom. Our experiences and discourse around non-motherhood are central to women’s ongoing fight for gender equality. And whether we are childless by design or circumstance, we can live without regret, shame, or compromise.

Both bold and tenderhearted, Women Without Kids seeks first and foremost to help valorize a path that is the natural consequence of women having more say about the choices we make and how our lives play out. Within this, it unites the unsung sisterhood of non-mothers—no longer pariahs or misfits, but a vital part of our evolution and collective healing as women, as humans, and as a global family.

“A startling, confronting, and liberating treatise.”  —Holly Whitaker, New York Times bestselling author of Quit Like a Woman