Women Without Kids Quotes

“The regulation of women’s reproductive power by men . . . the legal and technical control by men of contraception, fertility, abortion, obstetrics, gynecology, and extrauterine reproductive experiments—are all essential to the patriarchal”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“Am I Willing to Risk My Mental Health to Have a Baby?” “I sometimes think that guarding my sanity so ferociously makes me selfish,”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“Motherhood is no longer a necessary nor a sufficient condition for maturity or fulfillment,”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“[T]he erasure of our elderwomen in general is part of what Sheehy describes as "a conspiracy of silence which has hidden the fact of how much power older women potentially wield." Power, remember, that lies partly in the fact that women over age fifty are no longer primarily caregivers and are therefore free to play more of an active role in society at large—and that is equally born from experience and the accumulation of common sense.
Once a person has taken a few turns around the block, it becomes much harder to hoodwink them into going against their own best interests. Having lived long enough to have overcome their fair share of traumas, and to have gotten the measure of how the world works, will also make a person far less likely to believe in the next quick fix or "miracle cure." They are more likely to retire their subscription to the capitalist credo of keeping up appearances and start living by their own playbook instead.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“shift in Caliban and the Witch—in which she posits that the very purpose of the witch hunts that accompanied this era, for example, was to put control of women’s bodies and reproductive function into the hands of the newly minted owning class: wealthy white men, a.k.a. the founding fathers of patriarchy. Said “witches” represented “a world of female subjects that capitalism had to destroy: the heretic, the healer, the disobedient wife, the woman who dared to live alone.” Among them, many a woman without kids. Women in turn whose life choices went against the requirements of the developing capitalist machine, which demanded a continual source of fresh “labor-power” (i.e., people) in order to fulfill its mandate of perpetual growth.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“As Jeanne Safer writes: “My decision never to bear children reflects my entire history, the interaction of temperament and circumstance, fear and desire, capacities and limitations, that makes me who I am.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“Pronatalism is also the reason there is still no specific, widely used terminology that validates the life-path of women without kids: we are non-mothers, women without kids, either child-less or child-free, all of which emphasize the absence of a child.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“it all has the same rotten root: pronatalism. The ideology, that is, that says “parents are more important than non-parents, and that families are more respectable and more valid than single people.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“But me not being a mother feels as fundamentally a part of me as the freckles on my face; not something I would ever have thought to question had it not become apparent that someday, being somebody's mom would be expected of me.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“[T]hese are the lives and the lived-in faces that I look to when I envision being nobody's grandma.

Each of these women, for me, seems both youthful and wise, experimental and accomplished, as if the little girl that she once was is right there, a twinkle in the corner of her own eye”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood

“This is the essence of what it means to be sovereign: that is, the ultimate authority over our own life. When we are sovereign, we are no longer swayed by the projections and the expectations of others. As Jody Day describes it, "Being sovereign means you cannot be owned; that you are unownable." Meanwhile, age releases women from the belief that our value lies primarily in our physical attractiveness.”
― Ruby Warrington, Women Without Kids: The Revolutionary Rise of an Unsung Sisterhood