Jody Day
World Childless Week Ambassador
March 8th is International Women’s Day worldwide and the 2024 focus is ‘Inspire Inclusion.’ Whilst this is an important theme, I can’t help but wonder whether there’ll be a notable increase in inclusion around the issues women without children face this year? The last few years, it’s felt more and more like ‘International Mothers Day’, and whilst I celebrate women who are mothers, and appreciate that our society is still far from comprehensive in its support for the tasks of motherhood, I often feel that because women without children don’t need that kind of support, it’s presumed that we don’t need any kind of support at all. Having been writing and advocating on this issue for thirteen years, it still feels like childless people live in an imaginative blackspot for mainstream ‘hard-working families.’ (Please note the ironic use of quotation marks!)
Although International Women’s Day began in the early 1900s with a powerful commitment to social justice, voting rights and labour rights for women, it seems that it later lost its way in the backlash against feminism that took hold in the 1980s, when to call oneself a feminist was to be asked, ‘Do you hate men?’ The eighties were my coming-of-age decade and the working world of the London fashion industry that I joined in 1983 was still one ruled by men; the designers, models, shop assistants, PR agents, journalists and editors might have been mostly women, but the business owners, publishers and investors were usually men.
At school, and within my family, the fear of god had been put into me about ‘not getting pregnant’ and how it would ‘ruin our lives’ if we did, something that many of us who went to school at that time in the UK will remember. The government was determined to reduce the number of teenage pregnancies via a massive educational campaign - and it worked. Unfortunately, the side effect was that it made getting pregnant seem so easy (I was warned not to sit on a warm seat recently vacated by a boy!) that it left a whole generation blithely confident of their fertility. This, combined with the introduction of IVF, meant that an awful lot of GenX women weren’t too worried about it; certainly for me, unable to conceive naturally from my late twenties onwards, I thought that ‘forty’ was the age to worry about, and that should I not be pregnant by then, there was ‘always IVF’. It seems incredible to me now that as an intelligent and educated woman, I didn’t even know that the reason female fertility declined with age was to do with the quality of my eggs, or that the success rates of IVF for women 40-44 were between 4% and 11%. So much for a backup plan!
Growing up in the seventies and eighties, motherhood looked pretty dull to me. When Lady Diana, the former Princess of Wales was pregnant in 1982, she made her public appearances in a range of frumpy floral tent dresses, her growing bump and former glamour hidden from view, and with it the slightly embarrassing reminder that she was a sexual being. It had been like this throughout the seventies too - there was absolutely nothing alluring or noteworthy about being a mother and indeed, when a pop star or film idol did get pregnant, usually they dropped out of sight for a while, as it did nothing for their sex- or box-office appeal. Back then, to become a mother was to lose some kind of feminine mystique and to become, in some way, rather ordinary and just like other women.
Things began to change fast in the 1990s and, as I wrote about in my book, Living the Life Unexpected, I think I can date it to the day that I held the August 1991 issue of Vanity Fair in my hand and gazed at the enormous, naked pregnancy belly of Demi Moore on the cover with the title ‘More Demi Moore’. The portrait, by Annie Leibowitz, is considered her best work, and it started a trend of ‘celebrity bumps’ that has become ubiquitous, for me, reaching peak bumpitude when Beyonce broke the internet with her pregnancy photos, which were the most liked images on Instagram in 2017.
It has been this steady glamorisation of motherhood, rooted in pronatalism, bankrolled by consumerism, and weaponised by social media that has elevated human female reproduction in the Western world into a moral experience, not just a biological or social one. Indeed, the ‘as a mother’ trope is now so hyped-up that to even suggest that the experience of women without children (whether by choice or chance) is missing from the narrative of twenty-first-century life is to be met with, at best, a blank stare, or more often, a spoken or unspoken harsh judgment. Combined with conservative hang-wringing about falling birth rates and an ageing population, this retreat into motherhood as the only route to a fulfilling female life is undoing many of the gains of second-wave feminism. It also pits women with and without children against each other; hiding from those without children the dark sides of the mothering experience, whilst giving mothers the impression that the lives of non-parents are one long selfish hurrah, full of white sofas, endless holidays and fat bank accounts. The truth is, all human lives can be meaningful, and all lives contain both joy and grief - nobody gets a free pass in this life, mothers or not.
So this International Women’s Day, let’s seek to include the experiences of all women and recognise how women without children have always been with us, contributing hugely to their families, communities, workplaces, civil society and the wider culture. Yes, the birth rate is declining, but rather than this being seen as a disaster, we need to recognise that it is now returning to what it was before the Baby Boom years - and that perhaps it was the anomaly, not us.
We were each born childless and worthy; our childlessness cannot take that from us. On International Women’s Day, let’s celebrate mothers, but let’s recognise that they are more than their reproductive identity, they are women first. And we are more than our childlessness too. This International Women’s Day, let’s include all women, and that means childless women too.
