Join us in welcoming Peggy O’Donnell Heffington and her new book Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother, out April 18th via Seal Press! She will be joined in conversation by Brown University professor and fellow author Bathsheba Demuth, followed by an audience Q&A. This event is free and open to all!
ABOUT WITHOUT CHILDREN
In an era of falling births, it's often said that millennials invented the idea of not having kids. But history is full of women without children: some who chose childless lives, others who wanted children but never had them, and still others--the vast majority, then and now--who fell somewhere in between. Modern women considering how and if children fit into their lives are products of their political, ecological, and cultural moment. But history also tells them that they are not alone.
From Joan of Arc to Queen Elizabeth I, to Harriet Tubman and Susan B. Anthony, to Sally Ride and Jennifer Aniston, history is full of women without children. Some chose to forgo reproduction in order to pursue intellectually satisfying work-a tension noted by medieval European nuns, 1970s women's liberationists, and modern professionals alike. Some refused to bring children into a world beset by famine, pollution, or climate change. For others, childlessness was involuntary: infertility has been a source of anguish all the way back to the biblical Hannah. But most women without children didn't--and don't--perceive themselves as either proudly childfree or tragically barren. Seventeenth century French colonists in North America, struggling without the kind of community support they enjoyed in their mother country, found themselves postponing children until a better moment that, for many of them, never arrived. It is women like these-whose ambivalence throughout their child-bearing years inevitably makes their choice for them-that make up the vast majority of millennials without children in the United States.
Drawing on deep research and her own experience as a woman without children, historian Peggy O'Donnell Heffington shows that many of the reasons women are not having children today are ones they share with women in the past: a lack of support, their jobs or finances, environmental concerns, infertility, and the desire to live different kinds of lives. Understanding this history--how normal it has always been to not have children, and how hard society has worked to make it seem abnormal--is key, she writes, to rebuilding kinship between mothers and non-mothers, and to building a better world for us all.
ABOUT PEGGY O’DONNELL HEFFINGTON
Peggy O’Donnell Heffington is an Instructional Professor in the Department of History at the University of Chicago, where she teaches courses on gender and women’s history as well as historical research and writing methods. When she’s not answering email, you can usually find her trail running, baking gluten free cake, and looking at clothes on the internet. Peggy lives outside of Chicago with her husband Bob and two pugs, Ellie and Jake. WITHOUT CHILDREN is her first book.
ABOUT BATHSHEBA DEMUTH
Bathsheba Demuth is an environmental historian, specializing in the lands and seas of the Russian and North American Arctic. Her interest in northern environments and cultures began when she was 18 and moved to the village of Old Crow in the Yukon. For over two years, she mushed huskies, hunted caribou, fished for salmon, tracked bears, and otherwise learned to survive in the taiga and tundra. In the years since, she has visited Arctic communities across Eurasia and North America. From the archive to the dog sled, she is interested in how the histories of people, ideas, places, and non-human species intersect.