This interview (vodcast above, transcript below, audio podcast here) is a conversation between Jody Day (Gateway Elderwomen), Christopher Henze (Director: Wise Women) and Dominique Debroux (Producer: Wise Women), and explores our reflections on the thesis of their documentary ‘Wise Women: Humanity’s Untold Origins’ (2025). You can watch a trailer of the documentary below, and watch the full film here. More on their Substack, Wise Women… Forward.
SPEAKERS
Jody Day - Psychotherapist and founder of Gateway Women & Gateway Elderwomen
Christopher Henze - Director of “Wise Women: Humanities Untold Origins”
Dominque Debroux - Producer of “Wise Women: Humanities Untold Origins”
Interview edited lightly for flow and clarity.
Christopher Henze:
Hi everybody. Welcome to our Wise Women Forward Podcast. I’m Christopher Henze, Director of “Wise Women: Humanities Untold Origins,” and I’m with Dominique Debroux, my wife, inspiration and producer of the film, and a profound wise woman. Today, we’re talking to Jody Day. She’s a psychotherapist and founder of the childless movement at Gateway Women, a Work That Reconnects facilitator, and the author of Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children. You can find her on Substack at Jody Day. Links will be attached.
Dominque Debroux:
Hi, Jody, I’m so glad you’re here. One of the after effects of us making this movie is the ability for me to talk to all of these fantastic wise women, like you. I’m so glad to have you here with us today.
Jody Day:
I’m honoured to be invited. The film is fascinating. Thank you for making it.
Dominque Debroux:
Thank you. So tell us about yourself and what drives you.
Jody Day:
That’s a big one to kick off with! I’m in my early sixties and postmenopausal since my late forties. The transition through menopause has been a big learning experience because it’s also been wrapped up in my involuntary childlessness.
As you know, I was married in my twenties and trying to conceive in my thirties. I wasn’t able to conceive, and then my marriage broke down at the end of my thirties. So I entered my forties single and childless, and discovered that as far as society was concerned, I was complete social plankton—totally a wasted space, a failed female project. I used to joke that the only invitations I got were to dental checkups. It was literally like I had no value to anyone.
This came as an incredible shock to me. Although I’d been a feminist in my teens and early twenties, I’ll be honest, I parked a lot of it to be with the man that I fell in love with in my early twenties. I hadn’t really understood how much of my status in the world was actually attached to being part of a heterosexual partnership. I was really shocked in my forties to see how little value society placed on anything to do with me because I was both unpartnered and wasn’t a mother.
I also had a difficult time because everybody else in my social circle who wanted to become a mother became a mother. Some people struggled with fertility, had fertility treatments, and they worked. I was very lonely. So I started writing a blog about my experience because I found out that one in four of my generation probably didn’t have children. I was like, where the hell are they? I didn’t know any—either in my family, my social circle, business circles, anywhere.
I knew a couple of childfree-by-choice women who were artists. They were quite radical, and I was a little bit scared of them, and I just thought, that’s not me. Also, at the time (about 2009), the stuff I came across online about the childfree choice was really radical—it seemed to be about people who hated children and hated parents.1 I thought, is that what people are going to think about me?
So, 15 years ago, in 2011, I started writing a blog using my own name and my own photo. It was extraordinary when it went viral, because I was the first person who was writing about being single and childless, not by choice. The other things that were out there were often anonymous, with a green and purple, flowery vibe, very self-helpy. They were also from heterosexual married women writing personal experiences—very valuable— but about life after fertility treatments not working. That was the only narrative that was out there.
Mine was different. I was a bit of a rock chick London girl. I created the website myself, and with my design background, it looked contemporary and fresh. But the fact that I was using my real name and photograph—I didn’t realise—but I broke a big taboo just by not being ashamed of my life, by not taking the patriarchal pill that somehow I was of less value.
Within one day, I had people writing to me from all over the world, saying, “How do you know the exact words in my head? I thought I was the only person having these thoughts.” Then The Guardian picked it up and interviewed me. That article is still being read and shared today. In it, I talked about the difficulty of how my childlessness and singleness had impacted my friendship group. Because you see, my whole friendship group were involved with each other and their families, and I was very much left out of that.
From thinking that maybe four people might read my blog, it kind of mushroomed. The blog was called Gateway Women, and that became the name of my organisation. Childless women started reaching out, asking me, “You seem to understand something about this that other people don’t. Could you do something?” I was like, really me?! My self-esteem and confidence were on the floor. I was also recovering from a romance with someone with narcissistic personality disorder, so I’d had a terribly emotionally abusive experience. I was really low in my mid-forties.
But I kind of thought, well, no one else is doing this, and there seems to be a real need for what we wanted to talk about. So I carried on. I started my first group, giving public talks and appearing on podcasts. Then I started a private online community for childless-not-by-choice women, called Gateway Women, which is still going today, hosted by the next generation of childless women, and now called ‘The Childless Collective’.
Then I wrote my book, at first self-published and community-funded, called Rocking the Life Unexpected. When it was picked up and republished by Pan Macmillan a few years later, we changed the title to Living the Life Unexpected. It’s now had three editions and, 13 years on, it’s still thought to be the Bible, for want of a better word, for childless women.
Now I’m in my sixties, I’m really focusing on the next part of the journey, which is elderhood without motherhood.
In 2014, I was one of four campaigners in the UK who set up something called Ageing Without Children (AWOC), which is now a UK charity. I’m not involved in that anymore because I don’t live in England anymore—I live in Ireland. But I’ve been thinking about the existential and practical aspects of aging without children for a long time, and I’ve noticed how biased, unfortunately, the conversation about menopause and being a powerful older woman can be, and how so often it defaults to the grandmother narrative.
Even things about climate change—there are so many climate change and activist organisations that focus on the intergenerational aspect of ‘doing it for our grandchildren’. I don’t have a problem with that, but it does exclude one in four, perhaps coming up to one in five of us. There are so many more people not having children for a wide variety of reasons, on a spectrum between choice and not choice. It’s not simple.
I strongly believe that although my childlessness was a dark night of the soul for me, it made me look at my life’s purpose and value in a very profound way. I did not believe that my life on this earth could only be defined by having or not having children, I, too, can be a good ancestor.
There are many ways I can contribute to this world and to future generations. Just because I don’t have a little biological part in that future, I care passionately about this beautiful world and all the beautiful children and people already in it, and all those to come. I don’t need to be a mother and grandmother to do that.
I recently won an Advantages of Age award for one of my Substack pieces. And I have a project called Alterkin, which I’m running the pilot for, here in my tiny rural Irish community, to create an 'Alerinative Kinship Network’. It’s about a consciously chosen group of people who are each ageing without children, and making a commitment to each other to be each other’s family in the way that adult children hopefully would have done. But that’s not always how it works out. Life is complicated.
Christopher Henze:
Beautiful. We’re so grateful that the world has people like you. What a wonderful story.
Dominque Debroux:
What’s interesting to me is, as we made the movie Wise Women, one of the things that I realised is that not only are we living in an unnatural way—things are organised in a patriarchy, which is not really the natural thing—but also the patriarchy has divided us into small nuclear families, which I personally feel is less natural than the tribal state.
I have a few friends who have decided to be childfree and have gone through a lot of pressure because of it. Truthfully, one of them is a perfect auntie to her nephews and embodies much more of what that tribal structure ought to be. We are seeing right now that women who do have children are under a tremendous amount of pressure because there’s not enough support.
What struggles have you had in our societal structure now, and how would you like to see the societal structure become?
Jody Day:
I’m absolutely there with you that the nuclear family, as Lisa Sibbett wrote recently is a failed experiment. It is extremely fragile. There was a book I read called How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children by American historian Dr Rachel Chrastil2 in which she discussed horizontal kinship systems and how these are really the roots of our evolutionary way of being as a species—because a nuclear family is very fragile—it only takes one parent to be ill or to die, and the structure practically crumbles.
It also creates an environment where new mothers are isolated, which is so terrible for their mental health and for the children. They need so much support—practical, emotional, spiritual, in every way—and they’re often isolated.
But there is a kind of silo around the nuclear family. As someone who doesn’t have children, it can be surprisingly hostile to us.
If you’re without children, not by choice like me, and you’re going through a grieving period, actually being around other people’s kids is too damn hard. You’re heartbroken by it. You’re not that easy plug-and-play auntie. Whereas perhaps, someone who’s childfree by choice and has known that since their early twenties, maybe before, can actually get more involved. They might have a very joyful relationship with kids, one that doesn’t leave them with a terrible grief hangover that has them in bed for three days. Whearas a childless person can open their heart to kids, and then go home, and feel crushed knowing that they will never have that relationship themselves. So there’s a difference there. But when you’re through the grief, it’s quite different.
Now, there can be some hostility to this idea that the role of women without children is to fill the gaps in the family lives of people with children. So it always has to be handled quite carefully.
Something I’ve noticed—I’m an only child—but in my first marriage, my ex-husband had many siblings. He was one of six, and most of them had children. There’s one particular family where there are four daughters. I call them my nieces by love, not blood. I’m very close to them. I’ve been divorced 25 years, and I’m still very close to them.
One of the things that made those relationships possible was that their mother did not gatekeep my relationship with them. Because unconsciously, mothers can fear letting childless and childfree women near their daughters in case somehow our childlessness rubs off on them. There’s a lot of unconscious stuff at play around this. So she really let me have lovely relationships with them.
Of the four, two of them have children, one is currently pregnant, and the youngest one, who, of course, is the rebel artist in the family, is the one I’m closest to—and by happenstance she’s truned out to be childfree by choice. But it wasn’t until she came to a talk of mine—all four of them came, it was on International Women’s Day about 15 years ago—she was about 16 at the time. She came up to me afterwards and said, “Jodes, you mean I don’t have to have children?” And I said, “No, you don’t have to. We live at a time when it’s possible to choose not to.” I said, “You might choose to have them as I did, and that doesn’t work out either. So it’s not like you can just choose and you always get what you want.”
It was amazing that she still hadn’t been exposed to the idea that it might be possible to choose not to have children, which is what she’s done. She’s a very successful musical artist instead. That’s her choice.
I had a long chat with her last night. We’ve built a very close relationship over the years. I’ve had discussions with her that she would not have been comfortable having with her mum. My childlessness has actually been an important part of our relationship. Those four girls, as they were going through puberty and older, I was different to their other aunts. They could actually identify with me more easily, because they could imagine having my life. They could literally imagine being out in the world, imagine having a career. They couldn’t quite yet imagine having their own children and their own families.
So I was different to their other aunts, who to them were ‘just’ the mothers of their cousins. I had the nickname “GA” (Glamorous Auntie!) because I had the cute little car and the interesting life in design in London. I represented something different. I think that is so precious. Kids really need to see lots of different kinds of lives. There’s an old expression: you can’t be it if you can’t see it.
I don’t think I influenced any of them to go in any direction, but I think they saw in me that I dealt with a great deal of adversity, and I turned it into meaning.
Christopher Henze:
What strikes me when I hear Dominique and you talking about this stuff—it’s in a section in the film called Men Behaving Badly—is the amount of time and the amount of ways that women are gaslit by the patriarchy. Women are so gaslit about this concept that they need to fulfil that specific role. My point of view about women is that you guys are so gracious that you really take it on, as opposed to just pushing back.3
Dominque Debroux:
The specific gaslighting—and this is something that I learnt most through us making the film—is that women are told from very early on, from infancy, that our time of reproductive fertility is the most important. Basically, yes, we can do all sorts of things, but us having babies holds the highest importance. That is so detrimental to any of us whether we choose to have children or not.
Because if we do choose to have children, then we get to menopause, and then what? We’re now irrelevant, not important anymore. It’s hurtful, because at that time, we are understanding that we have all of this experience, all of this wisdom. Once you get postmenopausal, yes, there are the problems and the symptoms, but once you’re beyond that and you know how to handle them, you have this clarity, this focus, this decisiveness, and you have so much to offer society.
So I think that is the biggest gaslighting and the problem. I’m so sad that you had to go through that, but I’m just amazed that you went through it and created this beautiful space for women to realise that, no, there’s no problem in being childless. It’s just another way.
Christopher Henze:
If we didn’t have the patriarchal pressure, I’m sure there would be many more women who were choosing not to have children. Reproduction is so emphasised, and I don’t think we’d have the population problems that we have.
Jody Day:
We’re seeing many more young people choosing not to have children. Often the narrative is that there are mothers and there are the childfree—the people who choose not to have children and the people who are mothers.
In actual fact, the majority of people without children didn’t choose it.4
That often gets hidden in the statistics, and journalists often don’t know the difference between ‘childless’ and ‘childfree’. And sometimes people choose to call themselves childfree when they’re childless. Because everyone’s free to choose however they want to describe it.
But what I think we’re seeing, and I’ve been predicting this for several years, is that the number of childfree people is really increasing. Young people are choosing not to have children for multiple reasons, and that is massively impacting this big demographic shift we’re going through where the boomers are ageing.
People talk about population decline. There’s a clue in the word “baby boom.” It was a big boom of people, and actually, we’re now returning to a slightly more normal fertility rate since modernity. Ten per cent is the rate of natural medical infertility in humans. (So if every woman were trying to get pregnant, 10% of them wouldn’t be able to). There have always been in our tribes, in our evolutionary history, women without children.
I can’t imagine it’s ever been easy, to be honest, even when we were perhaps matriarchies and matrilineal, because then there was probably a celebration of fertility and womanhood and all of that. So probably not to be a mother has always been to be slightly marginalised.
But perhaps those are the women who become the priests, the healers and the shamans. We have a different role.
The outsider actually is very valuable to the tribe. The outsider is just as much a part of the tribe as every other person who’s an insider, because change always comes from the margins.
Christopher Henze:
We’re calling this whole thing Wise Women Forward because one of the things the patriarchy does is it has you languish in things that have happened because they’re so dramatic. Part of the idea is to keep our gaze looking forward, to keep our concept of what’s next. And what’s next is wise women. That’s one of the things we tried to get across in the film. You’ve seen the film, right?
Jody Day:
Yes.
Christopher Henze:
What were some of your thoughts about the movie?
Jody Day:
Thank you so much for saying something other than the mother-grandmother hypothesis! I was really enjoying the film, and then that came in, and I thought, “This is the bit where I stop enjoying it.” I love that you interviewed the academic who did the original work on that— it was fascinating to hear it from her.
But I was really happy that the thesis of your film is very much that wisdom is not just there at the service of grandchildren—that wisdom is actually there in service of all future generations, as well as the ones that are already here.
Going back to what Dominique said about being gaslit, that this is the time when we’re no longer needed and we’re not useful in any way as women who are postmenopausal unless you’re looking after your grandchildren—I hate that idea. It does not chime with my experience of this time of life at all. It is like so much of our culture, phenomenally wasteful. Here we have this incredible resource of older women, postmenopausal, with clarity.
Actually, when oestrogen partially or completely leaves the building, you’re not really that impressed by guys most of the time anymore. I feel more like I did before puberty, which is like, “Boys? Yeah. What are they for?”
Christopher Henze:
Come on, we can get things off tall shelves. I can lift heavy stuff. Maybe make a movie?
Jody Day:
But the idea that I arrange my life to conform to their opinion? I’m just like, “Wow, that was a 45-year detour. I’m glad that’s over.”
Dominque Debroux:
What’s super interesting to me—you said that the 10% who are not fertile in a natural setting become the outsiders. But what if they’re not? Nature sets things up well, where these women—I love the term childfree because they are free to do something else with their creativity. The second chakra is the chakra of creativity. You can use it to create a human or create something else.
To me, it exists in nature because it is useful, and that’s what we need to go back to. I’m a proponent of communes—in the sixties, people coming together in communes. They had the problem of the sex and the drugs, but how about going back to tribes, to communes, with us all working together?
Christopher Henze:
Imagine if when you’re starting—you’re pre-cycling and you feel normal, just as you said. You’re formidable, and then this thing descends upon you. That’s why I put my daughter in the movie, our daughter, because she’s reminding women what a nightmare that is.
But imagine if the women who start cycling have other women who are either in it or starting it right next to them, so that they can say, “This is your crazy time. This is what you feel.” Women, always in every form, need to be surrounded by other women, and the patriarchy just isolates them so effectively. It’s how it maintained this power for so long. It’s been 10,000 years. So this is why, again, Wise Women Forward—trying to bring people together.
Dominque Debroux:
Trying to bring women together, and especially in this country, we need to come together because our rights to our own bodies are being taken away.
Christopher Henze:
That’s why we’re grateful that you’ve joined us, and we’re bringing more people together. We keep moving forward.
Jody Day:
My work is about bringing women together. I first started bringing them together online, and I’ve had in-person workshops and events. I think that sitting in a circle in a sacred space with other women and talking about intimate stuff about our lives feels like the oldest form of healing there is.
I have a workshop called the Reignite Weekend, which has been running for 14 years. It’s very much about helping childless women through that transitional space of making peace with their unchosen childlessness and answering the big questions: What am I going to dedicate my life to? How is this going to work? What is my Plan B or Plan Z, or whatever it might be?
But now I’m creating a new workshop, which will take place for the first time in winter of 2026 because it needs to happen in the dark time of the year, just after Halloween. In the Celtic calendar, this is the time of year—the beginning of winter—but it’s also the time of the Cailleach, the time of the dark winter goddess, the old woman, the hag, the crone, who actually created the world, by the way. Not that anyone says thank you!
It’s really the next stage. How do we come together? How do we share stories about how we’ve been wounded? How do we heal each other? And then, how do we dedicate our beautiful, wise, childless hearts as initiated elders to the service of the world? Because there’s such potential in older women, and it’s often kept quite private. It’s difficult to find an outlet for it. It’s gaslit and shamed by the patriarchy.
This sounds like a mad segue, but at the moment I’m listening to a podcast about Joan of Arc. Every time she went up against the English, what they were throwing back at her was, “You whore, you witch.” It’s this sexual shaming that the patriarchy uses to try to keep women down. Nothing has changed, whether it’s “crazy cat ladies” or people yelling at Joan of Arc. It’s “get back in your patriarchal box and shut up.”
Christopher Henze:
That’s why I was so grateful that Dr Sharon Blackie joined the film, because she talked a lot about how the oldest writings, the oldest records, are about formidable women.
Jody Day:
I’m a big fan. I’m interviewed in one of her books as well, Hagitude. I’m a big fan of hers.
Dominque Debroux:
She’s wonderful. She’s amazing. I hope that one day we can bring retreats together of us postmenopausal women, be they childfree, childless, or with children. Because really, we need to all come together, take down the divisions that patriarchy has put in there, and just kind of blow the system away.
Jody Day:
I agree that’s where it needs to transition to. There also need to be safe spaces to heal where you’re not going to get ‘bingoed,’ as we call it, by someone whipping out all the photos of their grandchildren and expecting you to ooh and ahh about all of them, or relating their parenting or motherhood or grandmotherhood stories as if they’re a universal experience. The culture really encourages it, so it’s a very natural thing to do, and people often don’t realise that maybe 25% of the people in there can’t see that as a universal experience. They’ve either opted out of that or they’ve been excluded from that. That can be really hard.
So we need to heal, and we need to connect. I’m an advocate for the childfree as well. And mothers, I wanted to be a mother. I come from my mother. I have lots of mothers around me in the world, and they need more support and understanding.
However, the amount of parenting advice online, it could break the internet. But stuff about being childless, not by choice, is still very hidden. Maybe a magazine or newspaper will do an article, or an interview with someone like me, once every five or six years, but they’ll have something on parenting and motherhood every single Saturday.
There’s a sense that the patriarchy and the overculture really validate the experience of parenting, but in fact it’s lip-service, because all pronatalism is interested in is numbers—more people like ‘us’ to populate the planet, whatever the ‘us’ is. But once a woman has given birth, they don’t really care. There’s so little support that could be given.
To your point, Dominique, about living in communes, I think it’s also really important to remember that I live in rural Ireland—it’s still big extended families here. But as soon as people had the economic opportunity to stop living in the same house or the same village as their family, they took it, because people are difficult… So a commune might solve some things, but it would come with its own set of interpersonal issues, because people are going to people. Being human is complicated. Human relationships are often a real pain in the arse.
Christopher Henze:
We’re going to move beyond the patriarchy. It’s perhaps the most complex thing, because humans were never designed to know that we should be a patriarchy. We cannot put the cat back in the bag or put it in the closet. So the incredibly complex issues that we’re going to face—I wonder if there’s a set of socially aware people who have no reproductive burden, who can put their brains together, their instinct together and their naturalness together and come up with solutions to what’s next. I wonder, does that exist?
Dominque Debroux:
I do agree with you that in my life, my chosen family is much easier to be around than my blood family. That’s part of the problem. Bringing together people who want to help each other in community is a different thing than having to be with these people that I’m related to by blood. That can be the issue of why young people fly away from the town, fly away from—
Jody Day:
Perhaps not until they’re older. When I first realised I definitely wasn’t going to have children, it was a bit late. It was 44 and a half, and almost the next thought was, “Who’s going to be there for me when I’m old?” It was like I’d never had that thought before in my life, and it was right there. It is a huge worry for people who are ageing without children for whatever reason. It’s actually a big worry for parents as well, but it’s one that they’re able to suppress, mostly by not worrying about it, because “the kids will sort it out,” even if they don’t want to think that their kids are going to—there’s a plausible deniability to actually dealing with the issue, which as people without children, we just don’t have.
So bringing people together to talk about this—this is the biggest fear, but then it’s the biggest opportunity. When I talk to people about this, because what I’m doing is creating community, they’ll say, “Oh, I need community.” And I’ll say, “Well, great, you don’t need me to do that. This is open-source human code. Nothing I’m doing here is revolutionary. It’s just in our hyper-individualistic moment, what I’m doing seems quite odd.”
In asking people if they’d like to do this with me [Alterkin], we’ve begun a commitment to each other that we hope will last the rest of our lives. We’ve sort of taken vows. We’re getting involved intimately in each other’s lives so that we can be that network for each other. And people are like, “Well, what if I get taken advantage of? What if they say no? What if this? What if that?”
I realised that I think the last—I don’t know how many years to put on it, but let’s just say 50 years of hyper-individualism, and really the kind of richness that came after the baby boom, and social media, seems to have really de-skilled us in the friction, the normal friction of human relationships.
I’ll say to people, tongue in cheek, “Oh, community is fun! Community is built by doing inconvenient things for inconvenient people at inconvenient times.” And they’re like, “Panic!” It’s also not something you can have, because when they say, “I need community,” it’s almost like community is a product or an app, and they want it. I’ll say, “No, no, you have to build it. Day by day, moment by moment, favour by favour, vulnerability by vulnerability, mistake by mistake.” Friction—because human relationships are about friction.
Modernity is about frictionlessness. You get your food delivered. You have an app that tells you when your rubbish has been collected. If you really wanted to, you’d hardly have to deal with another human being. You could have a digital intermediary for so many things. I think parenting is one of those things where you discover that life has a lot of friction in it.
Christopher Henze:
Jody, we’re appreciative of your time. We covered some great subjects. Just wondering if you want to mention—you’re doing that event next October. Are there any other things that you’re working on, just anything to help us close out the show?
Jody Day:
Sure. Well, four times a year I host these events called online webinars called Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elderwomen. I’ve been running them for five years now. They’re free to attend. I have an amazing panel of childless and childfree elderwomen from around the world, different panellists on each topic. We tackle the big stuff—ageing without children, mothers and daughters, caring for elderly parents who don’t want to be cared for, all of the kinds of things that we’re dealing with. Because often people who are ageing without children are actually involved in caring for their own parents without any sense of who might be there for them.
On my Substack, which is called Gateway Elderwomen, you’ll find lots about what I’ve been talking about. Really, there is a system—to what you’re asking about when you wonder if there’s a group of wise people who have ideas about this—what we’re talking about is matriarchy. But matriarchy in itself is a word that has been gaslit by the patriarchy to make out that it means women in charge. But matriarchy is not a dominator system. Everything we’re dealing with in patriarchy is about domination. Women don’t operate like that. We cooperate. The future is cooperation, and we know how to do it. We know how to do it.
Dominque Debroux:
Matriarchy is community up.
Christopher Henze:
Great. Well, thank you for joining us on this episode of Wise Women Forward. If you want to find more about us, we’re on Wise Women Forward at Substack. Look for more content. And anybody who wants to go see the movie Wise Women: Humanity’s Untold Origins, please check out our website at wisewomenmovie.com. And again, thanks for joining us, Jody.
Jody Day:
Thank you. Thank you for your film. Thank you so much. I can’t wait to share it with so many people.
Dominque Debroux:
Wonderful. Thank you.
I’m pleased to say that this has changed, and there are now many more moderate and inclusive childfree voices online, including Zoe and James, founders of the community and Substack ‘We Are Childfree’.
How to Be Childless: A History and Philosophy of Life Without Children by Dr Rachel Chrastil. 2019. Oxford University Press. https://academic.oup.com/book/36456
I didn’t say so at the time, but ‘pushing back’ can be fatal for women. It’s not ‘graciousness’, it’s survival.
Stephanie H. Murray breaks down the data from this study on her Substack here.
