All the Womxn Before Us
An interview with Laura Carroll on her latest book, "A Special Sisterhood," and what we can learn from womxn in history who weren't mothers.
Laura Carroll is a pretty special person — she quite literally wrote the book on childfreedom, you might say. In 2000, she wrote Families of Two: Happily Married Couples Without Children by Choice, in which she interviewed couples about their childfree decisions. More than profiles of partners, the book is a celebration of childfreedom.
In 2000, this body of work was a radical departure from the status quo. The childfree conversation was new. Not to those who, for centuries, have chosen childfreedom by various means, but rather, for the general pronatalist public who either had never heard of being childfree, or who could not fathom that someone who did not have kids wouldn’t be miserable about it. Laura’s book affirmed childfree people and also opened the door to a larger conversation about what it means to not have children and live a fulfilling life.
Since then, Laura has written extensively about childfreedom and childlessness, making her a foundational author and expert in this space. She has a master’s degree in psychology and communications, has worked in litigation psychology, and has been an editor and a public speaking advisor.
Laura published her latest book, A Special Sisterhood: 100 Fascinating Women From History Who Never Had Children, in 2023. Here, she talks about the creative process behind A Special Sisterhood, finding community as womxn without kids, and determining purpose for oneself.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
As a reader, A Special Sisterhood feels so easy to pick up, so accessible. While it can (and probably should!) be taught in college curriculums and feminist studies, it feels far from a textbook or a piece of abstract theory. What was impetus behind this book and the style you chose for it?
It's been about five years ago now, I was invited to speak at what was called the NotMom Summit, and it was a live event, pre-Covid. And it was a group produced by Karen Malone Wright of thenotmom.com. She wanted to bring together childfree women, childless women, and every-story-in-between women into a room and do breakouts over a couple of days and as a way to find community. And yes, there are things that are different about how we came to not having kids. But, there's a lot that we had in common. She really believed that.
And I did, too, and so she invited me to do a presentation on women throughout history who didn't have children, no matter how they got there. And so I did that, and I quickly found that I could be finding women forever. I mean, I found so many. It was hard to get it down to a 25-minute presentation that clicked along. It was fun. People learned something and it was really well received. So I was inspired to keep going.
I started collecting women. As I fleshed out the idea, I thought, you know, we really need to broaden this group. So the Sisterhood is not just women who chose not to have kids. These are just women who, for whatever reason, ended up not having them.
In many cases in this book, I want to believe that they were busy living their lives [laughs]. I wanted to convey it to this larger community, and I wanted to convey it to younger women. So that's where it was a divergence. Yes, it's accessible to all ages, really. But I wanted to make it such that somebody who was even in high school could get it on their phone and just decide who they wanted to read about, and in 300 words or less they get the gist. They're inspired.
And in that vein, I wanted to add some visual color to it. I've never used an illustrator before in any of my other books, so this was the way with [illustrator] Nataliia [Tonyeva]. I gave her a bunch of links online. And she then got the feeling of the women and created her own unique illustrations. So I think, between the short narrative and a visual kind of vibe, as it were, that was a style that I wanted to create, and I thought was rather unique.
Was there anything new you learned about childfreedom when you wrote this book, aside from the stories of the individual women?
Really, that there are so many ways that women get to that place. And I think we need to really embrace that every woman has a story. Every woman has that sub-story of why she never became a mother. And it's not binary. It's about accepting and embracing the way life evolves, and how women choose to live their lives. And they have to find out within themselves what's most important at every given stage of their lives. And these women in A Special Sisterhood did that, just like any woman will, if they're really living fully in themselves.
A lot of those women in the book, they didn't exactly start off in life with a lot of money, or both parents. They had adversity, and so they were strong, and they learned to be strong, and when they saw opportunities they went after them.
Out of all the womxn you highlighted in A Special Sisterhood, which one is the most fascinating to you, and why?
I have this list of all of them here, and I can't really tell you [my favorite one]. What I can tell you is, it was hard to get it down to 100. I got it almost to 300. Then I started going in thematic index card piles of, you know, “What's the theme in this woman's life?” I didn’t want to have too much repetition. You can't have 12 physicists. You can maybe pick two.
So it started to ferret itself out rather organically. I just had to open myself to being a channel to what it was supposed to be. That's more of the process of it.
During and since the Trump administration, state governments have passed legislation that targets abortion and other reproductive rights. At the same time, we’ve experienced heightened violence and vitriol from incels, “passport bros,” and men seeking “trad wives.” We see the harmful influence that misogynists such as Andrew Tate have on younger generations of men.
In your research, do you see this heightened misogyny linked with the acceptance of women’s childfreedom in recent years?
Or, do you think this patriarchal violence always been present, lurking, and it’s recently re-asserted itself amid a perfect storm of politics, social media access, and an age of heightened disinformation?
I find that we see trajectories of history, [for example], if you go back to the 60s, there was this expansiveness of women's rights, and an opening of sorts, culturally and socially. And so when things expand, they eventually contract. If it seems too loose and liberal and progressive, then we eventually contract. The tension is to always try to bring us to the middle.
So there's some of that tension going on. And I think it now happens faster, because the digital world is so huge. It's such a sea of information to ferret through that it's hard to really dial into the truth everyday.
In The Baby Matrix, I talk about this whole control by government, religion, and business. I think this theme is the bedrock of all of this. And so when men don't feel as in control, then you see these kinds of reactions where they want more control over our bodies again.
What I'm most frightened about is business, government, and religion as power structures. Right now, I'm most concerned about the religious power structures and the intersection of political figures who are ruining the separation of Church and State, but they're marrying on the control channel which gives them even more power.
So you know, this is all boiling down to control again. They're finding any way to get it. So we're in that swirl again where they’re pulling for more control. In my lifetime, I haven't seen that intersection so vividly as I'm seeing it now.
It’s like a pendulum. But it's happening faster and more intensely.
What kind of content about childfreedom and/or reproductive advocacy would you like to see more of in the present? Is there a particular medium you’d like to see CF representation or stories in?
I'd like to see more connections between all communities of women who don't have kids, no matter why that's the case. And to find community that way, because I think if we really connect with each other and go to a higher plane of understanding, we can start to tackle real tangible stuff so that real change can take place.
There's so much that's unfair in this pronatalist behemoth, so I'd like to see the advocacy be more of us, no matter why we chose what we chose. Over time, it's a little better, but there's still camps, even in the childless community, which does have a pretty strong community online. I've tried to market my book in that space, and it's not as not as readily received as I would like. There's been separate camps, and I want the camps to be more open to each other.
Are you currently consuming any books, shows, or content about childfreedom that you’d like to recommend?
I recommend any book that goes into the history of Roe V. Wade to get a lot of the backstory to how Dobbs got as far as it did. I think a lot of people don't understand the backdrop and the history of the last 50 years. You have to learn what the game board was like before in order to do this game board even better. Because it didn’t just didn't happen out of thin air. No way.
I mentor young womxn through an organization I volunteer with, and I’m always trying to instill in them that the status quo does not have to be your life. I’m a Millennial but I still grew up in an environment where getting married and having babies was assumed to be the default, and if you were a womxn who didn’t want to do that, you were selfish, weird, or some other bad thing.
What advice would you give to younger generations of womxn who are opting out of motherhood or working through what it means to be childfree?
What kinds of experiences are you really looking for in your life? And by that, I mean emotional experiences. So is it connectivity? There are many ways to try to define that. But you really need to think hard about what you want, the internal experience of your life, and then look at well, what ways out there can I get that experience? And for some people they're thinking about parenthood. They have to really look at, “Well, why would I wanna do that, anyway?”
So that's part of that deeper, reflective look. But I think that's first. What does purpose and meeting really mean to me? It's different for everybody, and it's not easy. It's easier just to go, “I think I'm gonna follow that train that everybody's on. And hopefully I'll like it.”
And so you have to be brave enough and strong enough to take your own path.
But know that the second thing, I suppose, is to find people who resonate with that, to surround yourself with people who can support that process, who are in that process, who have already been through that process and try to get away from the other noise. But you have to start with the self and what you feel you really want to pursue and how to pursue that.
And have the courage to just keep going. Find people to support you, and believe me, they're out there. Find the people who are going to feed you, fuel you, and keep going until you find your own answers.
Laura is the author of six books, including A Special Sisterhood: 100 Fascinating Women From History Who Never Had Children, 25 Over 10: A Childfree Longitudinal Study, The Baby Matrix: Why Freeing Our Minds From Outmoded Thinking About Parenthood & Reproduction Will Create a Better World, and Families of Two: Interviews with Happily Married Couples Without Children by Choice.
She has also contributed to Childfree across the Disciplines: Academic and Activist Perspectives on Not Choosing Children and Voluntary and Involuntary Childlessness: The Joys of Otherhood?
For over the last 20 years, she has been featured on network television, including ABC and CBS morning shows, been a guest on many radio talk shows, as well as US and Canadian public radio. Her articles and work have appeared in many print and digital media publications, including Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, New York Magazine, and Women’s Health South Africa and UK.
For books related to childfree topics, check out the Childfree Life Section of Laura’s LiveTrue Books Collection.