A couple of years ago, I was walking in the woods near my mum’s house, listening to a podcast. (I honestly was in the woods: this is not a made-up metaphor for my state of mind.) A published author was talking about her need to make the most of her daily routines because she wouldn’t have children to take up her time.
“I’ve sort of got no excuse [not] to sort this out. I do have time to really think about my days and my routines and how I want to feel in my body and be.”
I was 32 and without children, and highly ambivalent about having them. I’d just spent a year of lockdown going on walks during work breaks, listening to podcasts. I suddenly felt fear about ‘”normal” life returning. Surely I should run home, open my laptop and DO something. I had to prove my childfree existence would still be as meaningful, as productive, as valid, as those friends of mine who were starting families.
That fear of women’s place in society appears to be widespread. In September, a TikTok video of a 29-year-old woman revealing that her Saturday was free to recover from a gig and make shakshuka went viral, prompting debate about whether this woman was a selfish disgrace or a pioneer of single women’s freedom in the face of a capitalist patriarchy.
Well, I love shakshuka. It made me realise that having free time is an incredible privilege. Is it a privilege we are duty-bound to use wisely? Who defines what “wisely” means? To whom are we duty-bound, apart from ourselves? I don’t mean to be glib, but I don’t think the suffragettes blew up letterboxes to make women of future generations feel guilty that they had too many choices.
The fact is all women have more “free time”. Since the 1970s, women in the UK have been having children later every year (the average now is around 30 years old). Over the same period, more and more women entered the workforce. The question of whether women could “have it all”, both work and family, became a cultural phenomenon in the 1980s, illustrated by films such as Working Girl, where Melanie Griffiths wears shoulder pads, and politicians like Margaret Thatcher, who cooked her husband dinner after Cabinet meetings. Twenty years and two feminist waves later, we ended up with Sandra Bullock films, featuring emotionally unavailable workaholic women who meet a man and transform into smiles, soft ponytails and cashmere cardigans.
But there’s still very little cultural conversation around the women who don’t want to have a family, in the conventional sense, and don’t want to live by their email inbox either.
Perhaps we could stop fetishising career “superwomen” who have children. And not assume that every childfree woman must be fully dedicated to her work. Instead of leaning out (rather than in), and “quiet quitting”, how about this: let 2024 be the year of not “having it all”, but aiming to have none of it.
To write this article, I listened to that podcast interview again – the one with the published writer. I heard it in a completely different way. In fact, I wondered if I’d really listened properly the first time.
“My life is time, and space, and freedom. I have very little in the way of routine and obligation. I revel in that.” Turns out she wasn’t judging herself, or us either. It was fear that had made me react.
What will my life look like without children? How will I build community, and contribute to society, without a nuclear family? How will I feel when I finally embrace my “free” time without shame or guilt?
In the New Year, and every year after that, I can’t wait to find out.
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