Redefining [b]old age for women without children

A Q&A with Jody Day, the founder of the childless advocacy movement

This is one in a series of [B]old Women Q&As, about their writing and their life. - Debbie

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To me, [b]old age means embracing both the adventures and the challenges of elderhood without motherhood; it means waking up and being a stone in the shoe of patriarchy–every single day. -

Jody Day

A very good editor never stops asking questions. What are you really trying to say here? And You can go deeper; there’s more! And There’s something you’re NOT saying; what is it? When Erin Shetron pointed that out while we were talking about this Q&A with the remarkable

Jody Day

, I was taken aback. What was she sensing? What was I not articulating about women who are childless (not-by-choice) and women who are childfree (by-choice)?

Then it hit me: I was afraid of expressing some very big emotions on these two life scenarios. Jody has worked through her own grief about being childless, not by choice, and in so doing has offered a lifeline to countless other nomo’s, her shorthand for women who are not mothers. When I contemplate how deep her grief must be, it’s frightening to me. Because I have been lucky enough to have three children, and now grandchildren, and because I always knew I wanted babies, despite my fierce ambition as a journalist. If circumstances had denied me babies, it’s scary just imagining the grief I would have felt. But I’ve hesitated to say that out loud because I don’t want Jody, and others, to think I’m appropriating their pain, or echoing their grief too loudly.

As for the other scenario, childfree by choice, it’s much talked about these days on Substack and elsewhere¹. And, as I admitted to my editor, I have some discomfort around that, too. But I generally don’t say what I’m thinking out loud because I dare say these women have heard it already, and I don’t want to be obnoxious. Yet it seems important to be honest here, if only to point out that there are so many emotions and considerations, logical and illogical, around the subject of having, or not having, children.

It’s difficult for me to step outside of my own experience of being sure I wanted children, having an easy time making them, and then raising them, as challenging as that was. When I hear childfree women proudly share their choice, I admit I find myself worrying. My inner voice says: What if they regret their decision later? Do they know how transformative² motherhood is? But these are my thoughts, not theirs. I fully support their decision, while I also admit that I feel a tiny bit challenged by it. Does their decision not to have children invalidate mine? No, of course not.

I find Jody’s thoughts on her life, as an elder without children, to be so illuminating and helpful. And I’m grateful for this opportunity to look more closely at my conflicted feelings about “childless” and “child-free.” I hope you’ll join in the Comments, at the end, to reflect on Jody’s perspective and to share your own experience. Let’s jump in.

Jody Day

Debbie Weil: What is your morning ritual? Tell us everything! What time do you get up? Coffee first thing? A walk? Do you write everyday, and, if so, do you have a ritual to get started?

Jody Day: Menopause snuck up in the night and stole my sleep, so for the last 20 years, each morning begins with an assessment of how much energy I have to get through the day. At the moment, it’s a process which generally involves a cup of coffee in bed with a delightful new terrier puppy, Puffin McCool.

I do write most days, but it’s not always for my Substack or my novel. I’ve mostly accepted that my creative process is resistant to the lure of optimization, just like the untameable natural world it springs from. And this growing acceptance feels like one of the gifts of getting older; I no longer fight the way that I am. It’s a relief to stop losing pointless battles for control over myself.

Whether I ever get my novel finished (ten years and counting…) or publish another essay for my Substack that might be of use to others, it’s all just dust in the wind. Everything I am, everything I do, it’ll all be forgotten. Substack will disappear, my books will become out-of-date and out of print, my body will be no more. And although my ego rails against that, my soul finds it very calming; it’s the ultimate antidote to hustle culture.

DW: You’re 60; what does [b]old age mean to you?

I turned sixty last year, and it was a birthday milestone I felt excited about approaching, as it felt like sixty was properly grown up, and thus I could feel less bashful about claiming my ‘apprentice crone’ status. But it’s really been since 55 that I’ve been deeply curious about what eldering might look like as a woman aging without children, and therefore without any possibility of the socially acceptable role of ‘grandmother’ ahead to take cultural refuge in.

To me, [b]old age means embracing both the adventures and the challenges of elderhood without motherhood; it means waking up and being a stone in the shoe of patriarchy—every single day.

DW: How is all that’s happening right now in the U.S. affecting you as a writer, activist, and creative person?

JD: I live in Ireland, but as what happens in the US has such a huge impact globally, we’re all glued to the ‘Previously, on America’ reality show. This is not as smug as it might sound, as globally we’re all living in the autumn of Westernised modernity, and the rise of autocracy worldwide is part of that.

I’ve long been fascinated by ancient history (I was reading the Reader’s Digest version of Gibbon’s ‘The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’ when I was about eight!) and so I feel reasonably clear-eyed about the systemic nature of how civilizations rise and fall.

I have to say though, seen through a collapse lens, my Alterkin (Alternative Kinship Network) project for people aging without children–rooted as it is in respectful, intentional, long-term, practical, in-person, community relationships–feels like an “island of sanity” (to use Sarah Wilson’s³ phrase) right now.

DW: I love the word “gateway” in the name of your Substack, Gateway Elderwomen. That seems to open the door to a wider discussion about older women without children. Can you tell us more?

JD: I started a blog (remember those!) in 2011 called ‘Gateway Women’, which developed into a global advocacy and support network for childless-not-by-choice women. It’s still going, although the major ‘support’ part of it (the online community) is now under the umbrella of The Childless Collective, freeing me up to continue the advocacy and visioning, and to develop my ‘Gateway Elderwomen’ project.

When I chose the ‘Gateway’ in ‘Gateway Women’, it was an instinctive word choice, and I didn’t examine it. But as soon as the first journalist asked me what it meant, I realized that my unconscious had been hard at work behind the scenes.

To me, a ‘Gateway’ is a threshold from one state to another, a liminal place of identity transformation. In the novel that I’m writing, the Irish sovereignty Goddess Brigid shows up. I started writing the novel before I even knew I was moving to Ireland, and it was only very recently that I discovered that in the legend of Saint Brigit, she was said to be born on the threshold of the house--they just seem to be a part of my psyche!

Gateway also lends itself to the idea that change always comes from the margins, not the mainstream. I have great hopes for the amazing cohort of non-mothers who are currently (or already) reaching their 60s and 70s—from the margins, perhaps we can be a new kind of elder. As I unpacked in Eldering is a Verb, when you don’t have biological skin in the game, it gives you a very different perspective on how to be of service to all the generations to come. It is my belief that we can become good ancestors, even without biological descendants, and I’m certainly up for the challenge.

DW: How have attitudes towards women who don’t have children, and/or can’t have children, changed over time?

JD: I created the word “nomo” back in 2012, which is a contraction of “not-mother” and includes all non-mothers, because frankly, it’s none of anyone’s business whether you chose childlessness or it chose you. However, that does impact how society sees you: women who are childfree (by choice) are having a moment and are, to some extent, celebrated as modern feminists who’ve made a choice and had the agency and privilege to make it happen.

However, for childless (not-by-choice) women, particularly those who are childless due to not finding a willing or suitable partner (the most common reason, above infertility), they’re either ignored or pitied. And, even though there are more childless women than childfree ones, feminism has little to say about the inconvenient truth that not everything in life is under our control; it’s complicated, and it doesn’t make for a snappy feature story either.

The fact is, whether it’s fairy tales or modern films, if there’s an unpleasant or deviant female character, she’ll be childless or childfree.

So, in short, things have gotten better for some, but the pronatalist backlash to it is nasty (hello J.D. and childless cat ladies), and is probably going to get a lot nastier - Russia is seeking to ban what it calls ‘propaganda’ promoting childfree lifestyles, because authoritarian regimes really don’t like women without children—I guess we’re harder to control without motherhood to weaponize against us.

DW: Some well-known names on Substack, like

Emma Gannon

⁴, are writing about their decision, and the advantages, of being child-free. Is there anything helpful, or useful, to you about this perspective?

DW: I’m thrilled to see childfree voices taking up more space, including on Substack. Emma and I shared the same TEDx stage back in 2017, and it’s been wonderful to see how her work has expanded since then. I’m also a big fan of We Are Childfree, (new to Substack) and their thoughtful photo-essays of childfree individuals, and I’m proud to say that I will be one of their subjects soon.

DW: Do you consider yourself ambitious? What drives you, as you age into your 60s?

JD: I don’t see myself as ambitious (others might disagree), but I do know that I’m curious. These days I’m learning to trim my sails, and I certainly no longer have that sense that there’s a long road ahead of me in which to achieve the kinds of personal goals and social change I’d hoped for. I have to weigh up every burst of inspiration before I launch into something, knowing that energy spent on that might mean that something else never gets done. Both my mother and my grandmother died in their mid-seventies, so I try to be realistic without being too pessimistic.

As a child, I wanted to leave the world a better place than I found it. In a tiny way, in a tiny corner, I hope that will be the case.

DW: Looking back, what is one thing you are especially proud of?

JD: I am really proud that from the ashes of my midlife dark night of the soul, utterly broke financially, emotionally, physically and spiritually, I created a way for childless women to find each other, so that we could heal together from our personal grief, and also from the social censure of “pronatalism” that sees all women without children, chosen or not, as deviant. I scraped myself off the floor in my book Living the Life Unexpected and self-published it, with the support of the childless community, in 2013, and it's since gone on to have two editions with PanMacmillan.

Many childless women write to me and say that my work changed their lives; a few even say it saved them. I’m immensely proud of that. It saved my life too, and gave me back a sense of worthiness that society felt I didn’t deserve because I wasn’t a wife or mother.

DW: What is your biggest regret when it comes to life or writing?

JD: It’s not really a regret, but I can get a bit sad when I realise that when I needed support and guidance around transitioning into permanent non-motherhood, there was nothing. Twenty years ago, the word ‘childfree’ was mostly unheard of in the mainstream, and in the UK, the only support I ever came across (much later) were a handful of groups, each with just a few members, for heterosexual couples left childless after failed fertility treatments. That wasn’t my story.

Sometimes I wonder how powerful and productive my forties could have been had I been able to access support, rather than creating it from the ground up, for others. I meet women older than me, childless women in their seventies and eighties who know this feeling too, and who struggled alone at a time when their choices and non-choices were taboo topics of discourse; they too understand this feeling of lost time, lost potential, lost opportunities. I guess wondering how things could have been different is another one of grief’s (and life’s) many “what if?” questions, and thus it’s yet another part of the experience of coming to terms with accepting life on its terms, not ours.

I have no regrets about my writing; it has saved my life so many times that I have nothing but love and gratitude towards every word that has come through me so far this lifetime. However, I will regret it if I don’t get my novel finished! I had no idea it would be so hard - not the writing part, that’s been fairly easy for me - but structuring it into the most compelling story I can manage is really baking my noodle.

DW: What do you do for fun, or to relax?

JD: I adore baking, and it’s one of the things I reclaimed as part of my recovery from childlessness, because there was a part of me that thought that I had to have children in the house if I was going to bake. (WTF? I know!) However, it is handy to have friends or neighbors to share it with, or I’d eat it all myself! And playing with a new and extravagantly energetic terrier puppy, Puffin, reminds me that no matter how terrible the world of humans might feel, in puppy land, there’s always something to be excited about.

Jody, I know I speak for all of us when I thank you for taking the time to delve into your thoughts and share them with us. P.S. Thank you so much for dubbing me the Queen of Elderstack (I use it on my About page)! - Debbie

Jody Day is an English/Irish psychotherapist and the founder of Gateway Women, the world’s first (and most trusted) advocacy and support network for childless-not-by-choice women; she’s often called “the founder of the childless movement.” A childfree and parent-ally too, she’s the author of Living the Life Unexpected: How to Find Hope, Meaning and a Fulfilling Future Without Children (PanMac 2016/2020), and has had essays published in No One Talks About This Stuff: Twenty-two Stories of Almost Parenthood, edited by Kat Brown, and the forthcoming collection edited by Substackers Dina Aronson and Dina Alvarez, Midlife Private Parts: Revealing Essays that Will Change the Way You Think About Age.

For the last few years, Jody has been focusing on her Gateway Elderwomen project, including free, quarterly Fireside Wisdom with Childless Elderwomen webinars with a diverse panel of childless and childfree older women, her bestselling Gateway Elderwomen on Substack, her psychotherapy practice for women aging without children, and her on-the-ground pilot study for her “Alterkin” (Alternative Kinship Networks) concept around creating local, in-person, mutual-aid, communities of care for those ageing without children. After a lifetime in London, she lives in rural Ireland. and is managed by an unfeasibly energetic white terrier called Puffin, while hoping to finish her first novel.

Questions for readers

• Whether you are a mother, or not, how do you feel about society’s expectations of, and judgments about, women’s lives?

• I admitted in the Intro that I sometimes feel invalidated by the decision not to have children. Are there choices you see other people making that impact you similarly? I know it’s vulnerable to share, but I’m curious!

• What’s your favorite way to be a stone in the patriarchy’s shoe?

🔥🔥 Something new and exciting…

If you are a [B]old Woman and a paid subscriber to [B]old Age (or have considered becoming one), stay tuned for some very exciting news: I’m offering paid subscribers something NEW in a few weeks. That’s all I’ll say for now; keep an eye out for an email with more details! - Debbie

1. There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness by Michal Leibowitz (New York Times, May 20, 2025)

2. I don’t want to mislead you with the word “transformative;” in my experience, becoming a mother made me less selfish, not necessarily a better or different person.

3. Jody, thank you for introducing us to

Sarah Wilson

’s work!

4. Excited to be child-free (by choice) by Emma Gannon (April 2, 2024)