Mother of None is based on a broad corpus of sources: the personal accounts of 52 women interviewed by the author, the therapy groups on motherhood ambivalence which the author has been facilitating since 2012, and, thirdly, a large anonymous online survey on 3,731 women conducted by the author in Greece in 2021. It also draws extensively from scientific research on how motherhood is constructed and experienced. The book offers useful insights and tools on how women can navigate the pressures exerted by society and how to find their own voice on the matter of having––or not having––children.

When motherhood is portrayed as the inescapable biological destiny of all women, their only natural life course, any woman contemplating not having children faces a pernicious war from her immediate milieu and society at large in order to conform to the dominant social narrative. Women are indoctrinated that the only way to achieve self-fulfilment is through motherhood. The pressures they are subjected to start so early and are so ubiquitous and pervasive that a lot of women are often profoundly perplexed when they try to figure out what they truly want. Women who dare utter even modest doubts as to whether they want to become mothers are vilified, their reasoning summarily dismissed. When having children is treated as a non-decision, a law of nature, the boundary between wanting to be mother and consenting to be one becomes muddled. How women use their womb divides them into successes and failures, both having to live up or down to set social expectations and unfair stereotypes that pit them against each other.

Gutenberg , 2022, 287 P.