"A startling, confronting, and liberating treatise." —Holly Whitaker, New York Times bestselling author of Quit Like a WomanWhat is "woman" if not "mother"? Anything she wants to be.Foregoing motherhood has traditionally marked a woman as "other." With no official place setting for her in our society, she has hovered on the sidelines: the quirky girl, the neurotic career obsessive, the "eccentric" aunt. Instead of continuing to paint women without kids as sad, self-obsessed, or somehow dysfunctional, what if we saw them as boldly forging a first-in-a-civilization vision for a fully autonomous womankind? Or as journalist and thought leader Ruby Warrington asks, What if being a woman without kids were in fact its own kind of legacy?Taking in themes from intergenerational healing to feminism to environmentalism, this personal look and anthropological dig into a stubbornly taboo topic is a timely and brave...