The women I return to most – Elizabeth I, her potential heir Arbella Stuart (and rival to James Charles Stuart, later King James I), Virginia Woolf, Katharine Hepburn, Debbie Harry – never had children. Their reasons were wildly different: some chose it, some were prevented, some never got the chance. The pattern raises two questions. Did their work or their position cost them their choice? And why does it seem to matter, overshadowing the legacy and achievements of great women?

Falling developed-world birth rates have prompted anxiety about the future. Politicians ask why women are having fewer children. Economists voice concerns about ageing populations. Amid this, one assumption goes unquestioned: that motherhood is the primary measure of a woman’s life.

The birth rate is not falling because women want cultural legacies. Its decline is bound up with housing costs, expensive childcare, partnering later in life, fertility access and unpaid domestic work that still falls disproportionately to women.

But both questions meet at the same fault line: the expectation that motherhood should absorb a woman in ways fatherhood rarely has for men. That makes parenthood hard to combine with ambition or power. It also means that when a woman builds something other than a family, society struggles to see it as a legacy at all, which is how so much of what women made or achieved ends up forgotten or filed under a man’s name.

Perhaps the remarkable thing is not that some extraordinary women had no children, but the price society attached........

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