tribe of childless women Archives

The 5 most important things I’ve learned about recovering from childlessness

April 6, 2016 Jody Day 38

This essay was published in 2016, so some of the links may no longer work. But the 5 points hold true! Gateway Women was 5 years old yesterday. It was on 5th April 2011 that I published my first blog here, reaching out blindly to the world in the hope that someone (even just one person) would have some kind of clue as to what I was going through as a divorced, single, infertile, childless women in her mid-forties, wondering what the hell had happened to my life! I was almost 46 and had been trying to get my head […]

How do I meet other childless women in my area?

January 2, 2015 Jody Day 3

If your New Year’s Resolution is to get some new local friends who ‘get’ what it’s like to be childless in a world gone motherhood-mad, I wanted to let you know that there are free Gateway Women meetups around the world you can join! Perhaps one of the hardest (and most unexpected) losses of childlessness is that as well as losing the family we longed for, many of us also lose the vast majority (or even all) of our peer group too. Friendships between mothers and nomos (non-mothers) can be stretched to the limit by the now very different life experiences […]

You’re not crazy, you’re grieving

March 27, 2013 Jody Day 36

Do any of the following sound like you? You find yourself hiding out in the bathroom at the office because of your colleagues’ endless babytalk… You walk home alone across town, in the freezing rain, just to get away from your ‘last’ childless friend’s announcement of her ‘miracle’ pregnancy… You avoid family events and spend most of your cash on holidays and retreats abroad during the Christmas season… You snap and bitch at your partner so much that you wouldn’t be surprised if they left you… You’ve given up dating all together… You couldn’t give a shit what you look […]

The Gateway Women Manifesto: are childless women the new suffragettes?

May 3, 2012 Jody Day 25

If you take a moment to think about it, there have probably never been so many educated, liberated women without children in their 40s and 50s alive at one time before. Let that sink in for a moment… In the past, most of us would have been either bringing up children or already dead from childbirth. And of those women who were childless (mostly by chance but a small percentage by choice) very few of them would have had the social, economic or political power to take advantage of their freedom from child-rearing. 1 in 5 women in the UK and USA […]

Free talk for International Women’s Day (8 March) “Introducing the Nomos”

March 6, 2012 Jody Day 6

Introducing the #Nomos (the not-mothers) Talk + Q&A with Gateway Women Founder, Jody Day Thursday 8th March 2012: 17:00-17:45 HubWestminster, 80 Haymarket, London, SW1Y 4TE Places are free but numbers are limited. For reservations please click here. SPINSTER OLD MAID SELFISH WEIRDO 1 in 5 women are now reaching the menopause without having children – the largest cohort of childless women in the UK since the ‘man drought’ following World War I. Yet our culture’s idea of what these women ‘are for’ is similarly stuck in the past… Whether a woman has chosen to be ‘childfree’ or finds herself […]