14. Laura Carroll on a Special Sisterhood

It is a tale of two Laura's today when I'm joined by renowned childfree advocate, researcher, and author Laura Carroll. As one of the founding members of the childfree movement, Laura has been researching, writing and talking about being childless by choice for over twenty years. Her most recent book, A Special Sisterhood, celebrates 100 women around the world who make up a sisterhood that is bonded by not following the beaten path. We discuss the evolution of the childfree movement, how social media has had both a positive and detrimental effect on the community, and the many, MANY ways that pro-natalism finds its way into our lives. 

Learn more about Laura and the work that she does through the links below:

• About Laura
• Laura's books
• The Baby Matrix: Why Freeing Our Minds From Outmoded Thinking About Parenthood & Reproduction Will Create a Better World
• Childfree Zone

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

I was interviewing people in the late 90s that had to lie to their friends and family that they couldn't have kids because of the old flak they would get, or older couples in their 70s. These were brave people at the time because they were one woman characterized as you know. We were just seen as like strange birds, very odd, odd people with a capital O.

Speaker 2: 0:27

Welcome back everyone to another episode of Child Free Me, a show where we examine the choice to be child free and what it's like to navigate that decision in today's world. I am your host, laura Allen, and today I am honored to be joined by another, laura, laura Carroll. In addition to not only having a very cool name, laura is a prolific nonfiction author and really one of the first known experts on being child free and pronatalism. She is also a passionate reproductive freedom and ethics advocate and founder of International Child Free Day. And then, outside of her work within the child free space, laura has over 10 years of experience as an editor, over 15 years working in litigation, psychology and communications, as well as over a decades experience in business psychology, and so she's obviously had just a ton of success both inside and outside of the child free community.

Speaker 2: 1:31

I honestly kind of regard her as one of the founders of the child free movement, since she's been doing research and publishing on the topic for over 20 years at this point and I talked about this during the episode but when I first started really digging into the space and doing research, her name was one of the names that continued to pop up over and over and over again. So it is, of course, such an honor and so exciting to have her on the show to talk not only about her experience in the child free field and the research she's done over the past several decades, but to also talk about her most recent book, called A Special Sisterhood 100 Fascinating Women from History who Never had Children, which is a book that really celebrates the countless women from around the world and across history who are bonded by not doing something women are historically supposed to do. It's a title that really resonated with me as someone who, since I know I won't be having children, oftentimes feel like I am outside or will never be a member of this very special club that obviously so so many women choose to be a part of. So I really loved it. I love the stories and it was just so grateful that she was willing to come on and talk about it. Honestly, for anyone who is a nerd like me and interested in research, there's not a lot of research out there on the topic of being child free. I talk about this quite often, and so all of her books are nonfiction, really grounded in research. One of the books she wrote is actually based on a 10 year longitudinal research study that she did, and I am just so grateful for the passion and energy that Laura brings to the space and can't recommend her books enough.

Speaker 2: 3:24

So, without further ado, let's jump in. Also, just a note that I recorded this before the holidays and I was very ill. Apparently I sound super stuffed up and congested, so apologies in advance if you do a double take when you hear my voice. Just wanted to give a little warning. Laura, welcome to child free me. I am so excited to have you here. Like I was saying earlier before we started recording, I entered this space relatively recently, just a few months ago and when I did, you were one of the first names that popped up. It seems like you have been in this space for many decades at this point and are a really obviously a prolific author and researcher, and I'm just so, so honored to have you here, so welcome.

Speaker 1: 4:17

Thank you, happy to be here. Thanks for the invitation.

Speaker 2: 4:20

I think I'm going to start way back at the beginning and would love to hear what your journey was to knowing, or deciding that you are child free. Oh, my.

Speaker 1: 4:31

I would say that that goes back to probably early teens for me. Before I was 16 years old, I was already looking for ways to make my own money, being the independent person that I, was in.

Speaker 1: 4:45

And so I was able to babysit. And I started babysitting my parents, friends, kids and in the neighborhood et cetera and I learned very quickly that I didn't really like it. Now I was told I was good at it, but I very quickly thought to myself you know, why do people grow up in and have their daily life be like this? So that's the first way of thinking I had. And again, the upside is that I was making money by the time I turned 16, I immediately got a job at a restaurant and whatnot. So those were the early thoughts.

Speaker 1: 5:24

And as I got into high school and college, when I was in college I wasn't adamantly out there saying I'm never having kids, but I was busy thinking about what I wanted to study, what direction I wanted my career to go in, not thinking about marriage. I was just up to my own future. But I think in the end if you ask me today, I still feel the same is that I felt that the process of parenting, that whole experience, was something that I just really am not drawn to and I didn't want to have it be the central focus of my life. So that was the nugget really.

Speaker 2: 6:00

And what was that like? Were there others around you who felt similarly? Did you have a child-free community back then?

Speaker 1: 6:09

Well, honestly, I wasn't even really thinking about it, I was just busy doing my life. And once we friends of mine and whatnot got out of college and graduate school. Some got married, some did not, but we were busy with our careers. So it didn't really come up until friends started to get married and started to have kids. And my friends typically the ones I'm closest with they tended to have their first children a little bit later, later than the median say of the what is it around 27 now they were well under their 30s and one year friend was 40. But when that happened we started to have to navigate how the friendships were changing. We did that just fine really.

Speaker 1: 6:51

But at one point I had been married 10 years and I wanted to start looking around for happily married couples which I was that went the distance in their child-free marriage, and I didn't find books out there. I didn't find anybody talking about this. Now, mind you, this was before we had Google, search engines, things like that. This was in the late 1990s, so it was another digital time, for sure. So I didn't find anything. So I went ah, I decided to do the crazy thing and I decided to find out for myself, put ads in newspapers and magazines. What about trying to find couples to interview?

Speaker 1: 7:34

And my phone started ringing or my answering machine At the time? That makes me. But yes, the phone and answering machine just were exploding, with people finding me and calling me, and at that point I knew I was on to something. And, long story short, it ended up being a book called Families of Two and it got so much recognition I was on network TV, did so much radio I thought, oh my gosh, I think people are ready to talk about this and couples who'd been out there at that time finally felt, found that I can't tell you how many couples I talked to that said oh my god, I can't believe you want to talk to us.

Speaker 1: 8:14

So it was a game changer. So that really put me on a trajectory to studying it. And then the process I got my own questions answered.

Speaker 2: 8:25

Yeah, sounds like you were doing this honestly before anyone else. Was there anything surprising or what were the biggest takeaways that you uncovered during those conversations?

Speaker 1: 8:36

Well, really what I wanted to try and do is I did 100 interviews of couples across the United States and they had to be married at least 10 years, describe themselves as happily married and 100%, decidedly child-free. And I did 100 interviews and then did 40 that were more in-depth and from there, with editors, decided on 15 that really exemplified the range of what we had learned. And I also was with a photographer. So what I wanted to do is have photographs of these couples so that in the book people could see that we're normal people.

Speaker 2: 9:12

We're not aliens.

Speaker 1: 9:14

Two heads or three arms or unsocial. So that, I think, made it more real to people. So the biggest takeaway that I saw and I wanted to have reflected in the book was that this is a decision. It's thought about quite a lot. It's not made in the blink of an eye for many people, many couples, and when you look at them they're just people like you and me. They range from all different socioeconomic backgrounds. I had people that were in lawyers in Manhattan to people who were going month to month doing daycare, things like that. So I tried to. I learned that there were a lot of myths to bust. We're not all out there with all this money and life's so easy. Those topics are still talked about today. We're still have some starting myths. So those visually and then in the narrative with the interviews, I think it brought home that we're just normal people living like everybody else, except this one thing, this one big thing we didn't do that most do.

Speaker 1: 10:19

So it was really well received and I have to say that I expected to get a lot of flack Doing television. I have to say that I was received with curiosity and wasn't difficult and I thought, oh my god, this is fantastic. So it really started a road to getting the child free out in the media and the time blogs were being developed and as soon as the search engine and everything was maturing, the evolution of everything we see today really happened over the course of a couple of decades.

Speaker 2: 10:50

First, I want to say you have gone on to write many, many more books and the titles really resonate with me, which we can certainly get into, especially when we talk about your latest book. But what I love about this title is the word family that's incorporated into it, because it is certainly something I've talked about on this podcast before. Around defining family and especially when you don't have children, it seems like you have to fight just a little extra hard to define you and your significant other or partner as a family, because it's not the stereotypical family. So it just really really resonated. So, speaking of labels, in terms of the word child free, was that really in the lexicon when you first started out? Was that something that was already out there? Was there any sort of navigating between child-free versus childless?

Speaker 1: 11:45

Well, it was more common at the time, I think, to characterize it by saying childless by choice. In research that looked at women without children at that time and it rarely does now too into any effective way dissect out by choice or by not by choice or somewhere in between. But the word itself and the digging I did back then is it was first in a textbook in the 70s. So, yes, so people have come up with the word to characterize people who choose not to. But where it got into the media and popular wasn't really until this, you know, families of two came out and there was more media about it. And every year these days I do what I call a child-free trending piece on my website. There are several years and I could do it every year, decided not to beat the horse too much, but there's so much muddled use still child-free, child-free, child-space-free, child-free by choice, and that can all appear in one article.

Speaker 1: 12:49

So I think it's algorithmically driven, but it also creates, still creates, this confusion. So much of the time I will just say that it's people without children by choice, or have no children, do some other phraseology, but it's all trying to, you know, describe it. So it has been used for some time. What?

Speaker 2: 13:07

textbook. Was it in?

Speaker 1: 13:09

Oh gosh, I'd have to go back to my notes now, but yeah, it was a college textbook of some kind and it might even have been in more of a context of talking about population. The time was lots of conversation about people Thought there were too many humans on the planet, and there was a lot of effort for NGOs or nonprofits to put forth a messaging that you know, hey, parenthood is a choice, you don't have to do it. People were out there doing that back then, but the backdrop was to help, you know the population decline that we gosh. We're still talking about that today too.

Speaker 2: 13:41

so Yep, that sounds familiar, so 2000,. In some ways it feels like yesterday and in some ways it feels like two decades ago, which it was. How has the child-free community or even dialogue changed at all since back then? Have you seen any shifts?

Speaker 1: 13:59

Oh yeah, I mean just explosive. Actually, I can't tell you, when I was researching Foundings of Two, to find people was much more difficult than, of course, it is today, and with the evolution of our digital world, it has made this choice. People who make it so much more out there. We're more aware of them, we're more educated about them. We've almost more importantly, we have found each other. The strength of the community that I've seen over two decades has just it's been spectacular.

Speaker 1: 14:31

So I find, just in the longer timeline of things, there's been a lot of progress in a couple of decades. So I was interviewing people in the late 90s that had to lie to their friends and family that they couldn't have kids because of the lack they would get, or older couples in their 70s. These were brave people at the time because they were one woman characterized it as we were just seen as like strange birds, very odd, odd people with a capital O, you know. So today, child-free people and XYZ generations you deal with lots of challenges, for sure, but I have to say that we've seen a lot of progress. So there's a lot ways to go, but we've come a long way in those two decades too, so it's good to keep it in mind as we face these challenges that we discuss even today, and some are not even as heated as others, so that's a good thing too.

Speaker 2: 15:29

Yeah, and I've had this debate before and honestly I debate myself on it on whether the rise of social media has helped, and I think it has in many ways to your point. It has connected us, it gives us a lens into other child-free lives that we don't necessarily get on mainstream TV and the books are really anything that is published feels like it's very pronatalist and so, again, a lens into child-free lives via social media is really helpful. But on the flip side, as someone who came of age just as Facebook was coming online and the comparison culture, sometimes I feel like social media can promote pronatalism a lot. Right, it seems like and this is just anecdotal it seems like the algorithm seems to just naturally favor pronatalist, family-oriented content, even on my feeds.

Speaker 1: 16:21

Well, pronatalism is a big behemoth and I agree with you. I think that there's also, with social media, just a lot of exaggeration, writing that's designed to create reaction, things like that that, I think, work against some education and awareness. But I have to say in the end I land with there's more good than not, and rather have it than not, with pronatalism. I'm gonna talk about this in my child-free trending piece this year is there's been more talk about it this last year. There's been some nice chipping away at some of the myths and assumptions and it also relates to the next book I eventually did after Families of Two, because after that book what I found myself asking myself was why is this choice so hard for society to accept?

Speaker 1: 17:09

And it wasn't long before I hit that word and I went what the heck does pronatalism mean? And that took me down a rabbit hole that ended up in a book called the Baby Matrix, and I called it the Matrix because of the comparison, the symbolism anyway, from the movie the Matrix, where you take the red pill and you find out what it really is. So it's designed to really take a hard look at what is pronatalism, why do we have it? What are the assumptions. Which ones are not even true to begin with? Which ones might have been true in the 1200s, but they're really not relevant today? And why do we still continue to believe it anyway, or at least?

Speaker 2: 17:51

many people do.

Speaker 1: 17:52

So it really takes all that on and I think this last year there's more academic papers, ngos, articles with that word in it and in not in a positive context. So that thrills me. So, in the larger scheme of things, a couple of generations to have that happening when Pronella's been around since way, way back. So that's very favorable in a short amount of time on a really really long timeline. So I'm optimistic about the future of that too.

Speaker 2: 18:22

Yeah, I encountered the word this past September for the first time, again started entering this realm and now I can't stop seeing it and everyone around me. I feel so bad for them, but they now hear me talk about it all the time. I did a post on social media that I went shopping. I stopped by the toy department and just the number of baby dolls and again, there's nothing wrong with baby dolls, but just the sheer ratio of baby dolls to other toys was a little overwhelming to even me and I don't think I would have given it a second thought prior to really digging into all of this. So a couple of follow-up questions. So you talk about pronatalism and there are some pretty big myths that are debunked. Are there any in particular that you think are worth highlighting that came out of your research?

Speaker 1: 19:10

Well, in the book into the baby matrix I go into seven. One I think that's quite powerful is just what I call the destiny, the pronatalist destiny assumption that we're all somehow wired to want kids and if we don't, there's something wrong with us. And so I dissect that and talk about how it's not true. To begin with, we're not. We're wired to have children biologically, but we're not wired to have the desire to have them. So and that creates the assumption that makes us feel bad that there might be something wrong with us.

Speaker 1: 19:46

I think it's quite powerful. That also relates to something I've called the normality assumption, where we're seen as abnormal if we don't want them, and that's psychologically. We don't wanna grow up, we wanna have this, we wanna have a carefree, dink lifestyle, no responsibilities. We don't really wanna grow up and things like this that are really so not true when you just look at what's really going on on the ground. So I think those are two really major areas because if we really buy into those, it impacts so, so, so many other things. But again, I go into seven in detail, but those are the first two that I get into.

Speaker 2: 20:26

Yeah, and I think is that where you talk about maternal instinct, is that looped in to that discussion?

Speaker 1: 20:32

Yeah, Absolutely yeah.

Speaker 2: 20:34

If we're an instinct, we'd all be doing it, right, yeah, and it's labeled as an instinct, and so I think that's honestly where I truly felt that part of me was broken, because everyone around me seemed to have this. I would I'll have to go back and count the number of guests on my podcast who have said well, I just never had the maternal instinct, which obviously is not a dig against them, but we're just so conditioned to feel that we're lacking some sort of biological puzzle piece.

Speaker 1: 21:03

Yeah, that is exactly right. That's a pronatalism right there, something we're just taught to believe and we believe it so deeply because it followed us generations past. That it's a belief, but yet we believed it so long we think it's the truth, when really it's just a belief that's hammered into us, into our, like you know, social and cultural hardware. So part of it I try to do in that book is to unwire it and say wait, wait, wait. Let's just look at what's true here, and why are we being made to think this way anyway, and how far back does it go and why is that anyway? So it helps people be the idea is the clearer you can see it, see it, see through it. It helps people then get more in touch with. Well, what do I think I want in?

Speaker 1: 21:48

this area without all the social and cultural baggage that surrounds it all. So in the end, it's more about helping people get to knowing what's right for them.

Speaker 2: 21:57

And I do think to your point. We've come a long way in terms of being more accepting about the child free choice, and I think pronatalism is less overt these days, but that can sometimes be even more subversive because it is still very nuanced and kind of sneaky in the way it filters into our lives and I compared a lot to I don't know if you're familiar with the term diet culture, but it is this concept where we are all in this modern day age condition to be fat phobic and think about health in a certain way, and it has really just disguised itself as this wellness push. Now you really have to take a step back and recognize it for what it is, and so I feel I have found a lot of similarities as I've started to navigate also and recognize the diet culture, and they're very intertwined.

Speaker 1: 22:46

Now, once you see through some things, I think it's easier to see through the sneakiness and see through the indirectness in. I guess the challenging side of that too is that then you see it all around you all the time and see how big it really is.

Speaker 1: 23:03

It's a behemoth that to try to chip away at it takes a lot of people with a lot of awareness communicating very clearly about it, and it's not about changing minds. It's more about helping people see through to what is true. That's at least how I've experienced it when I started going down the rabbit hole and when I talked to people about it, who readers and whatnot. That's how they describe it too. It's now that they see it all around them, all the time. They see it for how big it is.

Speaker 2: 23:32

Yeah, and it can feel a little overwhelming.

Speaker 1: 23:35

Totally yeah.

Speaker 2: 23:36

Not hopeless, but when you just see the magnitude of it and the resources behind it. So a follow-up question to how the child-free space has evolved over the last 20-something years Is there any piece that you think hasn't evolved enough or still feels very stuck or has not evolved quickly enough?

Speaker 1: 23:58

Well, quickly is relative, I think. I mean, I think it's like I indicated earlier. I think it's shown so much progress in a short amount of time in terms of building community and there's so many people have found each other online now and it happens so much faster. There's a place for people who are even considering being child-free to get on and find conversation and discourse. One thing that does come to mind and it does flow into a recent book that I finished as well that I did a longitudinal study for 10 years and watched 25 women over 10 years. They started out 100% child-free and then I interviewed them every year for a decade.

Speaker 1: 24:38

And the results of that. In part it's a whole book, so there's a whole number of things that are discussed. But over the course of the 10 years about seven of them had what I called shifts in churness.

Speaker 1: 24:51

You know they had situations happen in their lives where they thought hmm, maybe I'm not 100% and maybe had to do with their relationship, health, all myriad of things. But there's some very interesting stories that I thought were actually one of the best learning parts of the book, because it's so often not talked about, because we're not tracking somebody over time like that right. So afterwards, when the book came out or I'd say it's more of the summary of the study came out I did get a mail from child-free people saying well, I can't believe those women even thought about changing their mind and I thought, wow, are you stuck on the thing on? Once you're child-free, you can't be anything other than 100%. Like case closed, door shut, you know. So I found that interesting. It was more a reflection of what there's a cohort that I do think that does believe that we don't change our mind, so leave us alone. I mean it's rooted in the fact that we get bing-o'd about that, we get shit for that. They ask us that, so people get defensive. So I understand that. But yet in those kinds of responses I thought, oh gosh, they're internalizing their own belief now that it's supposed to not happen. So that's not something that's maybe slowed it down. But I found it interesting that there are mindsets within the community that are developing that may or may not be reflective of what actually happens to a lot of people. So it's an interesting piece of the read.

Speaker 1: 26:27

I found it fascinating and studied too, all the women except one. I offered them to use fictitious names so that it would encourage brutal honesty, and I got it. So that too makes it some learning that we don't really see. We see it wasn't a sample, huge sample. It wasn't a breadth of sample, it was 25s, but it was a depth of sample which really dug deep, and that too is not done often or if at all. So it's really worth it, and that was one thing that came out of it. There was a subset that they questioned it and to me I thought good on them, because they're really awake in their lives and they're trying to figure things out. They just don't want to assume and just carry on. It's really worth it, I think, to read it and go along their journey.

Speaker 2: 27:10

Right, and this is the 25 over 10.

Speaker 1: 27:13

Yes, thank you.

Speaker 2: 27:14

Yeah, that sounds really interesting. And you mentioned the word bingoed and I think it's at least from my perspective you don't feel betrayed. Obviously, like this is. You have no say. I have no say over anyone's decision, but sometimes I can feel that there's just so few of us that I can kind of feel like a loss. I would say so I'm certainly not siding with those people who became angry, but I can commiserate honestly, yeah Well and not all of that subgroup.

Speaker 1: 27:41

They didn't change their mind Okay, not all did they, just there were shifts in it. They went through a period of questioning. So you know, at the end of the 10 years they stated kind of where they were at that time and then, right before publication, I tapped everybody again and said okay, how would you describe yourself? And you know the shifts insurance group? I guess I won't say, but I think it's worth seeing. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 28:04

Now I'm hooked.

Speaker 1: 28:06

Yeah, it's not. It's not that you lost them. Let's put it that way. That's a hint, Got it?

Speaker 2: 28:11

Intriguing. Yeah, I will certainly be reading that next, and very quickly before we talk about your most recent book. You've done so much research in this space. I still am struggling to find research. Is there any other researchers or places you can point me or the listeners who are interested in just digging into more research on the child-free space?

Speaker 1: 28:35

Oh, wow, you know, it really is out there. I have to say I mean maybe you have to just know to academic circles, but yeah, that's probably it. Yeah, and I have to say too that in reading some of it if you're not an academic it may not be the most riveting reading as a word. Yeah, in addition to myself, I think I would point people as an idea to start, if you haven't already, is to go to the research of Amy Blackstone, and she was the head of the sociology department at the University of Maine. She has a book out, child Free by Choice, and came out a couple of years ago and it's written in more of a relatable way and I know she's got lots of citations and lots of footnoting and things like that.

Speaker 1: 29:21

That's a place to start in a friendly way, but it's really been out there. Even when I went looking for research before, when I was researching families of two, there was voluntary childlessness research out there. I wouldn't say that it was a desert at all. People have been looking at that already. So it's just a matter of where do you dig and how do you dig.

Speaker 1: 29:41

There was a study this year by the University of Michigan. I thought was interesting.

Speaker 1: 29:45

It's pretty easy to find, so it gives us some more current numbers of what Michiganers if that's the right word report saying about where they're at on having kids and where I also land on that too. Sometimes the age range that it's referred to this, from like 18 to 45, say whatever the percentage was rather high say they don't want children, and to me the research would be maybe better if it would be dissected out by age range, because I know what somebody might say when they're 18 might be different than what they say at 45.

Speaker 1: 30:18

in terms of the strength of intention.

Speaker 1: 30:20

So I usually look for the studies that look at women over 40, for example, or that do the unusual thing and try to dissect out the reasons so that you have two sub-sample groups that you can learn. So we're not all lumped together because, it's face it, we're different. We have some differences with women who want kids and don't have them. There's a real lack of them, still the lack of research there, but I see a little more of it. So that's good. I think a lot of academics they see that need, that they see the whole and they're starting to try to fill it.

Speaker 2: 30:49

Yeah, and admittedly I'm very much a layman when it comes to academic research. So, and honestly, that Michigan State article that's honestly what I kept running into which I agree it's great, but I had hesitation, just simply because it felt like they took a population within Michigan and then sort of extrapolated it to the entire United States.

Speaker 1: 31:10

One reason I did 25 over 10 the way I did it. This is a summary of the research in layman's terms. I didn't see it's not an academic piece. I didn't even try to submit it to journals. It's not what I wanted to do.

Speaker 1: 31:22

I wanted to reach people who wanted to understand it and not have to fight to understand it. I wanted it to be easy but structurally and soundness of research it's all there and train that way of a master's degree done survey research forever. So I'm more of a pragmatist. I want to get it into people's heads and understanding faster than play the academic game. I guess that makes me more of an activist than an academic and I'm cool.

Speaker 2: 31:47

Yeah, we appreciate it, and now I'm even more motivated to read that. All right, so you again, very prolific writer, have been writing for the past two decades and you just recently came out with a new book. Would you mind just talking a little bit about, really, the inspiration behind the book and what it's about?

Speaker 1: 32:07

Great? Yes, so it's. The title is a special sisterhood A hundred fascinating women from history who never had children. So a few years ago I was invited to speak at a conference or it was called the not mom summit, and a woman named Karen Malone Wright spearheaded it and I was asked to do a presentation of slides of women from history who had never had children. So this was an audience of women who didn't have kids for all kinds of reasons. So the child free and child less and everybody in between was in the audience and a lot of people there.

Speaker 1: 32:41

So she had, karen had the great idea to let's get everybody in her room and find commonalities rather than focus on our differences. What do we have in common? And there's a lot. So I did this. I started going after this presentation for 25 minutes and I quickly saw there are so many women from history we could be here all day talking about it. I mean, it was hard to come up with the 25, and then I did like a collage of some other women and I got psyched to go wait a minute, I'm going to keep going with this. And I did and by the time I got to over 200, I thought, okay, lori, you need to slow down, oh my gosh Wow.

Speaker 1: 33:20

You got to like, if you're going to do something with it, you've got to at least look at, try to figure out a hundred you know, and figure out who those hundred are and why and how to pick them. And so it was a fun, creative process and it's in now it's in 15 different chapters that are based on just the major theme of the women's lives, from, you know, women who are high powered leaders, to one chapter is called legendary lens women. They're photographers of a variety of different kinds. So they have one thing and you know, one big thing in common that was a tall tree of their life, as it were. Yeah, so that's what it's about, and it spans back to 350 AD, and women from different cultures, all kinds of different backgrounds and, like the presentation, I don't go into why they didn't have kids I've done enough of that before and other things.

Speaker 1: 34:12

Yeah, this is more a sisterhood that I wanted to frame it so that we start to go. Wait, we all no matter how we all got there we do share this one thing in common. Of that one thing we have not done that we're supposed to have done or do, and what do we have in common in terms of that experience. So this is a fun, educational way to learn about women who not their reasons for not having kids, but just looking at their lives. How did they live their lives? And you know many are accomplished, but many you know it's many of their lives is just very interesting how it unfolded and took you know these twists and turns and they're all bad ass in their own way.

Speaker 1: 34:54

So you know, in the end you think it's a really good hundred and so far the you know reactions from my Goddaughter, who's 23, to you know it's really for young adults and up. So I'm getting already all kinds of really positive reactions and so I think it's it's landing just the way I wanted it to land. It's really fun and entertaining and it's beautiful. I worked with an illustrator, so every woman there is a unique illustration of her that kind of captures her spirit, and that was most time I worked with one and we just creatively collaborated so well. It was super fun.

Speaker 2: 35:28

So I'm proud of it. Yeah, it's really beautiful. I'm looking at the cover right now.

Speaker 1: 35:33

Thank you.

Speaker 2: 35:34

So, circling back to the titles that really resonate with me again, this word sisterhood really struck a chord because, you know, part of my struggle with this decision is truly the fear of missing out. So the FOMO and feeling like, you know, mothers and most of my friends who are choosing to have children, and even the ones who don't have children yet but know they want to, they're in a club that I'm never going to belong to, and this is by no means they are not doing this on purpose, and I know I have several mothers who listen to this podcast regularly and it is certainly not anything that they're doing explicitly, but it is just a shared experience that I will never be a part of. So it was just, it was nice to hear the word sisterhood and really think about how we also have our own group with something in common.

Speaker 1: 36:24

So I loved that, and it goes back a long way.

Speaker 2: 36:27

Well, Laura, thank you.

Speaker 1: 36:28

Yeah, it was great talking with you.

Speaker 2: 36:30

This was so fun. Before we wrap up, I just want to give you the opportunity to tell listeners who may be interested to learn more about you and your work. Do you want to talk a little bit about where they can find you?

Speaker 1: 36:41

Well, my site is lauracarollcom and my books are all on Amazon and also on iTunes books. So if you have iPads and in the Apple world and you're more comfortable there in that sphere, they're there as well. I'm easy to find. Google me. And you also the algorithm is it takes a little longer You're online. Yeah, that helps your algorithm, and so that's that my age helps me there.

Speaker 2: 37:04

Yeah, and I think your last name is a little unique. I think that also helps. Laura Allen, not so much the Allen really buries me deep. Well, thank you again. I hope our paths cross. I'm sure they will sometime in the future. I am so grateful you took the time to come on it's my pleasure, keep it up.

Speaker 1: 37:24

I love your podcast. You're doing a great, great thing, so keep it up. Oh, thank you.

Speaker 2: 37:29

And that's it for today. Thank you for joining me. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, or please consider leaving a review wherever you get your podcasts, and I will see you next week. Thanks.