The Radical Power of the Childless Woman

The Christian mandate to be fruitful and multiply and subdue the earth is the implicit need for the church to confine women to the production of believers. As Christianity passes through the enlightenment and morphs into the free market what women produce become laborers. Once the industrial age is abstracted into speculative finance (that much closer to god) women are now commanded to make consumers. That unmarried childless woman in the not-so-distant past, accused of witchcraft and prosecuted in great numbers, was punished for not doing the job assigned to her by society (she had other things to do). Now in our era of ecological collapse, in which we are well on our way to consuming ourselves out of existence, the Christian dream of subduing the earth reaches fruition with the accelerating destruction of the planet. The recent U.S. government reinstatement of the law that thou shalt bear offspring is a redux of the bad old religious demand to multiply consumers—in order to maintain our apocalypse—and now backed by all of the violence of the modern police state. As Mona Chollet argues in her brilliant book In Defense of Witches (2022) this demonstrates in reverse that female power is, literally, terrifying to man. The independent woman who maintains her childlessness by whatever means necessary possesses a radical power that threatens the continuation of the patriarchal status-quo; meanwhile she pursues her own desires.