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From the many fruitful years of our collaboration, I had learned the technical aspects of writing and editing, as well as how to toughen up and persevere as a self-employed person. We were thriving as a duo. Every professional project was a joint one. All our efforts were combined. I hoped to simultaneously flourish on my own. That desire led me back to school. I wanted to focus on a subject about which I’d become passionate: Well-Being. Over the years, I’d been reading about a new branch of social science called “positive psychology”—described as “the science of well-being”. I enrolled in a master’s degree program in Applied Positive Psychology and received a Master of Science three years later.

For my dissertation, I designed a study of 20 non-mothers, with a goal of theorizing about their sense of life meaning and purpose. As a childfree woman, I had over the years become increasingly fascinated by the stories of others like me who, for one reason or another, didn’t have kids. I had even started keeping a list of well-known non-parents. I read their biographies. I kept notes about my own experiences. Then, through my dissertation research, I found the statistics: approximately 20% of women worldwide are childless (also known as involuntarily or “by chance”, through infertility or other conditions) or childfree (referred to as voluntary or “by choice”).

One particular day, as I prepared to interview my research participants, I came across several stunningly misogynistic academic papers about infertility, all written in the 1950s and 60s, and I started to think deeply about the blithe use in those studies of the word “barren” as it applied to any woman who had not conceived. I was overwhelmed by a need to take back that word, to own it somehow, to empower it. But how? I played with it, capitalized it, sketched it, and then heard myself say it several times aloud: Barren…Barren….Being barren…Barren-ness…Barrenness…Baroness. Baroness! That’s it! The nobility of being childfree.

I began referring to myself, glibly and amongst friends, as a Baroness. I wanted to use the moniker Baroness on social media, but found it was already widely used to signify a certain haughtiness, having nothing to do with being childfree. I thought a funny twist might be to add my nationality to Baroness. American Baroness. After all, I told myself, we don’t have an American aristocracy, so maybe I’ll invent one. And so American Baroness was born. The title Baroness made me feel proud. Yes! I am one of the 20%—one amongst the vast number of women who did not, perhaps could not, conceive.

Every childfree woman has a story to tell, a trajectory to her title. Mine will sound familiar. I often think about all those years ago, my ex-husband trying to figure out how to create a baby’s room in the teeny tiny hallway of our rent-stabilized apartment in the West Village. We joked about waiting to have kids until we struck it rich. We saw friends getting pregnant in their late 30’s and early 40’s. It looked like fun. We were in no rush. Then, my uterus went poof. One emergency surgery later, and time had run out.

I lost track long ago of how many times I’ve been asked “why don’t you have children”, which seems to always be posed with a parenthetical “what’s wrong with you”. The answer is “Nothing”. That’s the point. Nothing is wrong with me. Or at least not any more than what might be wrong with any of us, I'd think to myself. Don’t make the sad face. I’m not broken. I’m not empty. Not barren. On the contrary. I believe that childfree women have a special and exalted role to play in culture and society. I believe there’s nobility in not having children. I would like to ennoble others who, like me, will not have children, by choice or by chance. Moreover, non-mothers can be positive role models to those who parent: a woman’s identity need not be synonymous with motherhood. Sovereign unto yourself, you live in dignity and are thereby ennobled. (Guidance)