“Our goddess,” wrote a poster last week on the Reddit board devoted to being childfree, “has passed.” Dolly Parton, one of the greatest benefactors to children in world history while also being a role model to those who were without them, had died at 80.
This week, Gloria Steinem, the writer and activist who renounced both marriage — for most of her life — and children died at 92.
While both said they were influenced by having mothers who were frequently ill and in need of caretaking, they had very different paths to not having children of their own — and different paths in helping better the world for children and parents.
Parton’s path to a childfree existence was fairly convoluted in the way that bodies so often make things. She also grew up one of 12, and five of her younger siblings lived with her for a time after she left the family home. “We always have somebody’s children and we don’t want the total responsibility,” she said of those years.
But Parton came to like what being childfree could do for her, recognizing that it helped her career significantly. “I just want to be free to work. I want to think, I want to write better songs, I want to write different styles of music; I want to write Broadway plays, which I am; I want to write books, which I will,” she said in a conversation with Andy Warhol in 1984.
