Voicing Voluntary Childlessness: Narratives of Non-Mothering in French

This book looks at first-person accounts of voluntary childlessness by women writing in French. It brings together authors who stake out a new terrain, creating a textual space in which to take ownership of their childlessness and call for new understandings of female identity beyond maternity.

Natalie Edwards is Senior Lecturer in French Studies and a member of the Fay Gale Centre for Research on Gender at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She holds a PhD from Northwestern University and specializes in contemporary French and Francophone literature, autobiography, gender studies and visual culture. She is the author of Shifting Subjects: Plural Subjectivity in Contemporary Francophone Women’s Autobiography (2011) and co-editor most recently of Framing French Culture: Photography and the Visual Arts (2015).