“SHE ISN’T ABLE to have children. Isn’t that sad?” my mother-in-law said about a friend’s daughter. Her question to me shaped my own perspective on the young woman—let’s call her Sally—and on the lives of women who do not have children. Decades later, when I was researching childlessness in the Middle Ages, I remembered this exchange and found it significant. Intimate conversation between women is typical of how, for centuries, ideals of fertility and motherhood have been passed down the generations. Whether Sally shared my mother-in-law’s view, whether she even wanted to become a mother and suffered from the prospect of a life without children, I did not know. We hardly knew each other and would never have talked about such a personal issue. Although women, especially, are asked whether they have children as a matter of course, when the answer is negative, the conversation falls silent. Even today, infertility is still a taboo that is talked about behind closed doors and evokes insecurity, consternation, and pity.

Infertility is not “a deviation from a natural, normal state, but as a social category shaped by discrimination.” This is what I argued in Infertility in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2022), pointing to the crucial role of language. People do not become childless through sexual acts but through verbal ones. To become so, they must be compared with others, confronted with a failure to conceive, and have their life circumstances classified as deficient. The Hebrew Bible tells some of the earliest stories about how much women suffer from not having a child. Rachel feels so inferior to her fertile sister Leah that she wants to die (Gen. 30:1), and Hannah sheds bitter tears because she is mocked for not conceiving (1 Sam. 1:8). Longing for a child cannot be separated from the countless tales of marginalization that have been told about childless people from the beginnings of written tradition to the present day.