Helen Mirren confronts the final female taboo [View all]

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The number of childless women is growing fast all over the world – why does it bother so many people? It is nobody else's business, says Sarah Rainey

In the opening scene of Bridget Jones’ Diary, the lecherous Uncle Geoffrey sidles up to Bridget at her mother’s turkey curry buffet and asks that dreaded question: when is she going to get “sprogged up”? “You career girls,” he leers, “can’t put it off forever. Tick-tock, tick-tock.”
Childless women – whether they’re 32, like Bridget, or 67, like Dame Helen Mirren, whose comments in this month’s Vogue have reignited the debate on childlessness – have had to put up with jibes like this for centuries. When a woman reaches a certain age, she is expected to start thinking about having children. If she doesn’t, society demands an answer. But why doesn’t she have children, people will whisper. Isn’t she able to have children? Doesn’t she want children?
In the past, Mirren has answered with defiance. “I have no maternal instinct whatsoever,” she once said. “Motherhood holds no interest for me.” In her latest interview, however, Mirren, who has been married for 15 years, admits that she always expected to be a mother. “It was not my destiny,” she says. “I kept thinking it would be, waiting for it to happen, but it never did, and I didn’t care what people thought.”
Women, she adds, never gave her a hard time: “it was only boring old men. And whenever they went 'What? No children? Well, you’d better get on with it, old girl,’ I’d say 'No! F--- off!’”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/9847642/Helen-Mirren-confronts-the-final-female-taboo.html