The team behind Wombs on Strike discusses inherited notions of womanhood, omertá, and how art tackles the theme

continued from Part 1

Do you find that perceptions about women and their role in society are inherited from older generations, and if so, how strong are they? Does the strong Catholic tradition prevalent on our islands have an impact on these perceptions?

Of course, gender roles are most definitely inherited from older generations.

In the local context there seems to be a common tendency to assume that religion has an impact on one’s choice to have or not to have children. The project could not avoid such a thematic and didn’t shy away from exploring it. However, the interviewees were not personally impacted or influenced by religion, including a participant who identified as a practising Catholic.

On the other hand, many participants agreed on the pro-natalist context and that religion perpetuates a romanticised view of the mother and child. Participants acknowledged that religion has served as one of the most enduring systems for maintaining patriarchal norms, with an important say in Malta’s policymaking.

The hold of pro-natalism tends to persist internationally even in atheist societies, and so perhaps it’s more about the patriarchal rails that continue to dominate the so-called cultural requirements. Religion can be just one of its many languages.

The cultural environment plays a significant role too, as mentioned by a couple of participants:

a 51-year-old, who works in humanitarian emergencies, mentioned how, particularly in East Africa, it's a given that families have to be large and that women will have a lot of children, so usually people asked, “How many children do you have”, rather than, “Do you have children?” When she replies that she has none, they would be very sad for her, “and I would very gently, simply explain that I was happy to be able to support them”.

A 49-year-old spoke about how her partner left her “because he wants children, without having the ability to offer anything to this child he wants to bring into this world”. Other participants have echoed this sentiment: do people really think about the responsibility it entails in bringing a child to this world?

Is there a degree of omertà, if not hypocrisy, in the way the issue of the low national birth rate is being debated?

It’s most definitely biased, one-sided and not holistic. So far, apart from the Archbishop’s take above, the situation has been tackled solely from an economic standpoint, however the debate is actually more extensive.

Some of the project’s participants have highlighted that their choice for not having kids has nothing to do with finance or a lack of social measures and subsidies; some have declared that they are financially stable but this does not make them change their mind. Local debates make no reference to the existentialist approach, whereby affect, autonomy, and freedom can be highly impacted when having children.

Similarly, the price a woman pays, from a physical and biological aspect, is not negotiable, despite all efforts towards closing the gender gap and women’s empowerment in the workforce.

From our artistic research project, it has become evident that despite being a heavily debated topic, national discourse around birth rates rarely includes the actual voices and realities of women who choose not to have children. For almost all of the participants, participating in this project was their very first opportunity to share their views, stories and experiences as women who chose not to have children in a safe space.

Is there anything in particular that stands out from the studies? Something that surprised you, for example?

One of our questions concerned whether participants knew or would have loved to get in contact with other women who made the same choice. While responses varied, most already felt part of a strong “imagined community”, having agency, with one 48-year-old describing it as a “tribe”. A 51-year-old stressed that such a community can validate women who are less confident about their choice, while also representing a political and economic force.

Two interviewees involved their husbands as part of our interviewing process, whose perspectives largely reflected those of their wives. They shared how family circumstances and introspection influenced their choices, while embracing an enlarged vision of family beyond traditional biological relations.

Social pressures on men also emerged, alongside the same sense of responsibility, generosity and care found among the women. This extended towards social, political and environmental collective responsibility, prioritising care for existing living beings and the planet over an assumed responsibility to reproduce.

This is a very vast, multifaceted topic. Why discuss it through art?

Art doesn’t exist in a bubble; it is embedded in daily life and can help address socio-political thematics. We are aware that the theme of the no-child life choice has been partially tackled in the past, namely in academic contexts. In our case, we believe that the arts have the power, as well as the responsibility, to connect with wider and more diverse communities, making the work more available and accessible. By making use of, for example, anecdotes and visual metaphors, such a complex, multilayered and intersectional theme becomes more approachable.

One of the objectives of our project was, and is, to fill the gap in both individual narratives and national public discourse, concerning the thematic, opening a dialogue towards mainstreaming diverse life choices, with the hope of embracing better equality, empowering women’s rights. And hopefully this can be strengthened further through the future phase of the project, where it continues developing into a creative interdisciplinary production.

Women’s rights are part of a wider network of rights, and in this regard the project has strongly linked this to cultural rights, whereby the women participants have been invited and welcomed to share their journey. Some of the interviewees also joined the team of performers during the creative experimentation stage, transitioning from participants to co-creators.

Could you talk us through the creative process?

Perhaps one of the most joyfully laborious parts of this process has been exploring how we might go about developing the language to express all these findings. Although we seemed to land on a few shared themes, the experiences shared were so uniquely diverse that we were posed with the great risk of streamlining their words. We also agreed that, at least at this early stage, we would prioritise verbatim-all willed into the space through analysis of metaphors and images from our initial interviews. Over here, the word ‘images’ is used in its full sense whereby it can hold within it a recall of any, or all, of the senses, rather than simply sight.

And this - brought with it the greatest gift and greatest pitfall: the sheer volume of material to work with, because our shared hope was the expression of a language that would be capable of portraying each of the women’s unique journeys whilst still honouring their place in the commonality of the tribe of women (to use one participant’s words). We ran the risk of either reductionism or heavy interpretation; it was a fine line to balance. And this was, perhaps, the greatest limitation to accept in this process: that regardless of how carefully we strove to not ‘interpret’ the content entrusted to us, we, the Creative Team, are still living, breathing artists who have come to this project with our own lived experiences. The simple act of ‘selection’ will always be the mammoth responsibility we carried through this process. The responsibility that ensured that what we shared during the public event is truly only a taste of what we have encountered with these wonderfully open and willing individuals.

This is a work-in-progress, not only because reaching a final production was never part, as yet, of the objectives of the current research and exploration phase, but also because the women in this project are living creatures who may have even developed a thought further or deeper in the time between our initial meeting and our later sessions. The identities behind the words we have carefully selected are not stagnant but constantly flowing.

Wombs on Strike is a collaboration with the Women’s Rights Foundation and Il-Kollettiv. This project forms part of the Spazju Kreattiv programme 2026-27 and is supported by Arts Council Malta and the Mediterranean Women’s Fund.

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It’s a Matter of Choice (2)

It’s a Matter of Choice (1)