From deviant choice to feminist issue: an historical analysis of scholarship on voluntary childlessness (1920-2013)

In this chapter the authors extend past narrative reviews by means of a systematic review and content analysis of literature going back to the earliest article they could locate (in the 1920s). The analysis allowed them to attend to socio-historical and geopolitical aspects shaping research about voluntary childlessness in relation to the politics of knowledge production, treating the published work as data, thus troubling 'the epistemic privilege of academic discourse' (Macleod, Bhatia, & Kessi, 2017, p. 309).