00:00:54.300But before we get into it, on that note, do you want to give everybody a quick update?
00:01:00.000Yes, we announced this in our previous episode, but I just want to remind everyone that we are going to be going on a little mat leave hybrid construction for the rest of the year.
00:01:11.140So we will be releasing one episode a month rather than two, and it will be a paid episode for our paid subscribers.
00:01:16.880And that will be through the end of the year so that I can learn what breastfeeding is.
00:01:22.980We will obviously keep up with our redistributions throughout this time period.
00:01:26.440And we're going to have some fun, hopefully a little bit more chatty and silly episodes this fall.0.79
00:01:32.320I think people enjoyed watching us shoot the shit and laugh about Charlie Kirk and other stuff on our previous episodes.0.86
00:01:38.640So maybe we can carry that through.0.97
00:02:20.540Right. So we have talked about Tradwives a lot. You, especially on the Yesteryear tour,0.97
00:02:25.620you're probably really tired of talking about this. But I think something that we've discussed
00:02:29.920is how effective this propaganda is on its own terms. I think that we're both in agreement that
00:02:38.060it is undeniably propaganda. And we hear all the time that this content is dangerous because
00:02:44.840it's going to essentially trick impressionable young women into making decisions that will be
00:02:49.620bad for them, like that they're getting a message from this content that they're not getting from
00:02:53.880the broader culture, both conservatives and liberals treat this phenomenon as in some way
00:02:59.880countercultural in that respect. I don't think that we actually have enough evidence yet to
00:03:04.260determine if or what the long-term ramifications of this period will be, but I do think it already
00:03:11.360tells us quite a bit about where we are right now. So today, I want to do a bit of media analysis of
00:03:17.200two recent interviews with the most popular so-called trad wife influencers, Hannah Nealman
00:03:23.520or Ballerina Farm in Vulture and Nara Smith on Call Her Daddy. Caro, have you read the Ballerina
00:03:29.580Farm interview? I know what's going on. Okay, do you want to just summarize how people are
00:03:39.180metabolizing these interviews? I think just generally speaking, people are noticing that
00:03:43.360both Nara Smith and Hannah Nealman have made massive pivots in the last year, but in particular
00:03:49.580in the last spring with their press, because both of them are pretty careful about when they actually
00:03:54.260speak and when they just let their visuals speak for them. So I think they've made massive visual
00:03:59.320pivots of their brands already. But this spring, both of them made pretty concerted efforts to say
00:04:04.600quite literally that they are not trad wives and to kind of highlight all of the ways in which they
00:04:08.840are closer to like the girl boss persona than anything else.
00:04:13.340So we don't know Nara Smith and Hannah Nealman. So this episode is like, quote unquote, about
00:04:18.500them, but it's really about what they tell us about us as a society. So I listened to Nara
00:04:24.460Smith and I read Hannah Nealman's responses and I noticed a few themes, some similarities that I
00:04:30.420want to tease apart today because it felt to me like they were operating from the same playbook.
00:04:35.880So for a long time, this conversation has felt kind of circular to me. It's almost like this
00:04:42.220logical pretzel where the accusation can also be weaponized as a defense. So skeptics or critics
00:04:48.340will point out, you know, they have their own money, they're running their own businesses. These
00:04:51.680are not women who are actually living the traditional values that they are aestheticizing
00:04:56.320or exposed to the risks of those values. And then they can turn around in 2026 and go, yeah,0.92
00:05:01.820I have a job. I'm not a trad wife. Why is everyone calling me a trad wife? Stop calling me a trad0.60
00:05:05.640wife. Now that they each have like 10 million followers. You go in this like loop and then you
00:05:10.420end up where you started and you're like, all right, well then what are we even talking about
00:05:13.760here? Right. So when I was listening to and reading these interviews this time around,
00:05:17.320I noticed something for the first time that I had not really picked up on before.
00:05:20.540And it called to mind a framework that I want us to think about today
00:05:24.600that comes from a feminist essayist and poet named Adrienne Rich from the 1970s.
00:05:30.080And that is the distinction between motherhood as institution and mothering as experience.
00:05:37.660To be specific, by the institution of motherhood, we are talking about a set of cultural practices.
00:05:44.580We're talking about established social mechanisms that regulate the behavior of women.
00:05:49.780We're talking about policies, the legal system, ideologies, and most importantly for our conversation today,
00:05:56.140we are talking about the images and the aesthetics that govern patriarchal motherhood.
00:06:02.280So we're talking about which qualities are idealized culturally through these systems
00:06:07.140and which are punished. Some of the qualities associated with the ideal mother are self-denial,
00:06:12.820this sense of inherent goodness, which we've talked about a lot on this show this year,
00:06:17.460how putting women on a pedestal as naturally morally superior, whether you're talking about
00:06:23.560them in the context of being a mother or, like, being a girl boss, that that is still a version
00:06:28.700of benevolent sexism and whiteness, which we're going to get into later. So what's important to0.60
00:06:35.380remember here is that these ideas are reinforced to a population in many ways, but often the most
00:06:41.320insidious ways and the most powerful mechanism that this happens is images and is aesthetics.
00:06:46.860So that, all of that, is distinct in Rich's view from mothering as experience, which she defined as the biological, the spiritual, the very personal element of being a mother and forming a relationship with your child.
00:07:02.880So mothering is your experience of this profoundly human act.
00:07:07.800Motherhood is the strict set of social expectations around how to perform appropriately maternal behavior.
00:07:13.640I think this is a really useful framework for this conversation, because Adrienne Rich became a mother in the United States in the 1950s. So very interesting time to be a white mother in this country. I'm going to have you read a snippet from a review and analysis of her book of Woman Born.0.69
00:07:34.400Katie going on an academic and intellectual journey to understand mothering so that I don't leave her behind.
00:07:39.240she's like i get it so you're feeling it in your body is that correct
00:07:46.900like asking chat gpt what would adrian rich say is the best way hypothetically to like
00:07:53.180make sure a mother keeps texting me back oh my god the idea of chat gpt embodying like the ghost
00:08:00.320of adrian rich is really is really sending me okay motherhood for rich is not a domestic issue
00:08:07.460or simply a question of choice or lifestyle.
00:08:15.940for want of a better, more inclusive term, women.
00:08:19.080But it has to be explored from a personal point of view.0.81
00:08:22.340For Rich, no issue is a better illustration
00:08:24.520of how the personal is also political.
00:08:27.060She starts her exploration of motherhood
00:08:28.880by digging in her own private experience.
00:08:31.280As she pours back over the journal entries
00:08:33.060she wrote around the time when her children were little,
00:08:35.080she realizes how ambivalent her feelings were not so much towards her children themselves as
00:08:40.620towards the constraints of motherhood yes flagged that this is how she came to see a separation
00:08:45.660between the experience of motherhood that is the potential relationship of any woman to her powers
00:08:50.880of reproduction and to children and to the institution of motherhood described as ensuring0.56
00:08:56.240that that potential and all women shall remain under male control yeah that's so interesting
00:09:02.100It really makes me think of how often this spring and summer I have been asked about my journey, like with motherhood in relation to my intellectual relationship to my book.0.98
00:09:11.900And I think that that's almost always a well-meaning question.
00:09:15.020People are genuinely interested that I am pregnant while also on tour for this book.
00:09:19.600But it really, I have always been kind of unsure of how to answer that question because it seems like there is a very clear answer that people want.
00:09:27.140And it's not always the one that I want to give.
00:09:29.700It can feel really counterculture to try to respond to that in public in any way other than what people expect.
00:09:36.900I expected it to become a bigger part of the story when you told me you were pregnant.
00:09:42.640Me too. I mean, I expected Tucker Carlson to drag my ass across this podcast floor.0.99
00:09:46.740It's just such a fraught subject, and that's what we're going to spend a lot of time talking about today.0.97
00:09:52.860So one way that I came to think about this in my research after reading Adrienne Rich and some of the other feminists that followed her and would apply her framework is that mothering is not inherently patriarchal.
00:10:06.880That relationship is not inherently patriarchal.
00:10:09.980But the institution of motherhood as a political, ideological, and aesthetic is patriarchal.
00:10:28.600To establish why they are relevant totems for a conversation like this one, both of these women have somewhere between 10 million and 20 million followers.1.00
00:16:08.800may experience motherhood as a rare source of self-affirmation,
00:16:12.000while society deems her motherhood to be illegitimate and deviant.
00:16:15.920She may experience caring for her child
00:16:17.860as a determined struggle against harsh circumstances,
00:16:20.700While society sees in her mothering the pathological perpetuation of poverty. Yeah. Some women may experience mothering as debilitating and intrusive, even though patriarchal ideology defines it as women's instinctive vocation. Some women may experience fulfillment and happiness in mothering, even though feminist theory calls it oppressive. Yeah.0.98
00:16:40.780Okay, so you can see how the institution absolutely shapes these experiences, but you can also see how the experience can be used to refute that institutional framing and how where you exist in relation to the institution is what determines how those images and ideas and behavior are perceived.
00:17:01.120So, by way of explanation, Roberts basically says, historically, a white woman who was essentially trapped in her home, being pressured to reproduce, might see entering the workforce as liberatory, while a black woman who was forced to work outside the home and care for white people's kids may experience being in her own home, caring for her own children, as an act of resistance against the exact same system that is forcing the white mother to stay home.
00:17:27.760So, I bring all this up to say, I think one of the more interesting layers of this conversation is that Nara Smith is a biracial woman. She's not African American, she's South African and German, but I think that really adds a complexity to the analysis.
00:17:42.160Like, you could make the argument that there could be something subversive about what she is doing.
00:17:48.200However, I think in order to be subverting something, there has to be a level of intention or at the very least awareness of that history and what you are trying to say about it.
00:17:58.520And I just don't think we have any evidence that that is the case here.0.56
00:18:01.480Well, I would also add that she also married into a family and has been, up until this spring, leaning into, like, a religion and a traditional family structure that has traditionally also espoused whiteness. Mormon culture and Mormon religion is adamantly white.0.65
00:18:16.680I went down kind of a rabbit hole about the Mormon church's history with racism, and it ended up being like one of those things where you spend eight hours, and you're like, this is everything. This is the thesis. And then you come out the other side, and you're like, okay, so wait, the Mormon church, yeah, that's not like a revelation.
00:18:34.280She has, at points, like, distanced herself from it,
00:18:38.040and then at other points posted herself reading the Book of Mormon.
00:18:41.400Lucky Blue Smith's family is very Mormon.
00:18:44.200Anyway, when asked about her content, Smith often just says,
00:18:47.660I'm just sharing my life. I'm just sharing what I love to do.
00:18:51.400Here's an example of that, if you will please read.
00:18:55.080Okay, so this is from a 2024 profile. Okay.
00:18:58.500Smith is still trying to figure out where she fits amid all of the frenzy.
00:19:02.640Quote, I never know what to say when people ask me what I do because technically, yes, I create content, she says.
00:19:08.020But then I'm just living my life and sharing that with people, which a lot of people do.
00:19:12.500There's an eagerness, almost a girlish giddiness to her voice that is at odds with the sultry whisper she uses in her TikToks.
00:19:19.360Yeah. So, like, the most generous and charitable thing I could say here is, like, maybe it's all extended performance art, you know?
00:19:26.920Maybe suggesting that this is all just her life as part of that performance, but we have never seen an outright acknowledgement of any intention to undermine the signals that she's sending in the content.
00:19:42.640We're going to get into this with the interviews from this spring, but I also just wonder, like, do journalists ever ask the questions that we want?
00:19:50.720Like, has any journalist ever just asked her point blank, why do you use that voice?
00:22:34.820To the $110 I spent on my annual Evie membership.
00:22:38.560Okay, so we have Hannah Nealman on Evie Magazine, which is the conservative Cosmo that Katie and I covered about a year ago in our Edible episode.1.00
00:22:49.860She is wearing a milkmaid dress that I broke.0.87
00:22:58.660You found like a URL that wasn't supposed to be live.
00:23:01.620I found their like launching page for their Mommy's Milky Boy jug dress.
00:23:06.780Which really just goes to show you that fucking nobody is reading this magazine because you clicked like a very public link and you were like, um, what is this?0.77
00:23:17.140This is their mommy's milky boy dress.
00:23:19.060So Hannah Nealman is wearing the milkmaid dress that Evie made, but she is very noticeably not showing the front because if you look at the milkmaid dress online, it's for like a woman with E-cups and it like basically shows your areolas.0.84
00:25:55.560However, I was surprised to find that even in these 2024 and 2025 profiles and interviews,0.71
00:26:03.120these women were already verbally disavowing the label.
00:26:08.200So, in 2024, Nara had a big profile come out in Harper's Bazaar where she said this, if you will please read.
00:26:15.180That's one of the narratives that I have a really hard time wrapping my head around.
00:26:18.800The trad wife, whatever it is, she says.
00:26:21.140You don't see me getting on a plane, hopping to New York, modeling, coming back, all while I have a newborn, paying bills, filming content, getting my kids dressed.
00:26:30.380Being put into a certain box just because people think that I'm slaving away is so weird to me.
00:26:35.300I'm a working mom who gets to go about her day in a very different way than someone with a normal 9-to-5 job would.
00:26:41.800And I just want to pause really quickly.0.98
00:26:43.540Nara Smith was using the Tradwife hashtag when she was growing her account.
00:27:38.540I don't necessarily identify with it, she says, because we are traditional in the sense that it's a man and a woman, we have children, but I do feel like we're paving a lot of paths that haven't been paved before.
00:28:35.600this is where I wish that there were follow-up questions or if the follow-up questions were
00:28:40.700asked that they would be included in the articles where it's like, yeah, but it doesn't really
00:28:44.020matter to me if they identify with the term. I want to know what Hannah Nillman thinks about0.85
00:28:47.620Charlie Kirk amplifying her profile. I want to know what Nara Smith thinks about her husband
00:28:53.100liking like MAGA videos and Christian. Like I'm like, I don't care what you think about the term.
00:28:58.700That's not really relevant. The question is like, what do you think about the implications of the
00:29:03.240term in the context of what was happening yeah it'd be like if you're like interviewing andrew
00:29:07.500tate and he's like misogynist me no no no i don't identify with the term i i'm actually in a 50 50
00:29:13.840partnership and i really respect women all the sex trafficking stuff is just because because it goes
00:29:18.020viral like oh i can't wait no i can't wait for the clickbait head to head that's a podcast who0.96
00:29:23.940compares andrew tate to hannah neilman but they're the same fucking this is the same phenomenon yes0.96
00:29:31.500As ridiculous as that sounds, the same mechanisms are at play here. So, I guess what I'm getting at, though, with these images and, like, this round of interviews is that I don't think the most interesting way to interpret what is happening here is as a new disavowal of something.0.54
00:29:46.380But I do think that things are shifting. And like I said, I noticed a few parallels in these interviews and then noticed more when I went back and read the old ones that I want to talk about. So, now we're going to compare the high points of the public relations playbook, and then we'll talk about what it means.
00:29:58.780So the first theme that appears in both interviews is virality as an absolving force.
00:30:05.320So you are outsourcing your decisions and your culpability to what the internet is responding to.
00:30:11.160The second is unprompted proactive defense of their husbands or preempting criticism about their husbands.
00:33:04.600And that was the first video that kind of popped off because I was like, my kids stumbled into my room asking me for bread and jam, and they actually did.
00:36:33.780Yeah. Like, oh, you can have the flexibility to be home with your children.
00:36:37.680Every sentence is so loaded and is such a perfect example of so many themes that we've been talking about on the show this year in particular.
00:36:46.340So, later in the episode, they expand on this, that there are all these, to use their words, innocent explanations for how and why.
00:37:12.160So pregnancy was a catalyst for virality.0.99
00:37:14.880And B, not just cooking, but the videos where she was making things in the most needlessly labor and time intensive way possible was what started to grow her account.0.86
00:37:25.560So another example she gives of an early viral video is making a PB&J from scratch.0.91
00:37:30.500She makes the bread, she makes the jelly, she makes the peanut butter from scratch.
00:37:34.820So you are taking something that is traditionally associated with being a very quick, low effort, kind of give up meal,
00:37:41.920and you're intentionally transforming it into something that is extremely taxing.
00:37:47.220Those are the two elements where she saw the most traction.
00:37:49.820And I also think that you're couching it in a context that is ripe for argument online, which is a medical problem, immediately creating this insulation and also opening you up to like the Maha discourse that has been exploding around the same time period.
00:38:17.080Thank you. Actually, we're here already.
00:38:19.820In another video, she opens the video by saying her toddler woke up with a sore throat and she, quote, doesn't keep traditional medicine in the house.
00:38:29.740So she decides to make cough drops from scratch.
00:38:33.060Okay, okay. Pause right there. I have to say something. I have to say something.
00:38:37.460In the interview with Alex Cooper, she was basically implying, like, yeah, I made the bread and jam later and it took a while for the kids to eat, but, like, they still enjoyed it later.0.98
00:38:44.580If your kid wakes up with a cough with a sore throat, that's a bullshit timeline.0.94
00:52:13.460Yeah. Okay. Pause for a second. So just to be abundantly clear. We actually, both of these interviews, I don't want to describe them as interviews. I think that these might be like opportunities for Nara Smith and Hannah Nielman to speak.
00:52:28.180At no point are either of these interviewers pausing and asking a clarifying question, which I think is like a very easy line in the sand for if someone is operating in a journalistic capacity or just giving someone the opportunity to speak.
00:52:44.620I don't want to really double down on Stephen Neal or Alex Cooper in this regard, because I think this is emblematic of how our media works generally across the board.
00:52:53.720I mean, you and I noticed this about the New York Times puff piece about Hannah Nealman that came out a year ago.
00:52:58.180Like, there just really is not—it's very rare for someone to say, well, hold on a second.
00:53:02.560I want to actually ask a clarifying question, or I want to push you on that.
00:53:06.920There's this idea that appears over and over again in these profiles, which is that all these women receive is backlash.
00:53:16.280There's this theme of persecution that comes up over and over again, almost to the point that I had in my notes that, like, the haters, so to speak, almost become a third character.
00:53:28.180in the story of the profile. But what's interesting, and I think you'll see this a lot
00:53:33.940today, is like, insofar as just mainstream press is concerned, it's often completely the opposite.
00:53:39.940If you actually listen to these interviews, they get the polar opposite treatment in institutional
00:53:44.900media coverage that most women who are in the public eye receive. There is a great deal of
00:53:50.740charity and subjectivity given to these women in these interviews, where most notable women end
00:53:57.160up getting scrutinized. It's just kind of uncommon, I think. Like, Sheryl Sandberg.
00:54:02.700Not to everyone. Everyone fucking hates when I talk about Sheryl Sandberg. But I think the one0.99
00:54:07.480thing that I learned in that episode is, like, Sheryl Sandberg got way more shit in mainstream0.97
00:54:13.040press than Hannah Nealman has ever gotten in the mainstream press.0.82
00:54:17.200But I also find it really interesting that Nara, even in that short transcript we just read,
00:54:22.620She started by saying Lucky Blue was saying, no, you should do this.
00:54:26.460And then she ends it by saying, well, he just had to get in line.
00:54:30.200Like, I was the one making those decisions.0.70
00:54:32.040And I'm like, no, it sounds like he saw you were going to make a fuck ton of money.
00:54:35.560And he was like, let's figure out a way to make.
01:05:21.760is not what she shares on social media,
01:05:23.440But you are still going out of your way to continue a brand in which you are making toothpaste from scratch. And so, again, as much as there is this pivot that these women are doing, they are still leaning quite specifically into these brands that are identifiable and symbolic of this idea of the traditional woman.
01:05:42.840And again, you have the personal being summoned as the political defense. I'm not a trad wife. How could you even think that? I work. I work for a living. Actually, my husband and I split our household duties, right? And we have a very similar sentiment expressed in the Nealman exchange, which is where I really kind of got the idea for this episode because I was like, holy shit, they're doing the exact same thing. This is like uncanny.
01:06:09.980Don't you also just find it interesting that neither interview had anyone just saying,
01:06:14.080hey, what do you think of the administration?
01:06:17.900Well, hold on tight. We're going to skirt somewhat close to that edge.
01:19:07.360She is the unwitting subject of controversy. And that has everything to do with the fact that the images and the aesthetics that they are perpetuating are embedded in American culture. They are the norm, right?
01:19:23.180At one point in the Vulture interview, McNeil, who was interviewing her, gives her an opening to make an incredibly boilerplate political statement to deviate from this world of the personal experience about her own life and her own feelings and her own choices and yada, yada, yada, and she completely dodges it.
01:20:59.360The choice to swerve that and make it about your philosophy as a small business owner to me is a subtle but very deliberate stake in the ground of her resisting that politicization and also kind of making like she's like making the conservative argument that all of this should be negotiated at the level of the family in the workplace.
01:21:18.760She didn't even have to think of her own examples of ways that the state could support families.
01:21:23.940McNeil literally listed them for her.0.81
01:21:26.060All she had to say was, I agree, I would love for all women to have all of those resources.
01:27:40.480Like, I don't think I'm, like, breaking news to anybody that Instagram is not reality.
01:27:43.880But in this particular instance, I thought it was very telling to see this beautiful, poetic description of women's bodies as the bridge between heaven and earth, while her actual experience of serving as that channel and being in that body was feeling very different.
01:28:01.000and was actually a powerful example of the ways that the medical system in postpartum
01:28:06.500care often fails mothers in this country, especially when you think about who Nara Smith
01:28:12.180is and the resources that she has and what she has access to, that she was not insulated
01:28:16.140from that experience, that very difficult experience. And you have to ask, what purpose
01:28:21.120does romanticizing this process to millions of people serve? And I think you did a really
01:28:25.800good job of communicating this in the birth episodes that we did, that the institution
01:28:31.040of motherhood is the legal and the political framework that is responsible for the fact
01:28:36.080that women are largely seen as mere vessels for babies, that the mother's body becomes
01:28:41.060secondary to the child's life because the ideal of motherhood is self-sacrifice, self-denial0.96
01:28:47.900to the death if that is what it takes. And so to see the sort of rosy mirror image of
01:28:53.800that same language and sentiment in this postpartum post was very eerie to me, especially
01:29:00.180knowing what she was actually feeling when she shared that picture.
01:29:06.560First and foremost, I noted that she said, you know, she tells her husband, he asks his
01:29:11.480mother and sister, they don't tell the midwife.
01:29:15.700Like, it sounds like she did eventually get the support she needed, which is great.
01:29:19.700But that is, again, like, I don't know, an unintentional or perhaps intentional slip towards conservative and traditional values. This idea of being like, I didn't want anyone to know, it felt like a stigma. And again, I have a lot of empathy for that because there is a huge stigma. So that's not unusual, but that is like a very traditional route of being like, keep it in the family, ask the other women, hopefully those women provided her with support. So that's great.
01:29:44.180But the other thing I wanted to say is it just makes me think of this inherent contradiction or catch-22 that we're dealing with right now with the influencer economy where I don't think anyone would say that she has an obligation to tell people in real time what she's going through.
01:30:06.020You know, maybe she did want to just post that.
01:30:07.720Maybe she was trying to feel that way and trying to, you know, like fake it till you make it.
01:30:11.100I think there are a lot of totally reasonable things.
01:30:13.020But at the same time, you are also continuing to perpetuate and propagandize a vision of motherhood, which is wholly unrealistic. And we have these two things taking place at once, where influencers are people, and therefore they are going to behave as people, as she did in this moment. And also, influencers are corporations.
01:30:31.020They are literally small corporations who are selling motherhood at an unprecedented pace and also their people. And so it's like it's really hard to begin to figure out what their responsibility is for being honest about their private experience of motherhood.
01:30:47.520I want to go back to something you said about how it sort of reinforces the conservative bona fides to be like, I don't want to share how hard this is. I actually think it's bigger than even conservatism. I think that is motherhood in this country.
01:31:03.260That is the institute, which is inherently conservative, but it's something that affects everybody. It's this idea of what is the quote-unquote good mother. The good mother is the one that does not talk about how hard it is, who wants to be seen as capable of caring for all of these people and holding it together and looking beautiful while she does it.
01:31:24.040And I think, frankly and quite sadly, we hear Nara Smith speak to that very feeling in this interview of not wanting to be perceived by the people around her as a bad mother, but struggling so much with this feeling of disconnection and derealization that she asked her husband, did I die? Am I here right now? That's horrifying.
01:31:43.340And there's this really interesting, almost conversational slipping happening between the institution and the experience here where the institution is impacting Smith's experience, it's impacting what she feels she's able to admit or ask for help about, but then she's using her experience to sort of reinforce the institution in that moment where you're posting the picture and suggesting that you're this heavenly figure.
01:32:09.280And then later, coming on this interview into her credit, talking openly about it, I think it's really powerful that she talked about it, and I'm really glad she did. I'm going to pivot now to something a little bit darker, so I will just say content warning. We're going to talk about postpartum psychosis and Lindsay Clancy a little bit. We're not going to get into details, so it won't be graphic, but if you're not in the headspace to think about postpartum psychosis right now, take care and skip ahead a little bit.
01:32:35.280But when I listened to the Nara Smith interview, I was struck by that portion in particular
01:32:40.340because it came out about a week into Lindsay Clancy's very public trial.
01:32:45.420Lindsay Clancy is a Massachusetts woman who is currently on trial for killing her three
01:32:50.420children while suffering from postpartum psychosis, and it is still unknown as of the time of
01:32:56.300this recording whether she will be held criminally liable for this.
01:33:00.220In the U.S., mothers who kill their children are almost always held criminally liable.
01:33:04.520When a parent kills their child, it's known as filicide.
01:33:09.420There are approximately 500 filicide arrests made per year in the United States.
01:33:15.000This is the highest rate among all high-income nations.0.94
01:33:19.900Lindsay Clancy was a labor and delivery nurse.1.00
01:33:23.100She repeatedly sought medical and psychiatric help postpartum.
01:33:27.460She had herself voluntarily committed a month before her children's deaths,
01:33:32.580and she was put on and taken off of a number of psychiatric medications.
01:33:38.040Postpartum psychosis is believed to affect around 1 in 1,000 postpartum mothers,
01:33:42.680but it, along with postpartum depression, anxiety,
01:33:46.540the symptoms that Smith was experiencing and talking about,
01:33:49.660these were not really interpreted as legitimate medical or biological phenomenon in this country
01:40:48.480These are the real communities that are being aestheticized and alluded to in a lot of this content.0.63
01:40:55.720It was so jarring to read about the prevalence of filicide and postpartum care in America and listen to the dark reality of women who describe escaping high-control religious indoctrination and what the roles for women really were in those communities, and then to turn around and watch a seven-minute highlight reel on a major news platform about how the Nealmans are proof of the American dream.0.67
01:46:50.040I want to close with a quote from a piece called Age, Race, Class, and Sex, Women Redefining
01:46:55.540Difference from Audre Lorde in 1984.0.69
01:47:00.380Hell yeah. We have not advanced since then.
01:47:03.760Yeah, it could have been written about the exact moment we are in.0.98
01:47:08.580Just been doing fucking donuts in the parking lot of injustice for the last 40 years.0.99
01:47:18.200Oh my gosh. Donuts in the parking lot of injustice. Put it on a bumper sticker.1.00
01:47:23.900Okay. Today, with the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment, the tightening economy, and increased conservatism,
01:47:29.780It is easier once again for white women to believe the dangerous fantasy that if you are good enough, pretty enough, sweet enough, quiet enough, teach the children to behave, hate the right people, and marry the right men, then you will be allowed to coexist with patriarchy and relative peace, at least until a man needs your job or the neighborhood rapist happens along.
01:47:50.740And true, unless one lives and loves in the trenches, it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless. Wow.