Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - How History Erased Mothers

00:00:00.000 hey y'all joe here and you are listening to under the influence quick reminder to start

00:00:10.080 getting those orders in for the book of the summer the parisian heist you all are going

00:00:15.300 to love this one so much it is a delicious twisty turny heist story set in paris i mean

00:00:22.800 it is going to make you want to go to paris so bad and one of my goals is to throw a retreat

00:00:28.400 for all of us in Paris. But to be able to do that, we've got to hit the bestseller list first.

00:00:33.940 And that means we've got to get everyone ordering this book, literally everyone we know. So shout

00:00:38.380 about it from the rooftops, order one for you, order one for a friend, let's get this done,

00:00:42.300 let's make this baby fly off the shelves, and then let's all go to Paris together.

00:00:46.440 Okay, now on to today's episode. I love this one so much. My guest today is Eleanor Cleghorn,

00:00:53.380 and she is a feminist cultural historian. And her new book is so, so good. It's called A Woman's

00:00:59.340 Work, Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering. And it is just a powerful and groundbreaking new

00:01:04.140 narrative about the history of what it means to be a mother and how so much of that history

00:01:09.360 has been written and then rewritten by men in order to take control and agency away from women. 0.99

00:01:16.040 Patriarchal control of motherhood has relegated the acts of growing, birthing, nurturing, 0.99

00:01:20.500 and loving to the sidelines and deemed it unimportant. But Eleanor does such incredible

00:01:26.780 research to elevate the voices of women themselves to retell the history of motherhood in a way that

00:01:32.400 actually showcases mothers and the women who have shaped the course of history.

00:01:37.400 The women who've mostly been forgotten. Here's my conversation with Eleanor.

00:01:42.020 okay so i just want to i want to jump right into this uh why do we need and why do we deserve

00:01:55.560 to reclaim the radical history of mothering right now i think that we are in this very

00:02:04.540 particular moment where we're seeing this scary resurgence of certain rhetoric around what mother

00:02:14.440 mothering should be around what good mothers are around what the right kind of mothering is for

00:02:20.260 society I think we're seeing this with you know the like rise of right-wing ideologies more

00:02:27.180 generally around family around you know who gets to be a mother and of course you're seeing it in

00:02:34.640 the US and we're it's really kind of rising over here in the UK as well and it's kind of my

00:02:39.940 contention that at these moments when we see this real kind of resurgence of these kind of narratives

00:02:46.580 around what mothering is what mothering should be that we can look to the history of motherhood

00:02:53.780 the history of attitudes towards motherhood, the history of mothering and how people have

00:02:58.760 mothered, to sort of hope for a future that moves beyond these more kind of reductive ideas about,

00:03:07.680 you know, what women should do with their bodies and lives, which I think is really kind of at the

00:03:12.820 heart of so many narratives to do with motherhood is, you know, this idea of what women should be

00:03:19.920 doing with their bodies and their lives. That's so true. And I want to read the first 1.00

00:03:26.620 paragraph of your wonderful book right now. It really hit me. I have this circled and double

00:03:34.500 underlined here. Mothers make history. Without mothers and people who mother, there would be 0.99

00:03:41.780 no history. But so much of what it has felt like to be a mother, to give oneself in body and mind

00:03:48.960 to tending, providing, protecting, and loving has been neglected in our stories of the past.

00:03:55.460 I mean, you really nailed it. Great opening, girl. Thank you so much. Thank you. I mean,

00:04:01.320 well, because you go on to say the work of mothering is taken for granted as something

00:04:04.880 women have always done and will always do. Is that true? Is that a true thread line

00:04:11.040 throughout history? I think that there's this idea that mothering, so that includes being

00:04:20.780 pregnant, giving birth, tending to and raising children, as well as I think like nurturing

00:04:26.780 families. I think that there has been this assumption throughout history that this is what

00:04:34.660 women's bodies are for and this is what women's primary social duty is and so to those ends it's

00:04:43.780 felt like the work of mothering the meanings of motherhood have not been the stuff of kind of

00:04:51.700 major histories you know like history traditionally has been written by men about

00:04:59.360 male interests right it's the wars it's the bloodshed it's the colonial projects rather

00:05:07.920 than the everyday lives of people and motherhood has been an organizing principle in women's lives

00:05:16.360 for centuries and as the primary kind of expectation I just feel like it's seen as

00:05:23.140 natural normal commonplace rather than the very stuff of how we build the world you know like the

00:05:30.660 very practices the kind of sustenance of life is what is done through motherhood through mothering

00:05:38.380 of many different forms but I just don't think it's been given the attention as being extraordinary

00:05:44.480 because it's so expected because we just take for granted that that's what women will do with

00:05:50.140 their bodies. They would keep on having the babies that are needed to create the populations that 1.00

00:05:55.140 will do the work. And you say that when this becomes expected, when it seems like it is

00:06:01.860 commonplace and not an exciting part of the story, part of the history, that it's much easier to 0.97

00:06:10.240 control women. And you write this, that it's not just exerted by denying women civil rights, 0.84

00:06:17.940 curtailing their freedoms and trapping them within the marital home. But it's achieved 0.97

00:06:23.340 through the denial that women's everyday experiences of maternity and mothering

00:06:28.220 were sources of knowledge and power. It completely strips the agency from it.

00:06:35.820 Completely. And I think that there has been, or what I sort of found as I was researching and

00:06:42.940 writing this book is that male-dominated systems of power, so governments, lawmakers, proponents

00:06:52.480 of culture, have throughout the centuries insisted that because women's primary purpose in the world

00:06:59.340 is to become pregnant, give birth and mother children, raise children, that by virtue of that 0.84

00:07:04.660 they're exempted from all other kinds of participation. So if women's primary purpose 1.00

00:07:10.720 is to be a mother then their primary place is outside of the world of kind of public engagement 0.97

00:07:16.900 public affairs society is to be kind of enclosed away in this designated space and 0.93

00:07:25.780 but what happens within that space which has been a reality for so many millions of women across 0.79

00:07:33.140 history you know the idea that there was a sort of inevitability about the fact that that's what

00:07:38.500 you would do with your body and your life what happens then in in the private sphere in the

00:07:44.880 domestic sphere in the sphere of home and family is not counted within the kind of public realm

00:07:52.640 of where thoughts made and culture is made and where decisions are made and where power exists

00:07:58.420 and i think so much of this has been enforced by not only insisting that like women's everyday

00:08:06.200 lives are unremarkable and not worth recording but that there is I don't know there is a certain

00:08:14.700 like privacy right that I think in the past like what really happened when women gave birth you

00:08:22.460 know the mess the blood the pain was something that was supposed to happen behind closed doors

00:08:28.180 there were narratives of shame attached to it for example and so much of kind of what happens in the

00:08:33.580 home is sort of not supposed to be talked about. So there are all these forces that are not just

00:08:38.960 diminishing the importance of mothering, but just diminishing the importance of women's place in

00:08:46.760 the world as well. Because so many men were the ones who were writing history and women were

00:08:54.280 really not the biographers of anyone's life, of their own life. How difficult was this research

00:09:02.720 to do? Because you go back to the history of mothering, to rewriting the history of mothering

00:09:08.200 into ancient times. We're in ancient Greece. And at one point, you find one of the very rare texts

00:09:15.920 from about the third century BCE that is attributed to a woman. How do I say her name?

00:09:22.720 Is it Periktione? Oh, yes. Yes, I think it is Periktione. Yes, the text about the harmony,

00:09:30.560 how you maintain marital harmony. Yes, yes. Please talk to me a little bit about that. And

00:09:35.960 then I do want to hear how difficult it is to rewrite a history that women have not been able

00:09:41.840 to write down or pass on for so long. So the text that you mentioned is, yeah, attributed to a woman

00:09:48.740 named Peritione, I think, and right around the third century BCE. And this woman was a follower

00:09:57.680 of pythagoras the philosopher pythagoras so very interested in harmony in all things harmony is

00:10:04.600 is that the is that the pythagorean theorem that we're that we're okay yes yes i have like not even

00:10:12.300 a basic knowledge of pythagoras but all i do know is that there's a kind of like a mathematical

00:10:17.360 geometric harmony at work there so this particular woman in this text is talking about how to achieve

00:10:26.620 harmony in one's domestic and marital life and this author is talking about how so it's kind of

00:10:34.700 almost like a letter to other women that in order to maintain marital harmony which is super

00:10:40.600 important for for society right that the marriage and family is harmonious and that harmony will 0.97

00:10:47.160 kind of seep out into society as a whole and she says that women have to be you know charming and

00:10:56.000 sort of well-mannered regardless of what their husband puts them through, right? They have to 0.98

00:11:04.140 love their children. They have to tend to their children's needs. So it's very much setting up

00:11:08.340 this idea that I think is still with us today, that women have to put all of their needs secondary. 0.77

00:11:17.500 They have to be very self-sacrificent for the home and by extension, their society. 0.58

00:11:23.040 And what was so fascinating to me about this text was that you could almost kind of, you see iterations of this kind of narrative throughout history, right? You see these other kind of almost like domestic handbooks, guidebooks written for mothers in around like the 19th century and the Victorian era, say, that took on a very similar idea that women are naturally self-sacrificial. 0.76

00:11:53.040 And that the well-being of their husband and their children is really contingent on them putting themselves second, existing primarily for the good of others rather than for their own lives, for their own agency, for their own choices.

00:12:10.020 And we're seeing these texts often written by other women as well. Why is it the women continually perpetuating this narrative?

00:12:20.840 I think that's a really interesting question. I think because motherhood or, you know, being in the home, being within the family, you know, having one's place within home and family was the reality of so many women's lives.

00:12:37.600 So if they did have the opportunity to write, it was often from their place of influence as a mother.

00:12:45.700 I think this is particularly true in the 19th century, in the kind of Victorian era, where we have this cultural emphasis on, you know, the angel in the home.

00:12:56.080 Like the woman is this angel.

00:12:58.140 She makes a beautiful home.

00:13:00.160 She's silent, serene, submissive.

00:13:03.840 She's not a human being, really.

00:13:06.040 She's this sort of idealised mother and wife. And around that time, we see these books appearing, almost like kind of self-help books, maybe, or guidebooks, reinforcing this idea that mothers must be unquestionably devoted to their families, their children, that they must be, you know, take every possible pleasure and fulfilment in their everyday acts of mothering, and that there's a kind of higher purpose and higher calling to that.

00:13:36.040 So I do think that there's a you know a simple answer is that that was often women's point of influence over the world is as mothers so that's how they kind of parlayed their everyday lives into maybe kind of more of like a public facing role and I think that's really interesting in terms of what we're seeing now you know in terms of how the mothering role is performed in social media online like how what is this

00:14:05.920 figure of the mother that we are presented with. And there's been versions of that throughout

00:14:11.380 history, which I just find fascinating. Well, yes. I mean, and I talk about a lot of how

00:14:19.140 motherhood is presented on social media, how we break it down into niches of different types of

00:14:27.980 mothers. And I truly believe that a lot of this performance of motherhood online, especially that

00:14:34.000 we've seen in the past couple of years is because women are desperate to be seen. Has that been the 0.63

00:14:39.700 case throughout a lot of history? I think, yeah, I agree with you too. I think there is wanting to

00:14:46.480 be seen is hugely important. And I think for women throughout history, wanting to be visible more

00:14:52.860 generally, wanting to be, wanting to contribute to the culture, wanting to matter, wanting to have a

00:14:59.920 voice heard i'm just thinking as well about some other examples for thinking about these poet this

00:15:06.220 poet called anne bradstreet who is a really famous poet in the us not so famous in the uk but she was

00:15:12.540 one of the like earliest poets who and she moved from england in like the first kind of wave

00:15:20.880 of colonial sort of movement from from britain to the u to what is now the united states so she was

00:15:29.600 really part of that early colonial project in the 17th century but she was writing poetry about her

00:15:35.340 experiences that of motherhood she wrote about lots of other subjects as well but she wrote some

00:15:40.500 really intimate poems about being a mother about her anxieties around getting pregnant about like

00:15:47.120 the struggles between her you know her very protestant faith and having babies in this kind

00:15:54.520 of new society that was being forged at the time and I think and a lot of these more intimate poems

00:16:01.700 she kind of hid and they were found after she died but I think there's also yeah to be seen to

00:16:07.940 have wider society wider culture kind of bear witness to what it means to be a mother right

00:16:13.880 and I think that is something that has been definitely present as an impulse in other

00:16:19.640 what should we even call it, other forms of maternal influencing over the centuries.

00:16:25.500 Other forms of maternal influencing. I love that. I love it that we've been trying,

00:16:30.400 we've been desperately trying to influence culture for so long and yet and yet and yet.

00:16:35.260 Yes, absolutely true. I think even, I mean, you asked earlier about how

00:16:40.960 I kind of went about researching a history of motherhood when so many women across the

00:16:48.120 centuries have not had the ability or the access to be able to record the details of their own

00:16:53.860 lines. Literacy was not something accessible to the majority of women in the past. And this means,

00:17:03.460 of course, that often you're having to tell the story of motherhood by looking at sources

00:17:08.020 about mothers rather than by mothers. And even if we go right back, so the book begins in the

00:17:15.000 9th century BCE. And it begins with this little votive clay boat that contains in it a tiny model

00:17:24.200 that resembles a human foetus. And it was thought to have been dedicated at a cave

00:17:29.620 where a shrine to an ancient goddess of childbirth was honoured. Now, this little tiny

00:17:36.680 handmade ship is an extraordinarily beautiful object. And, you know, we don't know a lot about

00:17:42.480 it. There are no indications anymore about who actually made it, what her circumstances might

00:17:48.320 have been. But what we can kind of surmise is that this person was doing a ritual in order to protect

00:17:54.780 themselves or their baby during pregnancy, birth or in the early days of life. So they were doing

00:18:02.220 a version of what we might do today if we're preparing for birth, thinking intentionally

00:18:08.000 about how we might want that birth to go doing you know practices that make us feel prepared

00:18:14.480 so this person who's making this little boat's doing a version of that but what she's also doing

00:18:19.880 is inscribing herself into history right creating a material object that says i am here i exist this

00:18:26.620 is my experience and this is the way that i'm expressing it which i just found completely

00:18:31.620 fascinating you know this sort of insistence that i'm here which i think also is a way of

00:18:37.160 being seen. It's like, I'm going to inscribe myself into a culture that doesn't want to

00:18:43.340 pay attention to my experiences. I want to take a quick break here. And when we get back,

00:18:48.760 I want to talk about two histories that are intertwined, and yet both also dismissed,

00:18:55.380 that of the mother and that of the person caring for the mother, the midwife.

00:19:07.160 Okay, we're back. You focus a lot in the book on midwives. I mean, it is a subject that I am

00:19:13.660 particularly interested in. There's a lot of family lore in my family that my great-great-grandmother

00:19:21.180 Lorenza was a midwife in Sicily, and it was a plot point in my novel, The Sicilian Inheritance.

00:19:27.980 And yet midwives are also often dismissed in history, right?

00:19:31.960 They are. And that's a fascinating family history to have. And I think that the maternal practice, maternal work of midwifery is such a fascinating way to read women's history because we know that women have been with other women when they've given birth for centuries.

00:19:52.860 And going back just quickly to these little votive objects I was talking about earlier, some of those that were found in the cave were representations of like very kind of, you know, simple handmade objects, but representations of a birthing woman with like her caregiver behind her.

00:20:10.660 so her midwife sort of holding her body and midwifery has been really maligned really

00:20:19.480 misunderstood really mystified throughout history I think because it is a practice that is so

00:20:25.820 proximate to women and their bodies and has existed for many centuries in a very kind of

00:20:31.320 defined space, women-only space. So what you see throughout history is a lot of anxiety

00:20:40.840 from men primarily, so from male doctors, male authors, lawmakers of all sorts of strikes,

00:20:49.580 who are expressing anxiety about midwives' practices, about what they might be doing.

00:20:54.940 I think because there's a proximity not just to like the secrets of women's bodies as kind of shameful thing of birth and pregnancy, but also because midwives were very close to women and children, the kind of missions of men.

00:21:11.860 So it meant that all these fears and fictions could be projected onto midwives and onto midwives work.

00:21:17.860 and we see this throughout history we see it in you know the fourth fifth centuries BCE in

00:21:25.840 classical Greece when which is the sort of beginnings of western medicine and we get the

00:21:32.200 first kind of medical discourse about women's bodies we see in the wider culture that there's

00:21:37.380 these suspicions being stoked about midwives for example like plays and poems depicting midwives

00:21:44.720 It's like child eating witches. And of course, these sort of allusions really stuck to midwives as we move through the centuries towards things like the witch trials that happened in the early modern period across Europe.

00:22:00.420 Some midwives were targeted. And the work has often been maligned and I think continues to this day to have a sort of thorny reputation in terms of what midwifery is and what midwifery means.

00:22:21.540 Over here in the UK, we usually have midwife-led births within hospitals, and there's a current crisis in midwives' working conditions, in their pay.

00:22:34.040 So again, it's a devalued medical specialism, and I think part of why it's devalued in that way is because it's seen almost along the same lines as mothering, right? 0.83

00:22:46.740 Mothers shouldn't need external resources, that's what patriarchy teaches us. 0.57

00:22:50.820 mothers have all the love all the devotion all the care written into their bodies and similarly

00:22:57.760 because midwifery is i think a maternal practice it's not taken seriously or treated respectfully

00:23:04.860 as a you know medical specialism a lot of the book i do look at midwifery because that's

00:23:12.260 thankfully where we have where we have evidence you know there's a especially in the earlier

00:23:18.400 centuries there is a smaller amount of evidence or source material by women themselves about their

00:23:24.020 experiences of mothering so we can sort of reflect and refract through midwifery knowledge which

00:23:31.060 thankfully has been fairly well documented and from that we can draw ourselves these pictures

00:23:37.600 of what at least the experiences of pregnancy birth and early motherhood might have been like

00:23:44.620 for women in terms of the way they were cared for and treated by the women who were with them

00:23:48.960 because of course midwifery as you will know me literally translates as with women like midwife

00:23:54.740 the word midwife means with women so already there's community there's care there's like a

00:24:02.380 collaborative coming together is written into that word what were some of the earliest birth rituals

00:24:09.300 that you discovered I loved some of them in here and and the descriptions of them um you know

00:24:16.100 things like placing the right foot of a hyena upon a woman's thigh to ease the delivery and what

00:24:23.160 what were some of the things that you came across there are some amazing things some wonderful

00:24:28.440 things like that one that is also like a getting a bed of mallow leaves and having a woman lie on

00:24:35.900 that to kind of speed up delivery what's fascinating is that the way that these rituals

00:24:41.120 are shaped by the sort of predominant belief systems at the time so in ancient greece and

00:24:48.020 imperial rome where people um worshipped all these different gods right the polytheistic society and

00:24:56.700 they had all different gods and goddesses representing every aspect of of human life

00:25:02.000 And there were all sorts of gods and goddesses that were honoured during pregnancy and birth.

00:25:06.460 So there was like practices of votive dedication, I spoke about earlier, to goddesses that were thought to come and protect women and their infants during labour, during delivery especially.

00:25:20.840 But there were also all these other kind of practices that were rooted in different beliefs about the powers of animal substances, earthly elements.

00:25:30.920 so women would hold amulets of different kind of maids of different kind of stone that were

00:25:36.640 believed to have protective properties um there are also some really great ones a couple of ones

00:25:41.740 that men can do there was this thing about how if a man really really wanted to have a son of course

00:25:47.720 sons in the ancient times were very you know were very sought after he could um try tying up his 0.55

00:25:55.180 right testicle tightly with string because it was believed that like male children would be

00:26:01.780 cut from like the left testicle or something so there are things like that that were quite funny 0.79

00:26:06.280 that men had kind of kind of participating but usually it was women who were doing these rituals

00:26:11.920 one of the ones that I really love is the undoing of all the knots and this happened in ancient

00:26:17.180 Greece and it also happened in ancient Rome and imperial Rome because knots in clothing on sandals

00:26:24.580 were believed to kind of fetter the womb.

00:26:27.240 I mean, I could read these all day.

00:26:29.880 I really could. 0.99

00:26:30.860 In the part where you talk about rubbing a woman's body

00:26:33.420 with the ash of burned hedgehogs,

00:26:36.200 or to increase the chances of bearing a son, 0.93

00:26:39.380 try eating a cockerel's testicle or a hare's uterus,

00:26:44.700 or for birth pains, the powdered dung of a wild boar, 1.00

00:26:50.060 and then a dried ass's spleen to aid lactation. 0.99

00:26:54.380 And I'm just like, I'm all, you know what? 0.99

00:26:56.640 Fair for all of us.

00:26:58.060 Yes, all of it, all of it and more.

00:27:00.040 I think there's also one about the softened fat of a wolf.

00:27:04.360 Yes, yes, there was, indeed.

00:27:07.080 But it was, so it's just, and there are...

00:27:10.040 Also a red-coated weasel at some point.

00:27:13.080 A red-coated weasel, yes, of course.

00:27:15.780 What's so fascinating is all the kind of lore around these animals.

00:27:19.900 So we've got, what have we got?

00:27:21.440 Hedgehogs, wild boar, we've got a red weasel.

00:27:24.380 which had like an association with mythology to do with birth.

00:27:29.560 Like you would see the red weasel appeared in different kind of mythological birth stories

00:27:34.700 and also in paintings during the early modern period. 0.91

00:27:37.420 Often like women would have a little redhead weasel. 0.91

00:27:40.460 So this is quite an interesting animal. 0.93

00:27:42.520 But, you know, this lore, what really fascinates me about all of this,

00:27:48.620 all of these rituals all of these practices is that they all originated from women trying

00:27:57.440 in any way they could to protect themselves and their infants to kind of intervene

00:28:03.860 within this sort of inevitability of danger and risk giving birth being pregnant having babies

00:28:11.040 the early days of life these were all precarious especially during the antiquity

00:28:15.980 so coming up with where you've got so you've got no sonograms you have no medicine you have no way

00:28:22.060 of really knowing what's going on inside the womb during a pregnancy so putting one's faith into

00:28:27.020 these spells essentially like medical spells and the sense of belief that's vested in that

00:28:34.440 is fascinating to me yeah it's fascinating to me too and also just a desire for control

00:28:41.640 over something that's uncontrollable is something that resonates so much with me today when it comes

00:28:50.260 to childbirth. I mean, how desperately we're constantly researching. And obviously, medical

00:28:55.020 care is still much better, though in the United States, it's still not great. But how we're just

00:29:01.140 constantly trying to do the right thing to keep ourselves and our babies alive because so much of

00:29:07.680 this is out of our control yes it is out of our control I remember when I was pregnant with my

00:29:13.160 first son um really like focusing in on things like what music will I have in the room with me

00:29:21.800 you know what will I like will I bring a little lamp with me like these tiny kind of controllable

00:29:28.540 factors and it was exactly that it's exactly what you said it was this desire to have at least some

00:29:35.600 degree of certainty and I don't know if you do this in the in the US but in the UK you do you

00:29:42.660 write a kind of birth plan it's supposed to be where you can articulate like what you like what

00:29:50.340 kind of interventions you're happy with the pain relief those kinds of things and often the birth

00:29:57.080 plan is just out the window because your health care providers are responding to what's happening

00:30:03.520 at the time and doing the best for you and your baby you hope um but the idea of like what music

00:30:11.000 it became this almost like magical thinking with me like oh will everything go well if i have like

00:30:17.120 i don't know a recording of elvis presley's last concert of madison square guns like some really

00:30:23.160 kind of crazy music like i don't know it became this kind of not really an obsession but almost

00:30:28.940 like a spell like almost like a medical thinking practice somehow yeah I mean almost like covering 0.69

00:30:34.900 your body with the dung of a red-headed weasel like if I choose Stevie Wonder versus Bach 1.00

00:30:42.100 will will I be able to protect myself and my child through this very harrowing ordeal yeah 1.00

00:30:48.500 that's so true it is that and it even you know even though I wasn't um you know rummaging around

00:30:56.680 in the hedgerows looking for hedgehogs um I think I felt a similar thing like while I was pregnant

00:31:03.420 like if I do certain things if I do kind of magical thinking I can keep us both safe and

00:31:11.920 I don't know that's really interesting because it's not something that I've

00:31:15.660 talked much about either before now about the sort of thought exercises that you do

00:31:23.280 or the little practices, like the tiny little modern rituals that we might do

00:31:27.280 to just regain some control.

00:31:30.300 I want to take one more quick break.

00:31:31.860 And when we get back, I want to talk about how Christianity changed the view of motherhood,

00:31:39.400 but what it didn't change about motherhood as well.

00:31:43.100 I mean, especially bringing in a figure like the Virgin Mary.

00:31:48.040 What did that do to the idea of motherhood?

00:31:53.280 Okay, we are back. Like I said, I could have read the Greek and Roman sections of this book

00:32:05.880 forever and ever. We're big fans of the podcast Greek-ing out in our house. I don't know how old

00:32:11.520 your kids are, but we've listened to every episode of them. But, you know, clearly the view of the

00:32:20.200 mother shifted a little bit with Christianity. What ended up happening around then?

00:32:28.600 So with the beginnings of Christianity came a new set of expectations and ideologies around

00:32:36.820 motherhood, and especially with the rise of the reverence for the Virgin Mary. And as the

00:32:46.000 reverence for the Virgin Mary sort of rose during the medieval, during the sort of early medieval

00:32:51.960 period. Because a woman was now the emblem, let's say, of the church, Christian church's kind of

00:33:04.200 highest possible values. So Mary personified serenity, she personified devotion, she personified

00:33:12.160 the purity of maternal love and these qualities are kind of adopted by the church but what so

00:33:18.960 on the one hand maternity mothering is elevated right to this kind of sacred status but what's

00:33:27.280 really really important about the influence that the story of the virgin mary had over actual

00:33:33.260 mothers is that mary was the exception not the rule no human mortal woman could birth an infant

00:33:43.980 without sex without the blood of birth without the labor of her body you know mary was kind of

00:33:53.220 overcome by was like impregnated by god essentially you know she didn't give birth

00:33:59.080 in the way that mortal women did she was kind of overshadowed by god's like power or something

00:34:04.960 so she was a vessel she represented this like what i call in the book a kind of patriarchal

00:34:11.660 fantasy of a mother which is somebody who can birth a baby that belongs entirely to a man

00:34:19.640 and that is brought into the world with none of her effort none of her self none of her kind of

00:34:26.820 agency but I think that the figure of the Virgin Mary as an ideal for motherhood as an let's face

00:34:35.160 it completely unattainable ideal for motherhood has been completely it's evasive in kind of

00:34:42.020 constructing this myth of what a good mother is like both within Christianity and beyond

00:34:46.800 Christianity just in our wider culture because she is the very model of what

00:34:52.920 a patriarchal society wants a mother to be and that is completely self-sacrificial completely 1.00

00:35:00.920 serene and humble and completely set back from herself serving as a vessel for a sort of man's

00:35:09.000 glory so that's that's kind of how I read it in in the book and I know that you know Mary's

00:35:16.560 virginity and Mary's status is incredibly meaningful and important for people who

00:35:21.000 worship her. But in terms of what I was interested in was how this figure of the Virgin Mary has

00:35:28.720 created this kind of deified, sacralized, impossibly unattainable ideal of maternal

00:35:36.500 perfection that human women are kind of having to chase but can never attain. And that's what 0.99

00:35:43.560 I was interested in. Well, yeah, and that's what I'm interested in, too. I've always been

00:35:50.860 fascinated by what the mythology surrounding Mary has done to the rest of women, particularly

00:35:59.460 because we do know, I mean, when we're thinking about the history of this, that so much of

00:36:06.860 of Christian belief about Mary was constructed by male writers. There's very little in the

00:36:15.640 existing record written by women. And so for me, it's always seemed kind of like a trick of the 0.99

00:36:22.600 light, right? It's that, oh, no, but we're elevating this woman. And yet, as you said,

00:36:29.360 we're really elevating a vessel for the growth of a heroic man and making that vessel so

00:36:36.680 pure that if any mother steps out of that halo of purity, then she should feel tremendous guilt

00:36:45.480 and shame. Yes, absolutely. A trick of the light is the perfect way to describe it because it is

00:36:52.860 a trick and it's also a trap. There was no way. The odds were stacked against every woman from

00:37:02.220 the beginning of the construction of the myth of Mary's pregnancy and birth there was there is no

00:37:09.840 this I think this is very intentional within the construction of of of the story of the Virgin Mary

00:37:16.160 is that she is completely set apart from all other women so that she can so that her her you know 0.97

00:37:24.500 perfection can never be achieved therefore it does as you say trap ordinary women into a cycle 0.98

00:37:32.940 of shame guilt and blame like that's the sort of place where women have to dwell because they can 0.52

00:37:38.580 never reach this state of perfect motherhood and i feel like there's a lot to answer for in the

00:37:46.940 construction of the virgin mary story in terms of how we think even today about what a perfect

00:37:52.820 mother is this myth of the perfect mother right exactly exactly and i mean look i'm not going to

00:37:58.500 go so far as to call call mary the og trad wife because i'll get a lot of shit for that but i will

00:38:04.880 say that i think we are seeing the same thing today with the elevation of these idealized 0.95

00:38:12.660 very filtered vessels of motherhood online which you know regular normal real women will never

00:38:21.720 attain and so we are meant to feel guilt and shame and then to feel off-kiltered so that then

00:38:28.640 you know these people and you know various companies as well can sell us something and

00:38:35.020 also try to force us back into the role of strictly being a mother strictly being the

00:38:42.560 care of the household and keep us much quieter in society. I think that is completely true and

00:38:50.060 it's it's actually really interesting and really really cool to think about mary as the original

00:38:56.480 child wife um because what she really is is a kind of cipher as you say a vessel like a non

00:39:03.820 this isn't a representation of any form of motherhood that can be truly related to you 0.91

00:39:12.320 it must be chased it must be idealized it must be kind of deified and put on a pedestal and that's

00:39:18.520 exactly what we see in these kind of hyper-realized, impossible, impossible performances or

00:39:26.940 projections of motherhood online. And also the ideas about how women should become mothers as

00:39:36.760 well. I mean, I've just, the idea of the virgin birth has sat with me ever since I learned about

00:39:44.160 it in Sunday school as a child as just one of the more ridiculous myths that I'd ever heard.

00:39:53.380 And I'm saying this as someone who went on to get a master's in religious studies. And I know that

00:40:00.520 this belief truly means a lot to so many people around the world. But stripping the way that Mary

00:40:10.460 became a mother and giving all that agency to God and then also really glossing over the entire

00:40:19.800 birth process in the manger and then, you know, moving the focus on to folks like the wise men

00:40:26.940 and then straight on to the baby Jesus and taking Mary so much out of the story has done a huge 0.94

00:40:33.680 disservice to women. It truly has. It's done, I mean, it is baffling, isn't it, when you really

00:40:40.220 think about the the this i this idea this very concept of a virgin birth i mean i played in the

00:40:49.200 nativity play at my primary school when i was maybe like five or six i was the i had the honor of

00:40:56.520 playing mary and this was like an honor a real honor and i remember being cast as mary and having

00:41:02.920 like the baby doll like the plastic baby dolls do you know like a cabbage patch doll of course

00:41:07.680 yes absolutely yeah yeah and having to like gaze adoringly at this like like plastic baby while you

00:41:16.040 know a kid from my class was pretending to be my carpenter husband and when i think about it now

00:41:22.920 it's hilarious but it's also like deeply deeply unsettling that because you know the reason that

00:41:29.040 a six-year-old could play like a woman who's just given birth is because she didn't really give birth

00:41:33.840 and she didn't really become pregnant at least not by the channels that we expect a human woman

00:41:40.680 to become pregnant and give birth by but yeah i mean the what was what's also really interesting

00:41:47.180 is that there is a almost a precedent within culture for the way that the story of the virgin

00:41:52.360 birth was constructed because you know they didn't necessarily know everything about the

00:41:58.480 physiology of reproduction the biology of of pregnancy and birth in you know the antiquity

00:42:04.820 in the early middle ages and there were beliefs circulating that a child so an embryo was formed

00:42:12.480 from the husband from the father sorry a sperm right so a woman is essentially a vessel she's 0.65

00:42:21.120 like an incubator whereas the male sperm provides like the force of life it provides the form of

00:42:27.640 the embryo so this was really popular belief for centuries and so when you know that you think okay

00:42:36.560 although the virgin birth is still kind of a stupendous idea um there is a little bit of

00:42:45.460 logic to at least for the people who constructed that myth the men who constructed that myth

00:42:49.980 Because they really were sort of embellishing quite a basic accepted idea that men, fathers, were the primary creators of their own children.

00:43:01.920 Women, with the labour of incubating and birthing, but it was men that were really responsible for the production of their own children.

00:43:09.760 And that's really rooted in, I think, a lot of anxieties that men had in the past around whether their children were really their own, because there are expectations around inheritance and patrilineal, you know, passing on of lands and fortunes.

00:43:27.300 So it comes from these kind of anxieties and fears about men's own children.

00:43:33.460 So it's really interesting to kind of take apart the Virgin Mary myth, like, away from the context of the Bible and think, aha, how did this make sense to anyone at the time?

00:43:45.140 It's so interesting how many stories, how many histories and mythologies arise simply from male anxieties.

00:43:52.360 100 i often think this about the like some of our canonical kind of great myths as well

00:44:00.100 when we see like you know what happens when women are left on their own what happens when women like

00:44:06.000 become you know very sexual what happens when women have power and they claim power and amounts 0.92

00:44:12.120 like there's always a cautionary tale there's always a punishment um and it's because i think 1.00

00:44:18.100 men working out their fears about women. So they have to, again and again, tell the story of how

00:44:24.440 women are diminished, how women are degraded when they try and have these independent existences. 1.00

00:44:31.780 And yeah, completely agree. Well, and I think that takes us into the next part of your book 1.00

00:44:38.180 that I really want to talk about in terms of male anxieties, which are the witch trials and burning

00:44:44.540 women for being witches, because so many of the women who were categorized as witches were women

00:44:51.300 who were not mothers, women whose pregnancies had failed, women who chose not to be mothers.

00:44:59.820 This seems to me yet another way of men exerting control over the women who did not want to be

00:45:07.980 put in the boxes that made it easier for them to survive.

00:45:13.380 Absolutely. I think because motherhood or mothering children, not just having children,

00:45:18.760 but having children within the context of a marriage and a marital family was the norm or

00:45:26.240 the kind of ideal situation. Women who stepped out of those confines, who either mothered outside of 0.82

00:45:33.040 their confines were completely exempted from those confines so either were not having children 1.00

00:45:39.860 were older and past so-called reproductive age became the target because it's like a witch is

00:45:46.840 kind of the anti-mother like there's the good christian mother on the one end of the spectrum

00:45:52.240 and on the other is this figure of the witch it's like an aberration of good christian maternal

00:45:58.220 values this sort of projection screen on which you know men this kind of repository for men's

00:46:06.520 anxieties about what happens when women are independent when women defy social norms when

00:46:11.600 women are not using their bodies to kind of fulfill or serve a patriarchal project um 0.96

00:46:17.640 so and it goes back as well I think lots of intertwining with the figure of the like it's

00:46:23.600 no coincidence that the figure of the midwife in the past in roman and greek mythology was often

00:46:31.140 presented as a witch-like figure because it's like any you know any she was seen as a kind of

00:46:39.820 possible disruptor of these maternal values like somebody who had the the capability and the

00:46:46.960 resources to say enable women to take their reproductive health into their own hands or to

00:46:53.180 decide what their reproductive destiny might be. So because midwives had the capacity to like 1.00

00:46:59.600 potentially disrupt male ideals around reproduction, then they were cast as witch-like 1.00

00:47:06.940 figures or demonized as potentially witchy. And then you see that sort of ideology repeated later

00:47:13.720 in the early modern period during the witch trials in Europe. And yet through all of it,

00:47:19.880 there have been women who have tried to buck against these systems, who have tried to rewrite 1.00

00:47:27.520 the history of mothering. I want to talk just briefly about one of those. I mean,

00:47:33.820 who are some of these women who have really fought back and who have said, no, I want my story told

00:47:39.680 the way that I have actually lived it? As we talked about earlier, writing the history of

00:47:46.680 motherhood through women's voices and experiences poses a difficulty because of the lack of like

00:47:54.280 surviving evidence that we have told by women themselves documented by women themselves but

00:48:01.320 as the centuries wear on and women's literacy increases more women are able to inscribe

00:48:10.160 themselves into their own histories write about their own experiences and as well as like some

00:48:15.840 the poets that I talked about earlier, like Anne Bradstreet, as we move forward towards the 19th

00:48:22.760 century, when women are really beginning to question the situation of their very gendered

00:48:28.700 lives, right, the limits placed upon them by a male-dominated society, that's when you really

00:48:34.960 see more women coming forward and sort of putting their experience as mothers at the centre of how

00:48:42.980 they want to make change in the world and amongst the women that I write about in the book one

00:48:49.920 who I'm sure is familiar to lots of your listeners is Sojourner Truth who was born into slavery and

00:48:59.240 escaped from slavery in 1826 from her slave owner's home in upstate New York and she escaped

00:49:09.380 with her infant daughter, Sophia, on her arm.

00:49:14.000 And Sojourner Truth wrote one of the earliest slave narratives,

00:49:18.600 what were called slave narratives,

00:49:20.000 and formerly enslaved people's accounts of what it was like to be enslaved

00:49:24.360 so that they could bring awareness to the public.

00:49:27.380 So she wrote one of these, and it's an extraordinary work.

00:49:31.460 And it describes her experiences while enslaved,

00:49:35.500 but it also really centres her identity as a mother,

00:49:40.280 an identity that was denied to her under the system of charter slavery.

00:49:45.580 She, I think she had about five children while enslaved, 1.00

00:49:49.260 and of course she had no right to call those children her own.

00:49:53.480 So by escaping with her daughter, with her infant daughter,

00:49:58.400 she was really, she was not just claiming freedom for her and Sophia,

00:50:02.400 she was also asserting her irrefutable and inviolable human right to love her child to be

00:50:09.720 a mother to her child and I think to write not just to write about this but but to testify

00:50:16.360 to her right to be a mother at a time in history when enslaved women were completely denied this

00:50:23.880 right and often horrible kind of scientific racism claiming that enslaved women didn't

00:50:31.020 even have the capacity to love their children so to really buck against a system that's so cruel

00:50:37.100 and so ingrained and so powerful and not just to tell her story being enslaved but to center her

00:50:43.440 right to be a mother is extraordinary and I am I'm in awe of it I don't even know kind of how

00:50:52.300 such strength and resilience and fortitude and power that she was able to center within her

00:51:01.560 really important work in early civil rights and early women's equality activism as well.

00:51:07.560 Yeah, it's remarkable. And I think it's such a great reminder, and that's what I want to end on,

00:51:12.960 that we have power, especially today, now more than ever, when we can use our voices,

00:51:19.820 when we have many more means of sharing our stories of motherhood, that it's so important

00:51:27.660 to not gloss over this, to not strip away the labor of what we do and the power of what we do,

00:51:35.640 to truly speak up and share our real experiences and not the very small mythologies and ideas

00:51:46.280 that men want to promote about motherhood.

00:51:48.640 Yeah, I absolutely agree. And I think in this era, this moment as well in our culture in which we're again being presented or bombarded with images of a kind of unattainable mothering experience, that to be able to tell stories that can resonate with others, that can build community.

00:52:11.940 I kind of hate the word authentic, but you know, that are maybe honest, that are honest about

00:52:17.020 the emotional, the emotions, the physicality, if you have the, you know, preparedness to share

00:52:24.260 your story in that way, I think it's an incredibly powerful thing to do. And it helps build community

00:52:30.120 and connection for other mothers as well. And it's, you know, incredibly powerful to speak up

00:52:37.000 about our bodies you know our bodies our experiences of reproduction our experiences

00:52:42.960 of mothering like it's an incredible incredibly powerful and resistant thing to do today well

00:52:49.200 thank you thank you for leading part of this resistance today i appreciate you in this book

00:52:54.080 so so much uh will you tell everyone where they can find you and more of your work

00:53:00.440 of course and thank you so much um my name's Eleanor Clegghorn and I am usually on Instagram

00:53:07.620 and I am at Eleanor Clegghorn so come over and say hi thank you so much for being here Eleanor

00:53:13.300 thank you so much for having me it's been a total joy

00:53:30.440 We'll see you next time.

00:54:00.440 You

Under the Influence (with Jo Piazza) - February 26, 2026

How History Erased Mothers

Episode Stats

Transcript