How Mothering Becomes a Radical Act with Elinor Cleghorn

Motherhood is often talked about as something instinctive, natural, or inevitable. But what if the stories we've inherited about mothering tell only part of the story?

In this episode of A Thought I Kept, I sit down with feminist cultural historian and bestselling author Elinor Cleghorn to explore the hidden history of motherhood and the women whose experiences have so often been left out of the historical record. Together, we talk about caregiving, identity, freedom, resilience, and what happens when we begin to see mothering not as a private experience, but as a force that has shaped history itself.

Elinor's thought kept is a beautiful one. What begins as a reflection on writing, research, and creativity soon opens into a much wider conversation about motherhood, care, legacy, and the unseen labour that shapes both our lives and the lives of those around us. 

Dr Elinor Cleghorn is a feminist cultural historian and the bestselling author of Unwell Women. Her latest book, A Woman's Work: The Radical History of Mothering, traces the history of motherhood across centuries, revealing the women, stories, and acts of care that have helped shape the world we live in today.

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SPEAKER_01 0:03

Hi and welcome to A Thought I Kept, a podcast about the ideas that stay. I'm Claire Fitzsimmons, writer, coach, and co-founder, and now co-author of If Lost, Start Here. Each week I sit down with someone and together we explore an idea that has lingered in their lives. That has really shifted something for them and helped make sense of life in a new way. I am so excited to introduce today's guest to you. Because I am talking to Dr. Eleanor Cleghhorn. Eleanor is a feminist cultural historian and she is the author of the best-selling book, Unwell Women. Eleanor is joining me to talk about her remarkable new book, A Woman's Work, Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering. It's truly an extraordinary achievement. In it, Eleanor traces a feminist history of motherhood across centuries, exploring not only what mothering has looked like in different times and places, but how the stories we've inherited about motherhood have shaped our lives as women, our bodies, our freedoms, and our identities. I wanted to talk to Eleanor because, in a way, the very idea of motherhood is itself a thought kept. Stay with me here. Because motherhood is not simply an experience, it is a collection of beliefs and expectations, myths and fears, rituals and instructions, and so many assumptions that have been passed down through history. Some of those ideas have offered care and connection. Many of them have constrained women, diminished mothers' experiences, and reduced complex human beings to ideals that they, really we, could never fully inhabit. In this really rich conversation, we talk about motherhood as an institution as much as an experience. Why mothers have so often been pushed to the margins of history. The women who did preserve maternal knowledge against so many obstacles, and what history can teach us about creating better conditions for mothers today. Eleanor's Thought Cat weaves through so much of this, and I do hope it will stay with you. It's such an infirming thought that offers so much freedom and hope, and I think compassion too. So here's my conversation with Dr. Elena Claire Korn. I hope you'll enjoy it. Hi, Eleanor. Welcome to the podcast.

SPEAKER_00 2:56

Hi, Claire, thank you so much for having me.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

It's really wonderful to have you here, and I have been so excited about talking to you. I have devoured your books and I have spent a long, long time pouring over the details of your most recent book, A Woman's Work. I know that we'll get into that. I know we'll talk at length about that book. But first of all, I just wanted just to ask how you're doing and how you've been promoting this book over the last few weeks.

SPEAKER_00 3:26

Thank you so much for reading a woman's work. That means a lot to you. Uh my favorite thing is to hear from readers, and a lot of the promotion that I've been able to do this time around with this book has been in-person. My first book, Unwell Women, came up during Downs in 2021. So in-person events were a real rarity. So having been able to do a bookshop tour and to do events this time and to talk to audiences and to have conversations in the room with people who are mothers themselves or who've been mothered who are interested in caregiving responsibilities more broadly, is just so wonderful. So it's been such a joy to just yeah, to get out there and connect and to see the book resonating with people. It's meant such a lot.

SPEAKER_01 4:24

That's such a different experience, isn't it? And you get this sort of immediacy to it, and it's such a it's such a resonant and personal subject that people can really bring probably a lot of themselves to it as well and how they interact with your work in this book.

SPEAKER_00 4:41

I think so, because I think even if we've, you know, chosen not to be biological parents or we haven't wanted to do that, caregiving, mothering, caregiving more broadly is something that touches all of our lives. I think we all have a relationship to that mothering in that sort of broader sense of care and community and how we look after each other. So it's really fascinating to me always to see what comes up in discussions from a book that's ostensibly about history. But my I think my ambition in my work is always to make something that has real resonance in the present with how women especially are living and feeling and existing in their bodies and in their lives. I think that's my particular interest when it comes to doing history, is that I like to show you nowhere, how we've got to where we're at, especially in a political and social sense, but also just so that we can reimagine our lives, our everyday lives, as having a history as being valuable in a historical sense, when so often history or history with a big H traditionally has been seen as this telling of past victories and wars and battles and monarchs and things that are often coded very male, whereas the stuff of everyday lives in Unwell Women that was living with illness, or in this book, mothering, childbearing has not traditionally been the stuff of history. So for me, it's really interesting to open up our everyday experiences to this kind of long arc of history and see how important our lives have been in making the world over those centuries.

SPEAKER_01 6:37

Yeah, and and I want to follow up on some of those threads, and I know we'll come back to them later. I'm curious. So each week on the podcast, I ask somebody about the thought that they're bringing, and I'm curious about the thought that you're bringing and how and if or if it doesn't connect with your work. What is the thought that you've kept, Eleanor?

SPEAKER_00 6:55

So the thought that I have kept is no work is ever wasted.

SPEAKER_01 7:01

Okay. No work is ever wasted. When did that thought come to you?

SPEAKER_00 7:08

This thought was given to me, transmitted to me during my PhD study. So I was doing my PhD in writing up my PhD around 2010, and I had two small children. I had a month-old child, and I had a child coming up to three. And I was very determined to continue on this trajectory of my PhD, which had been, which had really begun with the unexpected first pregnancy with my eldest son. And so I was navigating early motherhood and everything that brings, and this period of very intense study. And I had a wonderful supervisor for my thesis, a woman artist who works with sound. And she was also the mother of a young daughter, around the same age as my oldest son at the time. And we would often talk about how academia, traditional academia, at that time still very dominated by male writing, male voices, male teachers, had a hostility to not necessarily to women, but to mothering and to choosing to do the work of mothering rather than to concentrate on this very focused, very studious, the old kind of the pram in the hallway adage that having a child for a woman could only ever would was only ever going to be a distraction and an interruption and a kind of dilution of what it meant to really think anything. So my first year of my PhD was spent being pregnant, and I was treated by my classmates as a sort of odd, almost like a kind of precious vase that needed to be manoeuvred around the room, as if no one had ever seen a pregnant person before. I was just treated like this kind of like I should be sitting on a lily pad or something. So I already felt very out of place. I already felt, was it possible to have the kind of career I dreamt of while I was also pregnant and working with my supervisor in this really close, intimate way that you work with a PhD supervisor, especially one who becomes a friend, becomes someone important to you. And at the same time going through that really intense transition from independent scholarly woman to potential mother, was really important. And I became very conscious of my time, the limitations on my time, the limitations on my attention. We do the intense study of something like PhD, which inevitably means we do a lot of research, we don't always include that in the final papers or in the thesis itself. What she meant was that nothing I absorb, nothing I read and research and take on and write about is ever truly just thrown away, even if it isn't used in unofficial sense. But this thought, which has really stayed with me throughout my writing life and throughout my career as it's developed and changed since being in academia, it's really shaped the way that I think about honouring all the different parts of who you have been that have led you and continue to lead you up to the point you are at with your creative work. So I was looking back at an old notebook recently. I'm also a thought hoarder, so I tend to keep hold of many old notebooks, old drafts, old scraps of paper stuck into moleskins because I have an inherent fear of loss of my brain and myself and what I think. So I'm a thought order. But I was having a look back at one of these notebooks recently, and I saw something I'd written early one morning after reading an essay about a photographic artist called Francesca Woodman. And in this little reflection were the bones, the barest bones of the book that became Unwell Women, which was my first book that came out in 2021. And it really startled me because it was all there in this couple of sentences. I wasn't thinking at that time that I would plan this book. I was thinking about why I had certain preoccupations with women's stories insisting on their visibility throughout history, or women insisting on their own presence, not being forgotten or not being lost. And I was thinking a lot of the time as well about things like the history of illness in my family, the maternal line, all these sort of thoughts about what history does to women and why it's so important to hang on to these stories. And so no work is ever wasted is really my have become my way of thinking about how important it is to honour your personal kind of genesis of thought and creativity.

SPEAKER_01 12:57

It really makes me think about I'm a thought holder too, and it really gives me a sense of hope. Because sometimes I can start to feel the pressure to optimize time and to make the most of moments, and for there to be purpose and reason for everything I do. And I know that if my thinking goes there, it's a bit of a trap for me because that will have me back away from the sort of juicy threads we could follow, or it will make me want to define success criteria in highly specific ways. And as you say that, there is something in it that feels so instinctive about how we do and don't honor our own curiosity. And I was wondering from that, like how you have come to see how you allow yourself the confidence and how you allow yourself the time and also the resources, other kind of resources to do that, to honor what you find interesting, even if it doesn't have a very clear outcome.

SPEAKER_00 14:06

That's such an interesting question, and I also relate so much to that, to this the sort of tyranny of productivity, but also the sort of tyranny of feeling. I read that Zadie Smith said once, where she talked about how she felt free when she'd realized that she had no right to be brilliant every time she started writing, every time she sat down at her desk, that this work was a labor. However, you slice it, it's a labor. And for me, it's partly because of again, as you say, the limit of time, the limit of resources, mothering, I have a chronic illness, there are limitations on my time and my energy. But this sort of fury in me that the time I spend at my desk doing my work must amount to something. And since becoming a published author, amount to something that will continue to give me success in a sort of market-facing way, and there are huge pressures on that, and they are things that move me away from what really matters to me and why I do it and why I care to do this sort of work, like what my stakes are in it, what I stand for. So having now published two books, I'm feeling like I'm doing a lot of reflecting on what I want to do next and how I want to do it. And I feel like it there is such a lot of freeing that can happen or needs to happen. In terms of confidence, I don't know how I grapple with it. Sometimes I feel exceptionally confident, other times I feel completely lost, and it is a continual my work or how I relate to my work in a very sort of me and it kind of way, not in a public-facing way, nothing that anyone would ever see, is this continual negotiation between confidence and despair. I know that sounds so big, but it is that idea about the public-facing, because I suppose what your books are in are the I don't say non-wasted moments, but they're that sort of the product of what gets to stay, in a sense, in a very public-facing way.

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Yes. And that's all the research that you so much research. It's just there's such extraordinary achievements that then get to have like a physical presence, but get to have impacts on history and teaching and thought and all the different ways. But there's so much that's private-facing. There's so much of your research and your interest and your time that is private-facing, and that those are the moments that could be seen as being wasted. Yes. But in a sense, are not the wasted moments. So it's like the person doesn't get into the book or the study that didn't make an appearance on page six or whatever it would be for you. How do you view those moments, the private-facing moments of what doesn't get to have this sort of more tangible presence?

SPEAKER_00 17:33

Straightforwardly, with a book, we have what a hundred thousand words, and I write big sweeping histories, so I have to make some pretty brutal decisions sometimes about what goes in and what doesn't go in. And there is always a lot of stories that I have read or researched or written about in my notebooks or in the draft itself that just can't go in. And in a practical sense, what I do, because I can't waste a thought because I can't waste the work, is I put them into folders called sheddings. And what I have at the end of a book project are these ghost books that sort of lurk in my computer that are made up of what I have shed, what I have sloughed away through either necessity, sometimes through self-doubt, sometimes through just there's something doesn't feel right in maybe the narrative of the book. This story doesn't feel intuitively like it has a place in the narrative, so that might go into the sheddings. But what happens is this is sort of ghost books, like standing on the shoreline, waving goodbye to the main book boat, the main boat, the book that as it sails off to become a real thing. And sometimes I look back at these sheddings, and they're really interesting because I can also see the way I've been working at the time. Sometimes they're meticulously organized, and I've dated when I've taken a particular paragraph or ditched something into sheddings, and other times they're just a mess of scraps. So, as well as being the holding on to of all that work that doesn't necessarily have a place in a finished object, it's also a record of my relationship to the work at the time, whether I was being very methodical and editing myself, or whether I was being more that won't work, that won't work, acting on instinct or trying to figure something out that wasn't necessarily clear to me at the time. So that's really interesting too to me, that it's exists as this sort of marker of my emotional relationship to the work at the time.

SPEAKER_01 19:50

Was a woman's work one of those ghost books? So as you're working through Unwell Women, did you shed material into another ghost book that then became a woman's work?

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Oh, this is also really interesting. I it not as such, but the thought, there was an awful lot of thought shedding that became from Unwell Women that became a woman's work. So writing and researching Unwell Women, a lot of the material I was coming into contact with and encountering was written by male doctors, male medical authorities, men dominated medicine for centuries. And in writings about women's bodies and minds, from a medical perspective, it's very rare that you do not encounter a male doctor talking in some way about women's reproductive function, about women's social and biological duty to bear children and raise them. Women's reproductive function was often named as the source of their diseases and ailments. If women didn't have babies, they were seen as being like out of health equilibrium. But it was also women's presumed duty to themselves, to their husbands, to their countries, to their nations for so much of history. And so I would encounter these male doctors writing about, for example, the disease endometriosis, talking about how women needed to have babies earlier to get out of the career mindset. This is in the 1920s, and focus on their sort of feminine function, their natural function. So I was writing very much focusing and making those decisions that unwell women would focus on illness, diseases, health conditions. So motherhood came up so much, but I always veered away from it because it's such a huge topic of its own. So even though It wasn't necessarily a ghost book. A woman's work very much existed within the research of four unwell women. It was very present.

SPEAKER_01 22:10

What made you then want to turn to the history of motherhood? What was the shift to you when it became the thing that then you did spend your attention on, and that became book two?

SPEAKER_00 22:24

So much of patriarchal history has involved men telling women that they cannot be part of the world around them because they are mothers, or that by virtue of their foremost duty as mothers, that the world of thought, of politics, of culture, of societal change is they are exempted from that world. That their proper role in society is to be within the domestic sphere, raising the children of men. And this was something espoused by many male doctors who were often seen as authorities on gender division in society. And I thought, hang on, mothering has been women's fundamental role for centuries, both within the home and outside the home. But mothering has also been an incredibly important part of our history. Without mothers, there wouldn't be any history in a kind of very basic sense. The perpetuation of humankind has depended not just on the biological acts of bearing and nurturing children, but on this incredible resilience and ingenuity that women have had to love to sustain life, often against some really incredible odds. And I thought, okay, this is a radical practice. Mothering is a radical practice. It makes history, it makes life, but it has also been responsible for some incredibly important shifts over historical time. And this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to flip the story around and say, okay, patriarchy, you're telling us that women's place is in the home, that's the natural order of things. And so many myths around motherhood centre on that. We should be silent and serene and submissive in the home and happy with that. But it isn't, that's not what history tells us. History tells us again and again about motherhood as this force for change, for political shifts, for the sustenance of life in many different ways. And that's yeah, so that's the story that I I wanted to tell.

SPEAKER_01 24:57

It does make me think about your thought that no work is ever wasted because, as you said, so much of mothering has been invisible, it has been lost, it has been we mothers have not been telling their stories, whether that's because of though I denied access to literacy, yeah, or they were shut away from like the public realm. And in a sense, there is something here that is about really making those private experiences public and how you tell those stories that have been lost to history, have been wasted, if we can put it in quotation. Yeah. And I was wondering why that aspect of this of making something that has been seen as trivial, it's been seen as insignificant, it's been seen as expected, it's been seen as something that is less than, like what it does mean to preserve those stories and to make those stories matter again.

SPEAKER_00 25:57

I read a long time ago the work of a feminist pioneer, Goethe Lerner, who wrote about a book called The Creation of the Patriarchy. And Goethe Lerner is a feminist icon of feminist history and feminist sort of social studies. And in this book, Lerner talks about how one of the biggest sort of tricks that the patriarchy has played on womankind throughout history is to deny that their own lived experiences are the source of knowledge and wisdom. So it talks about how male-dominated history is essentially said, what wisdom is there in the milk-filled breast, I think, is a direct quote. Anybody who has ever biologically nurtured or otherwise a child, been physically close to a child, knows that this is completely untrue. You know, you don't have to have breastfed a child to know this, but to know that to suppose that there is no wisdom, there is no knowledge, there is no thought in caregiving work is an incredible trick played by the patriarchy on earth to diminish the responsibilities and because women have this work of caregiving upon which our society depends, to dismiss it as something we can just do because it's somehow built into our bodies, that by virtue of having uteruses, we automatically just have this facility to care, and denying the fact that what it really involves is strength, resilience, ingenuity, a kind of radical sense of hope and optimism involves our it's this continual emotional and intellectual work that we're doing all the time. Are we doing it right? Are we doing well by our children? How do we and often practical for many of us practical concerns as well? How to feed the children, how to house, how to have safe homes for our children. The breadth of ingenuity and thought and resilience that goes into this is astounding to me. And all of that in the face of this continual and perpetual myth that I think is very much with us today, that mothering is just this innate intuitive instinct, like something much more animalistic than thoughtful.

SPEAKER_01 28:37

That really struck me in the book this idea around motherhood being so associated with instinct rather than expertise. And you talked about it. I love that you thought about it in terms of creativity and intelligence and thought and skill. And I think what I kept seeing in the book was this duality the whole the whole way through, right from you start with Greek mythology, but this duality between the good mother, the bad mother, between instinct and intelligence, between being allowed to have a voice and being silenced, and even the joy and the grief of motherhood. And I'm just wondering how you found ways to negotiate those tensions because the book isn't just things were terrible before, now they're wonderful now. And it wasn't just that there was women's instinct, but now there's women's intelligence. It was like there are all these moments of duality and tension, contradictions, and hopes and fears throughout history, and we haven't just arrived at this perfect moment now.

SPEAKER_00 29:37

It's really important to me always to show that history is not this linear path towards good or towards progress. There's much that we can learn from history, especially I think, in relation to motherhood, in terms of how mothering was honored, was given space for, how, especially around birth and the very early days of mothering in centuries past, that there were rituals and practices that were very centered around community, around women's knowledge, around the sharing of space with communities of women that I think we have lost today. There are many things that we can look back on and say, okay, the culture of birth especially was incredibly interesting in terms of birth and becoming a mother, being this rite of passage. And often these rituals and practices were shaped around belief in the antiquity, investment in worship to goddesses during Christianity, honoring the sort of biblical mothers. But these belief systems were incredibly important in terms of honour the importance and value of bringing new life into the world. But by the same token, we can't lionize the past in this way because women had virtually no rights to call their lives and bodies their own. So what I'm always interested in doing in my work is showing, is revealing the structures at play behind where we've got to today. So what I mean by that is we're at a point in a very current moment in which the idea of mothering being women's natural state, being instinctive and right for them, is really having resurgence. We're seeing it in the rhetoric of fascist governments in the states, we're seeing it in the rhetoric of reform, this insistence again that in order to stabilize our future, we need to return to these really clearly demarcated gender divisions where women stay at home and do what they should be doing, and men go out into the world, make the money. Women are dependent on men, women mother children. And that's really terrifying because women have fought exceptionally hard for the rights they have to their independent lives and to make choices about how those lives are lived. So it's really terrifying to see how precarious some of those rights might be in the hands of the wrong people. So what I'm interested in doing is showing that what's happening today, for example, is an agenda. It serves a certain idea of how society should work, a deeply patriarchal one that's very, that is very actually very hostile to mothers and children. It doesn't, isn't this isn't a society that wants to centre itself around the needs and interests of children and the people who care for them. It's a society that privileges the needs of men, freedoms of men. And what I want to always show is how these narratives, ideologies, agendas have been with us throughout our history in the West, Western patriarchal world. And how these ideas have been created and who they have served. And within that, one of the things that was really important to me was the myth of maternal instinct and the idea that mothering is natural and right for women, because that myth really serves these sort of deeply misogynistic agendas, right? So we can see the way that these myths have been constructed and how the engines of the patriarchy, which include male-dominated culture, medicine, the law, different political structures, have fed this myth and how it becomes ingrained in us. And so that's what I want to always show. And it's really important to me also to show that women throughout history, especially in the roles of mothers, have not been the passive victims of these ideologies. They have always found ways to resist, to rebel. Women have also complied and embraced these ideas. Women have resisted them, women have mothered in spite of them. And that was what's important to me. That even though I write narrative history, so I write a story that has to make sense, beginning, middle, and end, it's always really important to me to show that we our history is very much always with us. And I do believe that by understanding the roots of oppressions that we we potentially face in the present, that we are better equipped in a utopian way to make change for ourselves and others, but at least to navigate and negotiate where we are, to understand it better. And I think that means that it loses some of its power.

SPEAKER_01 35:11

Around this moment, we start talking about a handful of words and what they mean, but it makes me think about maybe talking about individual women throughout history that do embody that because there were surprises for me in the book about how women have challenged certain perceptions of mothering and how they have upheld them. There were moments of how there could be what feels like very personal, very individualized stories from a moment in say the Middle Ages or antiquity can speak to something that's really playing out now in Congress. And I wonder if we could look at a couple of those figures to locate that tension because I find that really interesting. And I wonder whether a good person to start with, let's think, is someone like Se Jorna Truth. Maybe we could go there. Because I think that's a really interesting story, a and really powerful story that is about a fight of a mother to mother, and also around freedom, and also around power.

SPEAKER_00 36:14

So Sir Jorna Truth was one of the most important figures in the history of civil and women's rights, and Truth was born enslaved in in New York State and escaped slavery with her infant daughter on her arm in 1827. And she walked to freedom. She walked to her own freedom, which she thought of as very important. She thought to run away would be wicked, to walk away was noble. And she left this house in which she'd been enslaved for years with one of her children on her arm, her infant child, because that was the only child she could bring with her. Her other children that she'd had to bear in slavery because enslaved women were treated as reproductive chattel. Her other younger children were indentured or enslaved still at this point. So she could not physically take them. They were not at that point her property to take. And the reason that we know truth's story is partly because of her incredible work as she worked as a preacher after she was freed. She traveled around America talking about the abuses of chattel slavery, doing pro-abolition work, but also doing preaching. She also spoke at early women's rights conferences, the Ain't I a Woman speech being one of the most important speeches in the history of women's rights, in which truth stood up and really demanded the inclusion of enslaved and black women in the women's rights project in the 19th century, which was very dominated by white women and the interests of white women. So the reason we know Truth's story is partly because of this political work and the documentation of that. But it's also because she told her story in the form of a slave narrative, what is called a slave narrative. Truth could not read or write herself. So she, while she was traveling, she went to a commune, a sort of Christian, very progressive but Christian commune that was doing a lot of abolition work. And somebody there transcribed her story. So she told her story of being enslaved, of being born to an enslaved mother, of escaping slavery, of her treatment while enslaved, and importantly of her relationship with her children to a scribe. And what we have is the narrative of Sejaurna Truth, which is one of the most important narratives of an enslaved person in the literature. And if we can come back a little bit to the no work is ever wasted, in truth's public-facing work was as an abolitionist, as an activist, as a preacher, as a speaker, as an educator. But every grain of her life story that she chose to tell in that narrative is crucially important to the history of maternal rights, of the who has the right to be a mother and to love their children. Because enslaved women were treated as reproductive chattel, but were denied the right to love and care for their own children, and their own children belong to their slave owners and not to their mothers. For a woman like truth to insist on her own motherhood and her right to mother is an incredibly important part of history, not just for enslaved women, yes, but also for this broader idea of a mother's right to love and care for her own child, which throughout much of history was not hers. Women, under English common law, for example, for so many centuries did not have the recognized right to call the children that they bore their own. Those children belong to the fathers, especially in a marriage. So this is a sort of double injustice for enslaved women, is that their children do not belong to them, they belong to their slave owner. And truth also tells the incredible story in her narrative of how she regained custody of her young son, who had been sold away from her into another state. This was after the Emancipation Proclamation, and this was actually illegal. Her son was supposed to serve out his terms of indentor in New York State, and he was unlawfully sold away. So Truth defended herself against a white man in court and regained custody of her own son. She stood in that court and defended her inalienable human right to care for the child that she brought into the world. And she won. And it wasn't easy. Her child, Peter, didn't recognize her at first. He was denied a relationship with his own mother. So this was not a sort of blissful mother-sum reunion. This was difficult. And the fact that she attests to this is an incredible act of courage. And it is insisting on the validity of her experience as a woman, as a mother, and as a human being, and on her right to tell that story. I wrote about truth briefly in Unwell Women in the context of early women's rights. And I knew that she had expressed her relationship to mothering and her own motherhood in her narrative, having read it. So she was one of the first people that I definitely wanted to talk about in the book in terms of mothering as a radical act, right? She represents the radical nature of mothering in a political sense and a personal sense. She tells some extraordinary stories about her own mother as well, who would gather her children to her in the quarters that they lived in when they were enslaved. And she would tell the children she still have with her stories of the siblings who've been sold away. So that she again insisting on even though your siblings are not physically with you, this is your family. They are out there and they are part of who you are. And I'm going to keep telling their stories. They will not be forgotten. And again, this just struck me as such an incredible act of life-sustaining and family-sustaining, even when both of those things were impossible.

SPEAKER_01 43:21

It's such an extraordinary story in the book, and you tell it so beautifully and so powerfully. There's another story that feels very different to this one. And but again, it has something of that pain of early motherhood. And the one that really struck me too was Elizabeth Jocelyn. And I don't know whether this one just stayed with me because there is so much loss and grief in the history of motherhood. And she had written this story, The Mother's Legacy to her Unborn Child. I wonder whether you could speak to her story and s something around loss and maternal grief, but also. How mothers have told their stories in spite of death and loss and separation.

SPEAKER_00 44:07

So Elizabeth Jocelyn was a noblewoman who lived in Cambridgeshire in the 17th century, and she was happily married to her husband, and since their wedding, had been longing to become a mother, become pregnant, and had a difficult time. And then she became pregnant, and when she first felt her unborn baby quicken, so that was the early modern term for the first movements that could be felt by the mother of their potential child. So for us, the sort of earliest kicks we feel, the little bubbling. Anyone who's been pregnant might remember this sort of bubbling fluttering. So that's what we're talking about. Elizabeth Jocelyn felt her baby quicken. And at the moment she experienced the quickening, she was had this awful sense of foreboding that she would lose her life in childbirth. Now, the loss of life in childbirth in early modern England was something that women who were becoming mothers faced the possibility of. And that's incredibly tragic and really difficult to imagine that the possibility of life is always the hope for life is always knitted in with the fear of its loss. And that's true throughout so much, as you say, throughout the history of mothering. But for Elizabeth Jocelyn, this foreboding was so strong that she purchased a winding sheet that her corpse would be wrapped in and she hid it away. And then she decided to write a short book of instruction for her child, a mother's legacy to her unborn child is the name of her piece of writing. So she wrote this in private. So Jocelyn had the privilege of literacy. She could write for herself. And she was a very faithful woman. She was very embedded in this idea that a mother's duty at that time in history was to guide their child in spiritual matters, to raise them to be a God-fearing person, to live their life virtuously according to the principles of Christianity. So she was extremely conscious of this being her duty as a mother. So she set about writing instructions for how she wished her child to be raised in her absence. And what's so extraordinary about this piece of writing that survives today is that Jocelyn hadn't meant for it to be published. She wrote it for her child, she hid it in her desk, and it begins with this sort of beautiful sentence where she addresses the child directly and says, you know, it must be very something along the lines of it must be very odd for you to be hearing from your mother from beyond the grave. She doesn't use those terms, but to be hearing from your mother now departed. So what I found so extraordinary about this writing is that she imagined Jocelyn having this exceptionally private fear, responding to it, processing that fear by writing to her child, and again insisting on her right to mother her child, even in absentia, even if she was not around to do that. Women had so few rights around their own children's lives. But to be respected as a sort of spiritual life guardian, a guardian of child's moral character and virtue was so important. It was a symbolic right, but it was a very important one. So for her to insist upon that, insist upon her presence, continued presence in her child's life. So she wrote this legacy, she hid it in her desk. And Jocelyn did die in childbirth. She died, I think, just shortly after, and she gave birth to a daughter. And the legacy was found in her desk by her husband, and it ended up being published by a preacher friend, a reverent friend of hers, who believed that the contents would be of interest to other parents raising their children according to the principles of God. And so the work was published, and we have it, and it sold, and it was selling copies at a time when this idea of the maternal legacy was a way for women to publish their thoughts, a rare way for women to become published authors was to publish this sort of maternal guidance. So Jocelyn did this, but she did it in a way that to me was so deeply personal, and so much about her, not just her grief or fear around her potential death, but again, Light Truth, her insistence on her motherhood, on her maternity, and on her relationship to her child.

SPEAKER_01 50:02

There is so much in this about legacy, isn't there, and about how we can feel so disconnected sometimes as mothers from a history of mothering, but also from our own mothers and how our more direct ancestors have mothered. I know that I had questions when I first became a mother, and you tell it so beautifully in the book that you also found that you were connecting with your own mothering history, a more personal mothering history. And so my last figures for you are Sarah and Betty. So Sarah, who is your mother, and Betty, your grandmother. And I really appreciated and loved how you threaded your own story through this, but also about how their stories really connected with an idea about choice and about a different form of societal care of mothers. Why was it so important for you to include their stories in the book?

SPEAKER_00 51:03

Partly because I realized that when I was first pregnant that I had ignored my own maternal history, like my close familial maternal history until I myself became pregnant, and suddenly I cared to know. And it struck me as this kind of tiny microcosm of what history does to women more broadly. None of that stuff is interesting. Why would you want to know about it? But once I had a sort of bodily investment in this experience, I really wanted to know what that had been like for my own mother. And I remember being really obsessed with hearing stories about her pregnancy with me. And I had this very strange experience when I was in the bath when I was pregnant with my oldest child. It was quite near to my due date, and he somersorted, and it was really with my whole belly moved and rippled, and I could see like a little heel, and I was just kind of so weird. And I spoke to my mum, and she said, Oh, you did that exact same thing, and it just this sense that was so often resistant to the elemental connective nature of motherhood and mothering that through my pregnancy I was connected to my mother in a sense that went beyond being her daughter. It was this kind of part being part of this kind of much larger maternal history that encompassed her life, her own mother's life, her mother's life. And that was all I wanted to know about, and that and then I wondered why isn't this all we talk about? Why don't I know my late grandmother Betty? I don't know anything apart from what my mum has told me about her experiences of being a mother. So for me to put Betty's story into the book was hugely important because she was this example of a 1950s housewife, right? She was during the war, during the Second World War, she had freedoms that were otherwise unimaginable, would otherwise have been unimaginable to her. The war happened, she was in her late teens, early 20s, and she had this opportunity to learn a skill. She went into the Women's Air Force and she did Morse co-transcription. She became a skilled worker. She had these sort of new newfound freedoms within her life. And importantly, I think the inevitability of marriage and motherhood was postponed. She met my grandfather while she was doing transcription. And as happened very often then, towards the end of the war, they got married really quickly because he was being posted to Burma and they didn't know what would happen. And if anything happened to him, she would get the war widow pension. So they got married, and there's a fantastic photograph of them. They're both wearing trousers and trench coats and walking along the street, and it was the day of their wedding. So I think about my grandmother, and from she passed away when I was about 15. So I have very strong memories of her. I was very close to her. But she was an absolute force. Her family used to call her Hurricane Betty. She was difficult, she was hugely lovable and loving, but she was also ferocious. And I know that my from what my mum's told me, the experience of being mothered by Betty was quite stormy. Me really think we had this family joke about Hurricane Betty and she's ferocious and she's smoking her cigarettes and complaining about everyone. But she was also somebody who was forced into an ideal of housewife-based motherhood at a time in history where she was being bombarded with cultural messages that she should be happy and content. And after the catastrophes and degradations of the war years, how wonderful to settle down in suburban England. But that must have come for her with this enormous sense of frustration, of grief, maybe for her life during the war years. Maybe if she'd have had meaningful choice around what she would have done with her life, she might have chosen to be child-free. I don't know because her subjectivity, the complexity of her feelings around that. So I wanted to honour that complexity in the last chapter of the book where I talk about the 20th century. And so Betty became to me, my grandmother Betty became an example of a particular kind of maternal identity that was forced upon women in the 1950s and all the cultural baggage that came with that. And so when my mother was making the decision to have me, and she had me as a single mother and raised me for a lot of my childhood as a single mother, she was the daughter of a very traditional suburban English nuclear family. But there was a rebellion always present in my grandmother, and that was transmitted to my mother in that there was no pressure on her to do anything conventionally. My grandparents did not expect my mother to marry. She travelled, she lived in London, she had an incredibly interesting life, and then in her early 30s became pregnant with me after a relationship that didn't continue. And their support of my mother's choice to have me and raise me on her own. Part of that, I'm sure, was this sort of rebellious spirit in my grandmother, or a preparedness to accept that convention around marriage and family making is not always right for everyone. Because in many other ways, she was an exceptionally traditional person, but she was so supportive of my mum, unquestioning of her decision to raise me on her own. Incredibly caring and loving to me, and just such a force to be reckoned with in that sense. And my mother, someone who was politically left embedded in feminism, in women's liberation of the 60s and 70s, who came of age with a feminist consciousness, happened to be in a certain milieu of ideas and friends and culture that also gave her the feeling that she could raise a child on her own and it would be okay. Because she was being presented with these new ideas about what it meant to be a woman in the world and what it meant to be free. And for her, freedom was part of her freedom was choosing to have a child on her own, a marry marital structure or a nuclear family. And they just these two points of history, they represented to me not case studies, that's too cold, but my proximity in a sort of lived way to the realities of mothering in two particular kinds of throughout the 20th century that have been really important to how we think about mothering today. How do you think about mothering today? I mean, my decision to have children was also one that wasn't planned, like my own mother's, but I had when I became pregnant, it was just after I my husband and I got married. And so it was interesting to me that I was within this kind of socially accepted nuclear family structure before I even got pregnant, having been raised by a rubble rouser. But I got pregnant in the first term of my PhD course. Not this was not planned, and I but all I had at that time, I was 26, was this incredible sense of optimism that having a baby would be an adventure. And I was scared. So I already had proximity to mothering in my life. So it also felt familiar in that sense, too, the idea to have a baby or the commitment to it. And then, so what do I think about it now? Now my children are in their late teens, mid-late teens. One of my children has gone to university. As I look towards the emptiness to this different stage of mothering, it's been and is such a privilege to see them become the people they are. As I look back on it now and having looked at the history of mothering in all these different forms, I'm so incredibly grateful for the conditions in which I've been able to mother. So I think about my family and friends, I think about my safe home, I think about them having a great father, that I've always been able to meet their material needs. These are really important things. And it's made me, I think, even more conscious and even more maybe radicalized in my thinking that mothering is not this innate, natural, we just get on with it. It's just we women just sacrifice our own selves and somehow the children turn out great. It isn't that, it's a combination of love and care for the mother themselves and the conditions, societal, economic, political, in which we can bring our children into the world. And this is why I really profoundly believe at the moment when we're having these, seeing this resurgence of certain rhetoric around motherhood and seeing the rise of the all and far right and what they have to say about mothering, that it feels like I wish for a really strong counter to this kind of disturbing rhetoric to say, look, we will begin to build a world in which the conditions are there for people to build to have families and have children if that's what they want to do. Because at the moment, what we're seeing is this real double doubling down on it's just what women should do for a fulfilled life, but no commitment to improving the conditions in which we can imagine having families. So that's how I feel about it now. That it's both my own experience, my gratitude towards the privileges I've had, and the understanding of its history. Yeah, I think has really made me understand that we need a completely different set of mother and child centred social conditions.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:26

I'm conscious of the time, and I'm also aware that your thought started or came to you that no work is ever wasted in a moment that you were becoming a mother. And you noted there that you're now in this period of late teenage, empty nest, being at that. Maybe we can end here. How do you hope that you will hold on to that thought and the impact that you hope it will continue to have for you?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:53

You're completely right. It was a thought that was given to me when I was becoming mother and when I was really in the grip of thinking about how I might be able to knit together these different, all these different parts of myself, really retain my personhood throughout my motherhood. And I think that is how I've really kept my thought. That is how the thought I have kept has resonated with me, and it's something that's continued to be applicable as my sons have become older because I think back to the grind of it all, the food and the struggling up hills in Brighton where we used to live, with one on my back and one on my front in two carriers. And I think about the discomfort and the sleep deprivation and the just the grind, the physical and emotional grind of it. And now I look at them, and they are entirely their own people, right? They are not me, but I look at that and I say, okay, no work is ever wasted. All of it has come to this. My own work in my books, my own work in my life. There is no work that's no good that should have been shelved. It's all sort of part of what has made me just, yeah, just really honour what's happened to me in my life over the years that I've tried to do my work in the professional sense, but also the work of my life, which extends to my family of friends, and I wouldn't be able to do any of it without any part of it. The nappies, the trudging up hills, the sleeping in bed with them because that was the only way I could get any sleep. All of it is fed into the way that I think, the way I see the world. And as I look back now on the sort of on all of that, and I see it in them. I see the fruits of that work in them. I see the fruits of that work in my published work too. So that's how I will hold it. And I think I will continue to hold that thought with me for the rest of my life.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:20

Eleanor, it's been such a pleasure to be with you today and such an honour. And you know, your books have really shifted my perception about mothering. I hope it will shift other people's perception about mothering. And really make visible that there's so much work that has been lost and that you're really bringing to the fore and it just speaks so beautifully to your book. So thank you for bringing it today and thank you for being here.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:46

Thank you so much for having me and for this wonderful conversation. I'll treasure it.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:52

Thank you for joining me today for my conversation with Eleanor Clegghorn. Let me know whether the thought that Eleanor bought, No Work Is Ever Wasted, is one that you will keep. I'd love to hear how you found this conversation. And if you want to continue to discuss or explore the themes in this episode, do subscribe to my newsletter on Substack. It's called More Good Days. You can find details about how to connect with me and also how to connect with Eleanor in the show notes. There's also details for both her books, Unwell Women and A Woman's World. If you enjoyed this episode, then please do, if you can, share it with one other person who you think might find it interesting too. I will see you next Monday for another thought that one of my guests has kept and that you might want to. Bye for now.