Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - The Hidden History of Motherhood Nobody Taught You (And Why That Was Deliberate) with Elinor Cleghorn

Episode Date: May 6, 2026

If you’ve ever felt like you were failing at something you were supposed to be naturally good at – this conversation will set you free.Elinor Cleghorn is a feminist historian and the author of A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering, and in this deeply personal, wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Mindy, she unpacks one of the most important questions of our time: why has motherhood been so diminished, misunderstood, and so weaponized against the very women who do it?From the myth of the perfect maternal instinct to the constructed guilt that has silenced women for centuries, from the empty nest to the role of fatherhood in healing the masculine wound, this conversation goes everywhere. It's equal parts history lesson, permission slip, and love letter to every woman who has ever given everything to raising a family and wondered whether she was doing it right.Spoiler: you were.A Woman's Work by Elinor Cleghorn is available in bookshops and online now. Find Elinor on Instagram at @elinorcleghorn.For more resources related to today’s episode, visit the podcast episode page: https://www.drmindypelz.com/ep338  Connect with Dr. Mindy:Join Reset AcademyWatch the episodes on YouTubeFollow Dr. Mindy on InstagramSubscribe to Dr. Mindy’s newsletter Disclaimer: This podcast is intended for educational and informational purposes only and is not a substitute for professional medical advice. Always consult a qualified healthcare professional before making changes to your diet, fasting routine, or lifestyle.

Can I be honest with you for just a second? So many of the women who have come to me have literally already tried everything. They've done the diets, they've worked themselves out to death, they've done the programs, they've diligently followed the advice of their doctors, and yet they are still exhausted. They are still hormonally lost. They are still wondering why nothing seems to work for them. And here's what I've learned after two and a half decades of working with women. It's not a willpower problem.

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and fall in love with your body again. So that's resetacademy. Dot, Dr.Mindy.com. On this episode of the Resetter podcast, I am bringing you Eleanor Clegghorn. This is one powerful conversation. You got to meet this woman. You got to understand what she has done

through the lens of looking at the history of women. She wrote a book called Unwell Women, and it was literally a book about how women are treated in our health care system. It was wildly popular. And now she's written a book called Woman's Work, And it's about the history of mothering. And what you're going to hear in this conversation is so profound.

You don't have to be a mother to appreciate this conversation because if you have a mother, you're going to see mothering through new eyes. Eleanor's specialty, she is a researcher, she has a PhD from University of Oxford. She's been on, I mean, she's got some great street cred. She's been published in the Wall Street Journal. She's been on BBC History, BBC Science, Focus. she's been a new scientist, she's been on vogue. This woman has been highly sought after

because what she has done is look at things like health care and mothering and seeing the impact that a patriarchal culture has had on the way women think about themselves in these situations. So unwell, women was about how we walk into a doctor's office and we get put down and how that turns into shame for us. It turns into guilt for us. Well, this conversation is going to blow your mind because in her new book, Woman's Work,

she talks about how the patriarchal influence on mothering has set us up for failure. It has caused us to feel like we are being bad moms or we're not doing enough. It has caused us to, put more pressure on ourselves than need be. So in this conversation, we did some really interesting things. First, I wanted her just to talk about mothering through the lens of a patriarchal culture. How do we know? Like, I'm a mom. I thought mothering was just instinctual and you just birthed a baby

and you raised the baby. She explains why we have been set up for turning on ourselves. We have been set up to think that we need to be some kind of super mom, that we need to be invincible when we mother. Otherwise, we're failing at that. It was a profound part of the discussion. Then we went into, what does collaborative mothering look like? Where does the father fit into it if you're in a heterosexual relationship? What does the family unit look like when both parents come together? And what can we learn from that? This actually morphed into a very interesting part of the conversation around healthy masculinity. So I think you're all going to really enjoy that. And then the end, please don't miss the end, because we landed on empty nesting where so many

of us are at. And how do we let go of the identity of mother and move into a new identity, a different version of mothering? What does that look like? So Eleanor is a researcher. She's a historian. She calls herself a feminist cultural historian. And she is giving us a new lens in which to look not only at mothering if we were a mother, but a new lens to look at our mothers from. We have a discussion about that. And she is giving us new ways to start to take our power back and start to unwind many of these belief systems that were not good enough, that we aren't doing enough,

the belief systems that have us attached to shame and guilt. If you came out of mothering or you're in the thick of mothering and you're feeling so many emotions and you don't know how to square all those emotions, this is the conversation for you. There's so much here and I can't, I'm just excited to bring it to you. We've never done an episode on mothering. So in honor of all mothers out there, in honor of us as we've gone through the mothering process or have been mothered, I offer you, Ellen. or Clayhorn. I can just share from my perspective that I just looked at my mom, who was your classic 1950s mom, who stayed at home and made cookies for you when you came off the bus at school and was there to comfort you every time you skinned your knees. And I never knew she had any

needs. She was just this loving, angelic person that you are describing and that she bought into. So when I became a mother, I thought I would just be that. And I wasn't. I was a working mom. I was emotionally overwhelmed. And I felt highly reactive. I felt like I didn't have any game plan. And I read every book.

I did everything I was supposed to do. But I continually felt like I failed at it. And what I really want to point out for mothers of younger children is I now look at my children at 26 and 23 and I go, oh, I did a really good job. I did a really good job. I'm really proud of these kids. But if you had asked me that, when they were seven and nine or five and three, I would say I'm completely failing at this. So how do we take, give women the success power back in mothering? How can we help women see this from a different angle than the one that the patriarch has painted for us. Yeah. I think the first thing that we can do is realize that this kind of guilt and

shame that we labour under is constructed. Okay. And it's constructed to serve very specific agendas that are not in the interest of women, caregivers, children, families. So, you know, when we're talking about the history of motherhood and how these kind of ideas about, you know, innate naturalness and perfect motherhood are constructed. They were constructed at a time when women have very few rights to do a lot else with their lives other than to be wives and mothers. So as we've progressed through the centuries and we've gained our rights to make choices about our lives, to work and mother, to be child free if that's what we want to be.

Since we've had these choices, we've still got this kind of work. weight and burden of centuries of messaging that's kept women under this guilt and shame. So we're still carrying it with us. Yes. So I think the first thing that we can do to, I guess, reclaim the mothering, the joy, the value, the love, the individuality around it is to first remember that. when we feel like we're not perfect because we haven't made the cookies for the bake sale, we haven't made the perfect costume for the crazy hat day, you know, we haven't had this

birthday party that looks like something, you know, staged by a party planner that looks better than my wedding did, you know, on Instagram. Because we've got this like visual culture of maternal perfection all the time, right? When we feel that we have, fail because of that. That isn't actually our failure as women and as people. That centuries of messaging that we've brought with us, that we've inherited, and that we are still being made to kind of labour under that still wears on us. So the first step is realizing that that's a construction and it was prevented to keep women in very specific roles.

and to keep them feeling as if being in the home, being domestic, being a perfect domestic goddess, a perfect mother was all you could ever want for yourself, that your perfect fulfilment as a woman was there in that role. And I'm not for one minute saying that it's wrong to find fulfilment in that. It can be such a wonderful source of fulfilment. but what isn't fulfilling is a feeling that you're failing your own children or your own role because of messaging that was never made to help you or support you or honour you. It was made to maintain a certain structure in society in which women were very much in the home, silenced, submissive, men went out into the world of work and politics and culture. But we live in a very different world now.

And like you, I learned certain messaging and certain things from my mother and also my grandmothers. My grandmothers were those 1950s moms who didn't really have a lot of other options around their lives. My mom came into her motherhood, like off the back of kind of second wave feminism and women's lib. she was a single mother for the first few years of my life but still you know no matter sort of what situation you're in you're kind of there's a tension right you're working against these ideals that you've just inherited and you carry and that's a lot it's a but i do you feel knowing where they come from knowing how they're constructed is the first thing we can do in freeing ourselves from those burdens It's funny you say that because I'm hearing that over and over in every conversation that I'm having was first you have to understand where your thoughts of failure came from.

And this is how I keep bringing everything back to the patriarchal pressure that was placed on women. And as you were talking, I was thinking, do you think this is why so many women are actually don't want to have children right now? because there's no other model of what successful mothering would look like. It's just like I have to give my life away to be a success at this and I don't want to give my life away. So therefore I don't want a mother. And there's like a statistic right now like like 45% of women like you know between the ages of 25 and 45 don't have children that they're they just chose to be childless. And I'm wondering if it's because of this. I think this is absolutely one of the forces that's being brought to bear in women's decisions not to have children, right?

Because we're seeing, we live in a world in which we're image saturated and we are saturated with kind of performances of what it means to be a good mother, what it means to be a perfect woman, what we should look like, what our homes should look like. All of it's constructed, right? You know, people who have huge followings have also. got camera crews in their homes. They're constructing these beautiful domestic scenes. But the pressure, I think, of having to be feeling like you have to be a certain kind of mother within our culture. And I think it's very true over here in the UK as well, certainly contributes to that, this idea of having to give up everything in the service of this perfect motherhood. But I also think that, and what aligns with that, especially I think in the US, and you can tell

me if I'm wrong on this, but I think also that women fear the lack of infrastructure and support and like state support around the work of mothering. Oh yeah. So the idea that if you have children, you might not be able to afford childcare. You know, we've got a little bit of state subsidised childcare over here in the UK. But when you think about the economic, all the economic pressures that come around having children are making your family in the US you especially have this so this idea that you

that mom is this kind of sovereign provider of all the you know all the beauty aesthetic kind of gorgeousness of being a mum but also all that self-sacrifice is real right if you have no infrastructure and support you have no

economic meaningful economic support around childcare, around healthcare, around community, that really is all on you. Yeah, yeah. And I think those two, maybe those two things combined are really, yeah, they're really huge in how shaping people's decisions. There was something that your book opens with that really struck me. And I want you to elaborate on it because I think it's a pretty shocking idea,

which is that you say we know more about the air we. breathe, the seas we travel, then we do about the nature and meaning of motherhood. So that quote, I've used it as an epigraph for my book, and it's by a really amazing poet and feminist writer called Adrian Rich. And in 1976, Adrian Rich published this incredible book called Of Women Born, which is one of the kind of landmark feminist reflections on being a mother under patriarchy, being a mother in a world governed by a made for men and their interests. And in this book, Adrian Rich, so this is the 70s, this is really in the midst of kind of second wave feminist thinking, Adrian Rich talks about how much we know about, you know, the minutiae

of the way that our world works. But what we don't know about is this fundamental work and experience that women do and go through. And that is mothering children. And it's because, Adrian Rich says, it's because history, you know, written for the victors as it goes, written about wars and battles and, you know, the building and destroying of civilizations hasn't been interested in mothering. It's just this work that women is taken for granted that women just keep doing it, right? We keep having the babies. We keep raising the babies. What can possibly be worth sort of thinking about? So she really was the first person to sort of,

yeah, I mean, it is crazy because it's everything, right? Considering how hard the job job is. Yeah. Without the work that we do, there would be no history. And that's how I kind of start of the book. And that was what my impetus really was to sort of follow, take on that kind of invitation maybe that's in A. Jim Rich's book and say, like, why hasn't motherhood and mothering been kind of the most important subject in our histories? Yeah. And as I dove into your book, which is phenomenal, by the way. I really, there were so many places my curious brain was stimulated by the history of mothering. I'm hitting this place at 56 years old where I'm realizing that the patriarch has really

hijacked a woman's natural state. And I spend a lot of time trying to help women fall back in love with their bodies again. And there was a quote that you said that really, like I had to think on it. I had to dive into it and read it a little bit more. And it was that the patriarch has reframed mothering or has told mothers that there is a natural instinct, that we should have some kind of natural instinct. When I first read that, I thought, yeah, there is an instinctual part.

But I think you're bringing in a point forward that women should just know how to do it. Like it should just be natural. and it should be fine and you should, you don't need any help. Let's talk about cod liver oil for a second. And I know what you're thinking, cod liver oil, really? Dr. Mindy, that sounds like something my grandmother took. But hang with me here for a moment, because this is one of those old school remedies that modern science keeps proving right.

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dot standard process.com. Enjoy. You already know how to do it and that that is damaging to a woman's psyche. Can you elaborate on that? Because I think that's maybe one of the most important pieces of this whole conversation that will free women from thinking that they're failing at something they're supposed to be instinctually good at. Well, thank you for thinking so carefully about that aspect because I appreciate it's contentious, right, to kind of challenge this idea that for women,

motherhood is or isn't a kind of natural instinct that we, as women, by virtue of having the biology we have, have this sort of ability, not just to do the bodily work, the biological work of having children and bearing them and keeping them alive, but that we have this innate keeping them alive. Let's just, let's point out that keeping them alive is, is job number one. So, yes, keep going. Absolutely. Giving life, keeping, sustaining life, right? But across history, for centuries, I think patriarchal culture was really pressing this idea that all women just have all the resources within them to be these perfect mothers, these idealized. mothers who never have complicated emotions about mothering and the role of being a mother. They don't struggle.

They're able to have these kind of endless time, endless resources within them. And within this whole narrative, there's also the idea that by virtue of being mothers and being maternal, that women are always self-sacrificial. They always put their own needs, their own interests. their own wants, their own desire, secondary. So what this sets up is of something really difficult, as you pointed out, which is that women don't need any outside help. They don't need any support beyond what they themselves can give.

And I always think about this thing to do with Christmas, right? You know, like the magic of Christmas or whatever holiday you celebrate. And when you're a kid, you think back to. the kind of magic of holidays. And I saw this thing on Instagram recently and it was like that holiday magic, that's mom. You know, it's this kind of ability to kind of create magic out of nothing. Yes. And so over centuries, male dominated culture, patriarchal culture has insisted that women have everything they need to be these, not just to mother, but to be perfect mothers. And what that's done is it's meant that conversations around complicated feelings we might have, complex emotions, get silenced and sort of shrouded in shame because the culture tells us that mothering perfectly and mothering well should be this natural thing for us as women.

And I think there's a huge difference between our instinct to love and care and make our families. and the idea that we are just naturally perfect moms. I think it's really important to kind of separate those two ideas. And selfless, that we're supposed to be, right? Yeah, completely selfless. And when doing my research, I would read these kind of parenting books that were written, say, in the Victorian era, right? By doctors or by social commentators who were always men.

and they would talk about mothers, women as mothers as being like these angels or deities or saints, you know. So even this idea that women are so perfect in their motherhood that they're not even human almost, they're so giving and so good. And once you start denying women's humanity in their mothering role, then you take away their agency, you take away their ability to speak. their ability to kind of be in their bodies, be in their themselves, live for themselves. Which, yeah, so it's been a very, very effective piece of patriarchal marketing over time.

Because what it's done is it's left us with guilt and shame. Do you think different countries have a different perspective based on the economic support and cultural support they would get for mothering? Do we see there's a massive difference in women who decide to have children are not based on societal support of that process? This is a really interesting question because actually in some countries like Finland, right, when they have very egalitarian laws, like a lot of equality between men and women in their society. And they also have things like fully funded childcare and, you know, know, social medicine, the birth rate is still low. And I think the reason for this is because women have choice. And women, once you have, you know, fully funded parental leave, you have really good economic support. You can go into work. You can come out work. Now, once your life as a

women, I think, opens up impossibilities. It can often mean that women are choosing to pursue lives of their own over lives of childbearing. But what is also interesting about this is that this kind of stuff, what the Republicans and conservatives in my country would call like liberal measures around childcare, this kind of information is exploited. So people who would like to reduce women's rights and roll us back to a historical time where we didn't have choice. We weren't able to work.

We weren't able to vote. We weren't able to choose for ourselves, how we lived. Women were having lots of babies because they have very little options otherwise for security and stability in their lives. So I think that it's a really interesting balance between. you know we're talking about what we all need right there's community i believe there's no argument that everyone who wants to make a family should be supported to do that fund child care fund health care fund maternal care fund postpartum support for new mothers that should be the only important thing the only important thing it's life it's sustaining life so i think we make the

conditions in our societies where people can have their families safely with support and community with great schools with good health care with childcare and then you build the conditions where having a family if that's what you want to do is a great move rather than something where you're having to weigh up the economics of it is it worth it can I afford it what's happen with our careers, you know, and I mean, in the UK, and I'm sure this is super similar in the US, quite often in the UK, if you've got two working people in the family, so you've got two parents and they're both at work, the costs of having, you know, more than one child and full-time childcare before they go to school might be equivalent to someone at one of your whole

wages. Yeah. So then you say, well, what do we do? Do we stay, have one of us staying in work just so that we can both have, one of us coming out of work and looking after the kid full time,

children doing that work full time, or do we both go to work and we are paying, you know, we're using it on one whole wage for childcare. And that leaves, it should never, that should never be. It comes down to these kind of economics. The decision.

The decision is so, yeah, yeah. So that's how I feel that we make, we put an emphasis on creating societies that are like family centric that center children's needs. And then you and then you build a society in a country where you think, oh, what, you know, that's, that's a great thing. And the work that we're doing to raise them and parent them is valued. Yeah. And I think that a lot of the women listening, and I would definitely say this, that there was a deeper

sense of connection to myself when I watched a baby come out of me. And I experienced the, you know, pregnancy. And I experienced the responsibility of raising a child. Like, I felt, I felt more connected to my female body. I felt more connected to my mother and my grandmother and my great-grandmother. Like, I felt more connected to women. Like, there's really something quite beautiful about growing a baby, delivering a baby, watching, you know, a child respond to the mentorship that you give it. And my husband and I had to make that choice. Okay, a nanny's going to cost this. Your salary's this. My salary's this. What are we doing about this? And I think perhaps that has made so many women go, well, that choice is unattractive. And, and then I'm also thinking,

as you were talking, well, this makes perfect sense why here in America, there is a big push to get women back into the home and get them out of careers and to start having children again. More children. Get this 45% down. And I'm starting to think a little deeper, like in order to do that, they need to take more of our rights away so that we don't have as much freedom of choice. And this is happening globally. I mean, we have a fashion. misogynistic leaders across the world. Yeah, I completely agree. There is a way of, in order to like, you know,

deal with this kind of problem around sort of birth rate decline, the answer to these, you know, the fascist, misogynists of the world is not to create these societies in which, you know, public funding, resources, policies are anchored in family making and children and mothers. It's to not fund any of that stuff, but get women back in the home back into that place where they're doing everything with no outside resources, where the father goes out to work, he's the patriarch of the family. That is there. So in order to achieve that, you roll back women's rights if you're a fascist misogynist that's the way you think this is what we'll do

because then women have fewer and fewer choices around their lives and in order to be you know have economic security that's a major one you have to be dependent on a man you have to be married and dependent on a man and it's dangerous because you know any of us who are not within that mindset know that what we really need is to shift society so that what we privilege and what we care about and value are our children and our families and all of the care and support that goes around that. But we don't.

We put everything onto women as mothers or this current kind of ideology of fascist misogyny does. And that is what is, is really terrifying, but I mean, it sounds horrible. It sounds very dystopian. It sounds really, really terrifying. But I think, again, that in order to, like, remain hopeful, which I'd always try to do, we have so much more knowledge now about how, what is happening around us, you know.

We know this for what it is. We understand the fascist misogynistic playbook in a way that previous generations have, women didn't. We have access to information. We can have conversations like this. We can share our resources. But I just wanted to go back to something you said earlier that I thought it was beautiful and that's that when you were talking about pregnancy and how it made you feel connected to your mother and to your grandmothers and to your kind of maternal lineages in your life. Yeah. I related so much to that, to this feeling that through my body, I had, and what was happening in my body when I was pregnant,

I suddenly started really thinking about what it was like for my mom, for my grandmother, my great-grandmother, to go through an experience, a bodily experience that's so similar, but it's so unique to you, right? So specific to you, that feeling when you feel the move for the first time. Nobody else has exactly that experience, but yet it's so kind of universal. as well. Like all women who've done it have a version of that feeling. So when I was pregnant and I remember thinking, why have I never sat down and really talked to my mother before about this?

And then once I was pregnant, it's all I wanted to talk about. What did it feel like when I moved? What did it feel like when I... Okay, let me ask you a personal question. And this one is a really important one, which is when was the last time you had your vitamin D checked? And I'm saying this because in all my years of working with women, low vitamin D is one of the most consistent findings I see and one of the most consistently missed. And vitamin D matters for so many aspects of your health. We're talking about a deficiency that can show up as hormonal imbalance,

mood struggles, poor sleep, immune issues, even stubborn weight that won't budge no matter what you do. But here's the part that most people don't know. Taking an isolated D3 supplement isn't enough. This isn't like just running down to the local store and grabbing some D3. Your body actually needs D3 to be combined with very specific co-factors to actually absorb and utilize vitamin D the way nature intended it. And most supplements on the market don't include

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Enjoy. Okay. Do you remember when you saw your midwife? Do you know, and then I kind of had this sort of regret or sadness that it wasn't, I didn't know more like I had. haven't been able to ask my grandmothers, like, about their experiences, about, you know, what it'd been like for them. Did you keep diaries? Did you, you know, and it's, it's that sort of privileging of mothers' stories and our bodies and our experiences that also in this political

moment is so important to you. Yeah. I was trying to explain to a friend of mine who doesn't have children what it's like to birth a human. And it was really interesting in explaining it. There is this moment, even the growing and the birthing where all of a sudden you feel connected to every other woman who has done this extraordinary task and you feel connected to every female within your family. And one of the things that I've been really obsessed with in my work is that if you look at the egg, the egg that created you was actually, it started in your grandma. So because a woman is born with every single egg she will ever have. And that was created when she's in the womb.

And then fast forward, one of those eggs creates you. But that was actually in your grandmother. And like when I started to do that, I did the same thing as you. I was like, I went to my mom and I was like, tell me more. I mean, I have a really, I had a really close, beautiful relationship with my maternal grandmother. But then I wanted to know about her mother and then her mother because I realized that the egg is what connects all of us. And I think when we are, you know, growing babies, delivering babies, that's really powerful. And the actual birthing of babies connects us to every other woman on the planet.

If you could take that 30,000 foot view, it's really something to be experienced and to be honored. And it's too bad that we don't think of it like that. it's it's absolutely just awesome isn't it in the truest sense of the world it's yeah or inspiring and yeah that that fact that we carry this kind of biological history of our you know the women who mother before us all of our four mothers we kind of carry these little pieces of them in our bodies they make us who we are as people and all their kind of histories of mothering are somehow also in our bodies and we carry them with us. And this, as you know, so beautifully put it, this kind of biological inheritance, maternal inheritance was so

much in my mind when I started thinking about writing a history of motherhood in that, you know, by virtue of being connected to our own mothers in our bodies, through our roles as mothers, we're also connected to all the mothers who've helped make this history for us as well. So that idea of connection, yeah, connection through the work of mothering. It's really important. Yeah, yeah. It's so important because it's what makes the world.

And for it to have been diminished, for mothering, birthing, pregnancy to be so, diminished over so many centuries to something that women kind of just do and just get on with. And but we've got this, I feel like we're at this point now where we're beginning to reclaim the value and worth and power of that. I remember when I have my first birth, my eldest son, and I just wanted to tell everybody who came near me in the hospital afterwards about it. Like I pushed a baby out of me. Like everyone who came, I wanted to say, and I pushed them out and I did and I did it and I, I, like, I only had a little bit of gat and, you know, all this stuff I was really like, do you know that I, it just felt I couldn't

so powerful believe that I could believe that I'd done it. But that knowledge of what my body was capable of was so incredibly empowering. And you're right, absolutely. connective as well. Where in all the research you've done, where does the role of the father fit in? You know, I know we now live in a world where we have same-sex relationships and, you know, I don't want to stay just in that traditional lane. But I do feel like if we are sitting at a point in time where women have choices, men also have choices. And I know in our family, my husband was largely the one that stayed at home and supported, and we were like a team.

And it really worked incredibly well. But he was kind of a lone soldier. Where do we see the role of fatherhood and fathering go in alliance to mothering? Yeah, it's such an interesting question. And I wrote my book and my research was really focused on mothers and their and their experiences and the kind of cultural messaging that they've been fed over time. But the role of fathers is a fascinating one because I think we kind of assume that in the past with the gender division of labour, right, women are in the home and go out to work, that the, at least the kind of intimate every day. work of loving children, of sustaining their lives was done mostly by women. And certainly laws, you know, the way that the law was constructed over a lot of history,

was that children were the property of their fathers legally, which meant that women often have very few legal rights to the custody of their own children in the event of a divorce, say. So there was always this overwhelming idea that women did the work, whereas men were the owners. These children are their property. There's definitely, you know, a fantastic book to be written about the history of fatherhood because I'm absolutely certain that you were to go back through it and there would be some extraordinary tenderness and, you know, things in the archive that are happening around the importance of fatherhood outside of what we think of as dad's just going to work and not really having a lot to do with their kids, right?

And I think there's a brilliant book by an evolutionary sociologist about fatherhood that's quite a recent one talking about the importance of fathering as a social role, not just as like, you know, the biological parent role. Yeah. And what you say, like we, you know, I similarly have, I'm married to a man, we have two children, we both worked at home for the majority of our kind of parenting lives. And so we've ended up having a very kind of egalitarian division of like parenting. So, you know, as like the children have never kind of favored me like mom or dad for any

particular things that are happening with them. That was us too. Yep. So they've have, they've grown up without having this like, well, mommy does all, does the cooking and the cookies and the clothes and the mopping the tears up and daddy does the you know rough housing and the football and whatever it's always been completely equal and i i feel like now you know we're in a really interesting moment as well for masculinity right for this idea of masculinity yes we are more than ever before we need to kind of rewrite the script around what positive masculinity can be

and I think within that story, fathering, the importance of fathering can't be underestimated, you know, or under-emphasized. Like, it's, you know, being a good dad and having a relationship with your children where you're helping them become the people they are, where you're emotionally connected, where you're kind of rewriting all this old messaging around the sort of gender division of parenting. I think that's such an important source of positive masculinity in our kind of divided culture at the moment. So, you know, let's hear it for the good dads. I'm married to a man who's an exceptional dad and seeing how he's parented our sons, you know, over there, they're 18 and 16 now, but over that.

time from them being newborn babies to toddlers to people you know little ones becoming little people and it has been really beautiful and I've seen it change who he is and make him who he is and and you see the impact on your children you know my 23 year old is he's a boy and like I watch how he takes care and and and works with his girlfriend and I'm just like in awe I'm like wow I'm like wow there's a healthy man. And then when I go back and I look, I'm like, yeah, because he had an incredible role model in my husband. And he watched an egalitarian. The way you said that was so beautiful. He watched this egalitarian household work together. Like the four of us were like a team. And there wasn't a hierarchy system like that. And then I look at my daughter who's about to get

married and she's 26 years old. And I look at the man she chose. And I'm like, ooh, she chose a really good man and he is incredibly supportive. And I think, oh, she did that because she had such a strong male figure at home that showed what the healthy masculine looked like. So, you know, in all the conversations I've been having about the way the patriarch has infected us, I feel like women are emerging into a really beautiful place where we can stand up for our power. We can have babies and we can have careers and we can do it all. But we can't do it without the support of men, whether, and that even goes in places of, that would even go into a same-sex relationship. We need men to honor the role of raising children, whether it's an employer or, you know,

or a grandfather. My dad actually took care of my kids sometimes because my mom was busy. men need to step into this position to support a mother. And if we don't do that, then I do think we will end up slipping backwards into more of this, you know, misogynistic approach to men and women. I think that's such, it's so beautifully put that, you know, men, not just men who are biological parents, but men in our families, men in our community. when we associate, when we begin to kind of reassociate healthy, positive, strong masculinity with this idea of parenting, of fatherhood, be that directly within your own families, within your wider families, within your groups of friends, in your communities. You know, it's so important for rewriting that script that men understand.

that by supporting and honouring, mothering, parenting and children, that they are rewriting what it means to be a good man. And I'm really, you know, I'm thinking about this so much at the moment because my children, who are both boys, are becoming young men. And we've had a lot of, you know, conversation going on in the UK around the rise of the manosphere, which is these men who project and go online and have, very toxic kind of persona around what it means to be a man and that always comes with a lot of

conversation a lot of kind of very splashy chat about how women need to you know get back in the kitchen and get you know not speak out and not have rights and so this and it's obviously a very is this cultural kind of like fire paper at the moment like torch paper because what we're also seeing is a validation of these extreme misogynistic ideas of masculinity within our governments, you know, within your government, within like creeping political fractions over here in the UK and in Europe, we're seeing this getting justified on a really large scale. But actually, you know, to begin rewriting that, I think, by honouring how how incredibly important good fathering is.

and being even if you're not a biological father or even an adoptive one, being a parental role model in the lives of children that you care for and the children of your friends or your family members, that is how we create and we rewrite what it means to be a good man in the future. And by men understanding that to honour and to value and to centre mothers, and parents and children is not to be weak, is actually to, you know, be fully kind of regain your strength and reclaim your strength as a man.

Yeah, and I think I always say to my followers, like as women, we can be naggy, we can be critical, and especially of the men in our life. And I watched a lot of my friends who, you know, just nag and nag and nag and nag their husbands. and I feel like in the last year, I've gone to both my husband and my son, and I've honored them by just saying, thank you for being a good man. Like, thank you for showing up this way, because you're not just healing our family, but you're

healing generations of our family to come, and you're healing a society. And I think that, you know, when I wrote my book, Age Like a Girl, I really thought a lot about the word patriarch and everybody thinks of patriarch as men over women. And I was like, no, Patriarch is power over all of us and it's affecting, it's damaging men too, because men don't know how to show vulnerability. And I can tell you as a mother of a son, I spent a lot of time sitting with my son and being like, tell me what you're feeling because I knew that was a skill that the culture wasn't going to teach him. And I think we're at an interesting place. where we can go backwards or we can go forwards.

Yes. And the more we have conversations and the more we compliment men for thank you for showing up this way, it heals all of us. I think that's the beginning of healing, honestly, the world is we have to, we can't just be, we are women, I'm going to do whatever. We need to turn around and bring the men along with us because we want a society of power together, not power over. And power together means it doesn't matter man or woman, non-binary, doesn't matter, you know, sexual preference.

It matters that we are human species doing life together. And that's where the healing starts, don't you think? Completely agree. And this is something that, you know, as a feminist author who's written two books, they're about misogyny and the patriarchy in large parts, whenever I do a conversation, you know, event or a, or, or, have a podcast conversation like this, I think emphasizing that the patriarchy is a social construct that damages all of us. Yeah. Who exist under it. Yes. Yeah. It doesn't mean, you know, this imbalance of power in which men automatically are doing so well and women are downtrodden. That's not what it is. It's this

system that privileges what they call androcentric. So that's that's male interests. but what that means for men is that there are these really damaging and destructive so-called ideals of masculinity that we were just talking about, but also a denial of certain parts of their own humanity. So what you were talking about with your son and asking them about their feelings, you know, men for so long have been not conditioned or socialised to talk about how they feel, to be vulnerable, to cultivate friendships, between men that are based on real genuine emotional intimacy and vulnerability. So when we begin to name it, name this patriarchal damage or this wound, and we always highlight how much that's damaged all of us, then I agree with you, that's how we begin to heal and how we begin to repair. But that's what's so important because we are living in such divisive times when it comes to

gender roles when it comes to feminism when it comes to what all these concepts kind of mean but I think if we can just strip that back and say look we've been for a very very long time existing under this societal and cultural kind of I don't know even what you call it climate in which men and women are expected to be certain things and that is to the detriment of all of us to our connection to our joy you know it's it is and the amount of, I think that's so important to kind of express your gratitude when you've got good men in your lives and you see them doing good work, you know, with the people that they love, with their children, with their families, to really, to really note that and really kind of, because we exist in a culture that also doesn't reward men for being vulnerable and for being connective and for, no, we don't reward that. Yeah, not at all. So if we can do that within our own lives.

We don't, the culture doesn't reward it, but women want it. You know, women are like, tell me how you're feeling. And like, they're like, you know, you're asking them to do something that they weren't raised to do. So it really, this is, again, goes back to why mothering is such an important job. And I, you know, I really mothered a boy and a girl very different. And I, I knew the responsibility of mothering my son and making sure that he could express his emotions. And I think that when we come back to the role of mothering, it's important that we understand that that's also a gift we get to do is we get to raise the healthy masculine. And I know you being the mother of two boys, like it's a very incredible job to raise a young man who can express his feelings and can care for people in a way you don't see men care for.

I'm just, it blows me away. I didn't know what I was doing at the time, but I would want that for every family if that was possible, wouldn't you? Absolutely. It's been such an incredible privilege to raise my children and to raise my sons and to be doing it, you know, through the rise of sort of extreme misogyny that we've, that we're all dealing with now. and to see that they had this capacity to talk about how they felt,

how they felt about themselves and the world around them. And to really see that new next generation of good men. And to see it amongst their friends as well, you know, to see the people that they've chosen to be friends with that they've grown up with who are also modelling that, who are also bringing that forward. and it's because their parents and the people around them are doing that work and rewriting scripts and choosing not to repeat, you know,

damages that have been kind of done to us or that we may have seen around us as we grew up. And it's work and it's not easy, but it's incredibly important and it's incredibly rewarding. And, you know, to see two little boys, grow up into men and you think, you're good, you're good ones. You're good dudes. You're a good one. You're a good one. Yeah. And I can tell, as a mom, it's probably the most rewarding thing I've ever done is to

look at my son and be like, wow, you're a good one. I'm so proud of that. So yeah, it's, I agree. What a lot of my audience is going through what I've been going through, which is empty nest life. And when my son left, our daughter is the oldest, I remember saying to a friend, I feel like I was at a job and somebody came to me and said, you need to leave now. Your services are no longer needed here. Go ahead and pack your things up and go. But you can come back and hang out by the water cooler any time you want. And if we have a question for you, we know to find you there. Like I just was waiting around for how do I mother now? What does mothering look like now? And what I'm seeing in midlife is that a lot of women are just coming in burnt out. They're completely overwhelmed.

They've given their whole life away to their family. They're having to restart a career. They're mourning this incredible role they took on as mothering, as a mother. and it's a really, it's like a sand trap. It's like you're in quicksand and you don't know where to go. In your research, have we, do we have any historical understanding of how women transitioned out of that active role of mothering? No, it's so, it's so interesting to talk about this because I really think it's one aspect

of motherhood that's not talked about enough. It hasn't been recorded enough in terms of. of women's own experiences of this. And I, similarly, I'm just on the cusp of this. My eldest is now at university, and he's been living at university since last October. So he comes back for holidays, but he's, you know, he's out of the house. Yeah, he's out of the house, yeah.

Yeah, he's making his own life. And I remember, like, talking to my husband, and we'd be like, isn't it so weird that he can just kind of decide what he wants for dinner and if he wants to go to a concert, he just goes. Like, he's out there in the world, you know. Yeah, it's so vulnerable. Don't you feel like you're? Yeah, completely.

The worst feeling ever. You're like, wait a second, I've kept my eye on you for 18 years, and now I don't know where you are. Yeah. Yeah, it's hard. It is. And then my youngest is 16, and he's in the last part of his secondary school or high school,

and he'll be, you know, over the next sort of 18. months he'll be choosing where he's going to college and he'll be leaving too and I always remember my own mom saying you just wait when I when my elders went to university and I said you know I'm feeling it the empty the emptiness like the grief the morning of it and she said just wait till your youngest goes as well and that will yeah and that will be when the processing really has to begin But I don't think that women's experiences of this, emotional experiences of this, not just the kind of the mourning of them and missing them, but this incredible shift in your own identity. That, you know, you're who you are and your value and worth an identity. And, you know, for a lot of women who have given up their lives and dedicated.

all their time to mothering. I know that my own mother became a foster carer after Weedle left home because that work of mothering was for her so front and center of who she was. So she actually began once all her own children had left home, she began caring for other children because it was just, you know, just so central to who she was in the world. And so, you know, you're the first person to ask me about empty nesting.

And I'm so grateful for that because I really think it's a conversation that we need to have. And there's like a real honouring that needs to happen. There's a lot of conversation around at the moment I've noticed about how we might reimagine birth as this right of passage rather than this medical event. You know, to reimagine birth as a social and commuting. experience and event that we go through rather than this kind of medical episode. And I think there should be a similar kind of cultural reset for empty nesting where we're able to talk about what this means when again, for so many centuries, women have been

told that their value and use wears out at menopause and when their children leave home. Right? Yeah. Because you're not useful now. You've raised them. Your job is done. You've done it. So what does that mean for who you are?

And I was at a certain event recently. And I was sitting with some really wonderful women. And there were two women sitting next to me who were, you know, a fair bit older than me. And they were asking me about, you know, what my children were doing. And one of them said, you're going to have to refigure your relationship with your husband when they leave. which I thought was really interesting. And I always think, oh, we have loads. We talk about all sorts of things.

We're interested in all sorts of things that aren't about the kids. But actually, no, it really made me think that our relationship has been so centered on our work together, bringing up our children. So it's like, what does it mean for me as a woman? But also, what does it mean for us? You know, how do we reconfigure our own? identities together and this is really interesting to me and something that I don't read or hear a lot about is the relationship after the empty nursing. It's interesting because my last book, Age Like a Girl, was really about how women come into their own as they go through the menopause

experience and in our 50s and 60s, actually if you look through the lens of evolutionary biology and neuroscience and even a societal lens, women are actually. Women are actually, moving into a place of leadership and societal importance. But women aren't getting that message because of everything we're talking about where I gave my life away to this identity called mother. And maybe it was working mother, even that. And now that whole identity is gone. And I was building a whole life. I was raising this together with my partner. And now one of our major tasks of raising children is gone. And it leaves you feeling very vulnerable. And I'll tell you one thing my husband and I did that I would really recommend everybody do. And it was just,

once we were sitting at the dinner table by ourselves over and over and over again, we started talking about how incredibly exhausting it was to raise these children for the past 18 years. And there was like a little bit, it was so healing. We did this for months because it was so healing to just go, okay, you remember five years ago when this situation happened? How did you feel about X, Y, and Z? It's like you're so busy being a parent that to have that opportunity to stop and look at the co-parent and say, can we just talk about how hard that was and how, you know, some of the feelings I didn't have time to process and what was going through my mind. that was probably one of the greatest initiations into empty nest life that we could have given ourselves and we didn't even realize we were doing it. It was so cathartic and I highly recommend it.

That's amazing and I'm going to carry that with me honestly because you you're right. You're in the midst of it when it's happening, the parenting. You're in the midst of it and what you don't have time and you're kind of new challenges and things happen and you work together on it. you don't have that space and time to reflect on what it meant at the time for both of you as individuals and together. So that's, I think that's an incredible thing. And like, yeah, very healing. That's the only piece I figured out. Yeah. Yeah. And then and then the other piece that I've, I've figured out that I think I would love everybody to just take in is, you know, I, a lot of my friends were stay-at-home moms. I was a working mom. And,

And they get calls every single day from their children asking them what to do. How should I, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to a job interview. What do you think about where, should I wear this or wear that? And I went through another level of self-criticism once my kids left where I'm like, they don't, yeah, they don't call me every day. Why don't they call me every day? And did I do something wrong? and then I realized, actually, I did something right.

And I'm not judging my friends who had the call every day, but my kids were feeling strong enough to make their own decisions. And I go back to this egalitarian household that they grew up in, where there was a lot of processing of feelings and discussions, I mean, about world events. And it was coming from both parents. And so when they launched, they were on strong footing. And so I had to learn that because they don't call me every day doesn't mean I was a bad mom. And it's so fascinating how quickly I went there.

That's so you've just given me such a gift because I've had these similar insecure thoughts when I haven't had, you know, the text or the call every day or, you know, a few times a week. And to reframe that as actually you've launched them to use your brilliant word with this confidence and this self. worth and their self-knowledge that they don't need to call mummer every five minutes asking asking you know what's what or how to do this that's such a powerful and important way to reframe that I also wonder you know I talk about this quite a lot being the mother of boys but I noticed that in our culture in our society over in the UK there's a lot of sort of vilifying of teenage and adolescent boys. And we love to talk about, like, being the mom of little boys and, you know, aren't they

cute and on they rumbunctious and funny. But we don't, I think that we don't talk enough about being the parents of, like, adolescent boys, adolescent girls as well. And then of young adult boys and girls. Like, mothering. Right. I've noticed this in the history. as well. When I was writing the book, my editors would sometimes say, oh, have you got any more

stories about, like, mothering older children? And honestly, there's not much of it that I could find in archives. It's because it's like, interesting. It's so focused on the baby, the infant, on getting them through those, you know, kind of survival milestones. But the experience of keeping them alive. Keeping them alive, indeed. But the experience of being a mother to adult children, you know, that is so important. Your job doesn't end, it expands in a, in a really important way. And there are other phases that we can kind of look to in terms of how our families will grow and expand and change. But it's still an incredibly important. It's not the end of parenting, it's a shift, but it's one that we don't value enough at all. Or talk enough about

it because it is a very different type of parenting. For sure. It's very different. And I will say that one of the things that I am loving about this phase of mothering is that the conversations that I'm having with my children are based off of experience that I accumulated in my life. So whether it's business experience or even like I just had a beautiful conversation with my son and his girlfriend, night about how we have seen economic times change and what did we do and how did we weather those because the 20-year-old generation right now is from what I hear from them is they're very concerned

about the economics of the world and job opportunities and so there is you get to move to a little more of a wise elder and they're not they're asking you different questions so but it's that's why I call it you're just standing by the water cooler, drinking water, waiting to be asked a question. But once you find a new rhythm, you know, minor 26 and 23 and the new rhythm is so beautiful. But the transition was really uncomfortable. Yes. Yeah. I agree. It is really uncomfortable. We don't have those tools and sort of guiding lights that we need. but I really relate to what you said about being able to have conversations with them as they grow about the world around them, where you're bringing your knowledge and your experience of being here for, you know, a lot longer than them.

And them in the position to not just be like, oh, what does mum know, but actually to be receptive to it and absorbing it. And I love this image of like the wise elder because you can feel like. that you're like yeah i've got stuff to say about this and when you have children who are interested in the world around them they want to understand more about it like talking to your children about the economics of the world we similarly have quite a lot of conversations about you know the political state of very in various different you know arenas at the moment um and to feel like you're shaping them at this point where their minds are like you're not just this kind of kind of provider who's sort of making the dinner and getting the clothes ready, but you're someone

to be kind of looked to for guidance and insight about this world that they're becoming part of. And that's really, it is really beautiful. It's like having to climb this really kind of rocky mountain together and then it beautiful view at the top right. Might be a cheesy example, but you go through this transition that's tough. Yes. But what you get when you've moved through it is really beautiful. Yes, I totally agree.

I love your book, by the way. I just, I actually, you all sent it to me. I started reading it, and then I really loved it on audio. Because you go into you, all these stories about history, and I think it's something, you know, mothering doesn't get, it needs a rebrand. Mothering needs a rebrand and a new PR team, and you may have, you might be the head of the PR team. So I just appreciate you. where do people if they want to pick up the book or where can they find you or find the book? Thank you. Yeah, I've loved this conversation too. And mothering, parenting is so rich for

discussion and conversation, especially now. And I agree with you. It all needs a rebrand. And the, you know, political and social moment we're in, there's real hope to be found in rethinking what mothering and parenting is at this moment. And yeah, so thank you for the opportunity. to do a little bit of that. So my book is called A Woman's Work, reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering. And it's available, hopefully, in all good bookshops and online now. I am on Instagram at Eleanor Cleekhorn.

So you can always come and connect with me there and say hi. And yeah. It's beautiful. Well, thank you. And I hope just keep standing up for us all. Keep helping us rebrand a mothering. And if there's anything we can do to support your work, you please always let us know. I have a very enthusiastic community of people, of women, primarily that are all rising together.

So just know we're cheering you on and we really appreciate you bringing this conversation forward. So thank you for your time today. Well, thank you for having me. It's meant such a lot. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it. So please leave us a review, share it with your friends,

and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.