Liberating Motherhood

Why is having a child so increasingly out of reach, economically, socially, and emotionally? And for those who choose to have children, why does the burden feel so massive? 
Political realities influence our most intimate of choices, whether we want them to or not. Journalist Anna Louie Sussman is interested in how, when, and why people become parents, and in the political decisions that affect our experiences of parenthood. 
In her new book, Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty, she traces the factors that make parenthood so difficult through the stories of several people weighing the choice to become a parent. 
We cover a lot of ground in this interview, including:

How economic uncertainty puts parenthood out of reach for so many. This is a political choice, not an inevitability. So why is it the one we make? 

Whether parenting really is harder now than it was a generation or two ago. 

The shame of struggling in a culture that makes parenting feel impossible. 

Anti-child bias, its role in cultural life, and how child-free spaces exclude mothers and therefore women. 

How motherhood as an identity so often undermines everything else women do. 

The sickness of busyness: both the display and performance of busyness as a status symbol, and also “greedy jobs” that force us to be busy just to remain afloat. 

How the pressure to earn money turns our closest relationships into financial commodities, and forces us to put a dollar value on everything we do.

As always, you can find Anna’s book, and all books I recommend on the podcast, in the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop. 
About Anna Louie Sussman
Anna Louie Sussman is a journalist reporting on gender, economics, health, and reproduction, and a contributing Opinion writer at The New York Times. She is the author of the book “Inconceivable: The Impossibility of Family in an Age of Uncertainty,” which looks at the challenges people face in starting and growing their families. It builds off her New York Times Sunday Review cover story, “The End of Babies,” and was published in September 2026 by Dey Street Books.
Her first story, an engrossing account of the hunt for the perfect prom dress, appeared in Teen Vogue circa 1999. A decade later, she was reporting from the Middle East on women’s lives, and in 2011, became the senior writer and editor of Newsweek/The Daily Beast’s Women in the World Foundation.
Since then, she has reported extensively on finance and the economy, covering the shipping and energy industries for Reuters, and economics and the labor market for The Wall Street Journal. She researched and helped write “Fast Forward,” a book on how to advance women and girls in the global economy, with a foreword by Hillary Clinton.
She has interviewed Thomas Piketty about income inequality, heard a Yemeni imam justify contraceptive use with Quranic citations, and gotten Jeff Koons to explain why artists should embrace the market. She has reported on Polish women who can’t access their own frozen embryos, how abortion politics and the gruesome history of medical experimentation conspired to exclude pregnant people from clinical trials, and the brutal economics of egg freezing.
She has been the recipient of numerous grants, fellowships, residencies, and awards, including from the Logan Nonfiction Program, MacDowell, the Fetisov Journalism Awards, the Kavli Science Journalism Awards, the Hambidge Center, the Greater Good Science Center, the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism, the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the DeGroot Foundation, and others. She was a member of the 2022 Class of New America Fellows, the 2024 cohort of Alicia Patterson Foundation Fellows, and an Omidyar Network Reporter in Residence in the fall of 2024.
She has reported from two dozen countries in the Middle East, South America, Europe, Asia, and North America. She lived and worked for five years in the Middle East, spending time in Cairo, Beirut, Istanbul, Damascus, Tunis, Rabat, and Sana’a. She was born and raised in New York, enjoys reading and sewing, and was the parent of one outrageously wonderful dog, Stewie. She lives with her daughter in New York.

For centuries, our ethics—and especially our bioethics—have left out the most marginalized, treating white men and other powerful groups as the default and the norm. 
Wylin Wilson, a chaplain, former death doula, and ethics professor at Duke, seeks to change this. She writes about how we must center the powerless in our bioethics, and what we must do to ensure that systems of care serve them. Because when we build systems that better serve the oppressed, we build systems that better serve us all. 
When I began planning my interview with Wylin, I anticipated talking mostly about our crumbling health system, and how we build something better from the ashes. We did into this quite a bit. 
But early in our interview, I realized Wylin had deep wisdom on another subject of great importance: how we can actually live our values as feminists, activists, anti-racist advocates, and people aspiring to do better. 
I have often remarked that it’s very easy to be a good person until you encounter other people. And then, you have to deal with the mess of other humans. Grappling with the imperfections, annoyances, and outright cruelty of others enables us to flex our own decency muscles. It tests our values. 
This test of values is, I think, where many of us falter. We lash out at people for disagreeing with us. We slot people into “good” and “bad,” and justify abuse of the bad. We replicate the very norms supremacy culture has taught us—and we label that replication feminism or activism. I fight these own tendencies in myself, and have often struggled with how to work through impulsive harmful acts. 
Wylin has much to say about the emotions, the unconscious biases, the lifetime of lessons that cause us to make these harmful decisions. Her work on love as a practice, as a skill, is revelatory to me. We can get, do, and be better, but first we must acknowledge where we are getting things wrong, then flex our muscles of decency and love. 
We dig deeply into how we can be the people we aspire to be, but also so much more. In this podcast, we talk about a wide range of topics, including:

How we can learn to better navigate difficult interactions and treat all people in a way that reflects our aspirational values. 

Love as a skill, and kindness to others as a practice we can get better at. 

Racism in medicine and healthcare. 

Why it is so difficult to acknowledge your own biases, and how we can push through our resistance to examining our own shortcomings. 

Why healthcare providers are often resistant to acknowledging the shortcomings of the medical system, and what needs to happen for that to change. 

Grief as a gift that connects us to something deeper, and to our shared humanity. 

Wylin’s “ministry of presence”—the importance of being fully present with another human being. 

As always, you can find Wylin’s work, as well as the work of everyone featured on the podcast, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop. 
About Wylin Wilson
Wylin D. Wilson is Associate Professor of Theological Ethics at Duke Divinity School where she teaches Womanist Bioethics within the Theology Medicine and Culture program. She is author of Economic Ethics and the Black Church and Womanist Bioethics: Social Justice, Spirituality, and Black Women’s Health.
Learn more about Wylin at her website.

When women are overloaded with the endless burdens of household labor, we tell them to go on strike or lower their expectations. But this advice pretends that women are arbitrarily creating work for ourselves, and that if we just hung fewer wreaths or stopped making cookie dough from scratch, everything would be better. 
This trivializes women’s labor, and ignores the reality: Women have become the social safety net, doing without pay and without acknowledgment all of the tasks our communities refuse to acknowledge and our governments refuse to fund. 
It’s not an accident that women are overwhelmed. In the absence of a real social safety net, the obligations don’t disappear. Kids still need support and advocacy; families still require work. And that work falls almost entirely to women. 
In this episode, sociologist Jess Calarco and I talk about: 

How we have transformed political obligations into individual ones, and why we pretend political failings are individual shortcomings. 

How we transformed women into an individual and undervalued social safety net. 

Why the caregiving never really ends, and how it extends well beyond child care. 

The interventions that might finally fix this. 

I absolutely love Jess, and I hope you’ll buy her book, Holding it Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net. You can find her book, all books recommended on the podcast, and an assortment of reading lists on the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop page. 
About Jess Calarco
Dr. Jessica Calarco is a professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an expert on inequalities in family life and education, and the author of four books, including Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net.

Calarco’s latest book, Holding It Together (Portfolio/Penguin, 2024), reveals how we force women to be America’s social safety net, what the weight of that responsibility is doing to women, and why so many Americans believe the myth that we’re doing just fine. The book combines historical and policy analyses with original survey data and vivid portraits drawn from more than 400 hours of interviews with families from a wide range of backgrounds.
Calarco’s first book, Negotiating Opportunities: How the Middle Class Secures Advantages in School (Oxford, 2018), received the Pierre Bourdieu Award for best book in the Sociology of Education. Her book Qualitative Literacy: A Guide to Evaluating Ethnographic and Interview Research (University of California, 2022) is coauthored with Sociologist Mario Luis Small, and won the Outstanding Publication Award for best book in Methodology. Calarco is also the author of A Field Guide to Grad School: Uncovering the Hidden Curriculum.
As an active public scholar and the recipient of numerous early career and teaching awards, Calarco strives to make sociological insights accessible and relevant to broad audiences. She not only publishes in leading sociology and interdisciplinary journals but also writes for high-profile media outlets—including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Atlantic, Inside Higher Ed, CNN, and NBC News—and offers workshops related to her research and teaching, including workshops aimed at promoting equity and empathy in college and graduate education.
Calarco received a PhD in Sociology from the University of Pennsylvania and a BA in Sociology and Education from Brown University.

Welcome to season four of the Liberating Motherhood podcast! You can expect to see an episode every Wednesday, except for periodic days off. This first episode is with one of my favorite writers and thinkers, Gemma Hartley, who came on last year to discuss emotional labor and household inequity. 

Whether or not you are Christian, or were raised in an evangelical Christian family, right-wing evangelical Christianity affects your life, your relationships, and the political world around you. 
Highly organized Christian fascists, driven in large part by misogyny, have a plan for the future of the United States that involves the total subjugation of women. They hope to achieve this by getting into the minds of children early. This means that, while many people have left behind these churches, their thinking continues to hold sway. And even if you’ve never set foot in a church, Christian evangelical churches hope to control your life. 
Gemma Hartley is back on the podcast to discuss her evangelical upbringing, the process of deconstruction, the meaning of Christo-fascism, and the tight alliance between right wing politics and Christian churches. We cover a ton of ground in this podcast, including: 

How early evangelical socialization can nurture anxiety and depression. 

Purity culture, including how it affects our brains even when we try to leave it behind. 

The normalization of rape and child abuse in right wing Christian churches. 

How evangelical churches weaponize fear and community to gain control. 

Importantly, this is an episode about right wing Christofascist churches—not all churches, and not all Christian churches. These churches are politically powerful, led by men, and predominantly white. And now they have a tight grip on the reins of political power. It is crucial to understand them.
Gemma’s new book comes out September 22, and you can preorder it now. I hope you’ll consider doing so, since preorders are hugely supportive to feminist authors, and encourage publishers to publish more feminist work!
About Gemma Hartley

Gemma Hartley is a freelance journalist and author of Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward. Her new book, No One Loves an Angry Woman, will be released September 22. Her amazing Substack, of the same name, highlights the toll emotional, cognitive, and physical labor exact on women’s lives. She has a second Substack, Creative Commitment, to support current and aspiring writers.
 She received her BA in English Writing from The University of Nevada, Reno where she is recognized as a distinguished alumnus. Her work has been featured in outlets including Harper’s Bazaar, Women’s Health, Glamour, The Washington Post, CNBC, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Good Housekeeping, Teen Vogue, and The Huffington Post. She lives with her husband and three young children in Reno, Nevada.

Supremacy culture wants to convince us all that it is inevitable. If oppression is natural, it’s hardly worth fighting, after all. Racism, sexism, and other systems of oppression have always weaponized science—and too many scientists have allowed themselves to be mouthpieces for oppressive ideologies. 
Angela Saini has written about the use and abuse of science to uphold oppression for years. Her books investigate the origins of misogyny, analyze how science is weaponized in service of oppression, and debunk common sexist and racist myths about human biology. 
In this episode, we talk about a range of topics, including: 

The origins of patriarchy, and why patriarchy is social and not biological. 

The relative recency of patriarchy, and why patriarchy has not always been a part of human history. 

How biology is misused to uphold systems of oppression. 

How marriage became an arm of the state, and how marriage and family enabled women’s oppression.

Patriarchy as an accident, not an inevitability, and the role patrilocality played in its creation. 

How myths about gender and biology, gender roles, and gender as natural or inevitable uphold patriarchy. 

How scientific racism continues to influence medicine and politics. You can find the study I reference in the podcast here. 

How racialized medicine can worsen outcomes in marginalized communities. 

As always, if you like this podcast, please help support it by heart-reacting it, leaving a positive review on your favorite podcast platform, or sharing it with your friends.
About Angela Saini

Angela Saini is an award-winning journalist and Assistant Professor of Science Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She presents radio, podcasts, and television shows for the BBC among others, and her writing has appeared across the world, including in the Financial Times, National Geographic, Foreign Policy, and Wired.
Angela’s 2023 book, The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, was a finalist for the Orwell Prize for Nonfiction and a Waterstones politics book of the year. Her 2019 book Superior: The Return of Race Science was published to enormous critical acclaim, and became a finalist for the LA Times Book Prize, the Hughes Prize, and the Foyles Book of the Year. Inferior: How Science Got Women Wrong was published in 2017 and named the Physics World book of the Year. Her work has been translated into eighteen languages.
In 2020 Angela was named one of the world’s top 50 thinkers by Prospect magazine, and in 2018 she was voted one of the most respected journalists in the UK. In 2015 she won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Kavli Science Journalism gold award for a BBC Radio 4 documentary about birdsong and human language. She has also received a best feature award from the Association of British Science Writers. Angela started her career with the British broadcaster ITN on its news trainee scheme, before joining the BBC as a reporter, where her six-month investigation into bogus universities featured on the flagship national News at Ten and won a Prix Circom European television news award.
Angela has a Masters in Engineering from Oxford University, and a second Masters in Science and Security from the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. Between 2012 and 2013 she was a Knight Science Journalism Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She was a 2022 Logan Nonfiction Fellow in New York and was in Berlin in summer 2022 as a resident scholar at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute. She has given distinguished and keynote lectures at universities across the world, including the 2022 Simonyi Lecture at Oxford, the Yale Poynter Fellowship lecture in 2022, and the Wollstonecraft Lecture at the London School of Economics in 2023. She was made an honorary fellow of her alma mater Keble College, Oxford in 2023.
You can find Angela’s books, all books recommended on the podcast, and numerous reading lists on the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop page. 
Angela’s latest book will be out in January of 2027, and you can preorder it now.