Liberating Motherhood

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.

No matter how much we try to relegate sexuality to the most private corner of our lives, it inevitably escapes. Sex is not really a private act. It’s a political one, which both influences and is influenced by our culture, politics, history, and more. 
Angela Jones’s new book, Sex in Public, names sex as a public act, and talks about what it means for our sexuality to be politically and socially constructed and reconstructed. She has so much wisdom on so many topics, and I was thrilled to get to talk to her. 
Some of the subjects we cover include: 

Angela’s incredible new book, Sex in Public, which everyone should go out and buy immediately. 

What truly comprehensive sex education actually looks like, and how parents can get better at talking to their kids about sex and sexuality.

Teaching bodily autonomy and consent, and how we are teaching kids sexual ethics well before we talk to them about sex.

How teaching kids consent can be an act of challenging authority, and why this is often difficult for parents. 

Why sexuality cannot exist independence of politics and culture, and how this makes sex a political act. 

Desirability politics, and how systems of power shape who and what we are attracted to.

Sexuality as something that is constantly in flux—not a fixed identity.

The hollowness of the notion of sexual empowerment, and how sex positivity has been reduced to the freedom to have sex. 

About Angela Jones
Angela Jones is Professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Stony Brook University. Jones’s research interests include sexualities; sex work; Black feminist theory and methods; trans studies; and African American political thought and protest. They are an award-winning teacher and writer, as well as a winner of the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities.
Jones’s newest trade book, Sex in Public: The Transformative Social Power of Our Erotic Lives, will be published with Seal Press/Hachette in May 2026. Jones is also the author of the award-winning book Camming: Money, Power, and Pleasure in the Sex Industry (NYU Press, 2020) and African American Civil Rights: Early Activism and the Niagara Movement (Bloomsbury, 2011). They are a co-author of Black Lives Matter: A Reference Handbook (2025, Bloomsbury) and co-editor of Sex Work Today: Erotic Labor in the 21st Century (NYU Press, 2024).
Jones is the editor of the award-winning reference book, African American Activism and Political Engagement: An Encyclopedia of Empowerment (Bloomsbury, 2023). Jones is also a co-editor of the three-volume After Marriage Equality book series (Routledge, 2018). Jones has also edited two other anthologies: The Modern African American Political Thought Reader: From David Walker to Barack Obama (Routledge, 2012) and A Critical Inquiry into Queer Utopias (Palgrave, 2013).
They are also the author of scholarly articles, which have been published in peer-reviewed journals such as The Black Scholar; Social Problems; Gender & Society; Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society; Sexualities; Disability Studies Quarterly; Porn Studies; International Journal of Gender, Sexuality, and Law; Culture, Health, and Sexuality; Sociology Compass; Fat Studies. An Interdisciplinary Journal of Body Weight and Society; Sexuality and Culture; Sociological Focus; The Journal of Historical Sociology;and Interalia: a Journal of Queer Studies.
You can learn more about Angela and her work on her website.

Rather than taking the summer entirely off, I’m reducing my podcasting frequency to every other week, and posting reruns of some of my favorite episodes during the off weeks. I’ll be back to full-time in the fall. 

Do I hate men? Should you? Yes. No. Maybe. Misogynist men love to weaponize false claims of misandry against women. In fact, one of the clearest signs that a man is a misogynist is that he thinks misandry is real, common, and a threat. 
Jeff and I have wanted to talk about bogus claims of misandry for a long time. Here’s the result. 
Some of the many topics we talk about in this podcast include: 

Why we need to stop saying “sexual coercion” or “obligatory sex” and start calling it rape. 

The history of the term “misandrist,” and why it’s always been a part of bad faith arguments against women’s rights. 

Does Zawn hate men? (Jeff’s answers: “No. Yes. Not all men.”)

Why so many men see movements for women’s rights as a threat. 

Why men who actually like women are unthreatened by feminism. 

Men’s frustration at having to actually work for things. 

Jeff on the most pathetic kind of sex anyone can have. 

Why misandry can never be analogous to misogyny.

The disparity between Zawn and Jeff’s experiences complaining about poor medical care. 

Why men are so committed to wasting so much of women’s time. 

We end with our new feature, the Liberating Motherhood Complaint Box. This is where we address the whining, bloviating nonsense your husbands tell you about my podcast specifically, or feminism more generally. It culminates in Zawn referring to a man as a “loser bitch.” 

Make your partner’s ignorance famous, and subject him to my judgment! You can submit your own complaint for next month’s complaint box here. Please only use this form to submit complaints from men specifically about feminism or my podcast—not general complaints, not general questions, not general messages for me. 

If you need to contact me for something else, you can find forms for just about everything on the Liberating Motherhood website. 

We have new kittens, and they currently live in my office, which they are destroying. They are aspiring misandrists, and were quite interested in the podcast. For this reason, you’ll hear some background noises. Just remember that these minor annoyances come from these adorable angels: 

If you’d like to contribute a story for the podcast, you can submit it here.