Read Part One of our interview with groundbreaking cultural historian Elinor Cleghorn, author of 2021 book Unwell Women, and recently released book A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming The Radical History of Mothering, here. In Part Two, we talk about whether women can ‘have it all’, maternal mental health, the rolling back of reproductive rights, the manosphere, Elinor’s inspiring mother, and Elinor finding out she wasn’t immune to the pressure to be a perfect mother
Elinor, I’ve often thought about the women who have come before me: having to bear 10 or more children, losing half of them to illness, being terrified of dying giving birth and leaving their other children motherless. Is it weird to almost feel these women in my cells?
Nope! That was true for me writing this book. I started thinking about my maternal genealogy. My Nan was this boisterous, energetic, sometimes quite angry woman. I adored her, but she was difficult. For women like her, their destiny was work a little bit, get married. Then WW2 happens and, of course, war is bad, but also suddenly you’re a working-class young woman, interacting in the wider world. Then you have to give up this freedom. There must have been unspoken ambivalence and frustration. So I started thinking about how women’s emotions and experiences have been left out of history. I started thinking of my own connection to all these women. I regret that I didn’t ask my mum about her pregnancy with me until I was pregnant. Why don’t we ask more? Why don’t we know more? Why don’t we honour this experience more?
What did your mother say about the book?
I think she was worried that I’d make it look like she had internalised guilt about being a single mother. But I said, ‘I’m only talking about you as my mother and your foster mothering’. In 1999, the year I left home for university, she trained as a foster carer. Until her recent retirement she mothered over 50 children, many of whom came to the U.K. seeking asylum.
My mum is incredible. She had me in 1980 in Thatcher’s Britain, where single mothers, like with the Reagan administration in the U.S, were vilified as welfare scroungers, drains on society. Mum was really into women’s lib, reading magazines about parenting approaches that didn’t involve the nuclear family: raising kids in communes or with your friends, or deciding not to have children. My mum said ‘having you was my decision, I didn’t care what anyone else thought’. She also had support from my grandparents and community. But she worked in the pub, grew her own food. It was hard. Although she didn’t encounter prejudice where we lived, there was societal prejudice. As a single mother it was humiliating to have social-services men coming around to check there was no able-bodied men with her, which would have affected her meagre welfare benefit.
You wrote about a 15th-century Spanish noblewoman who employed a notary to come and check that it was her giving birth!
In medieval Europe, this did happen in elite, aristocratic and royal births because a legitimate child was considered essential to continue patriarchal power. Men had anxiety about children not being theirs, and ‘is she trying to trick anyone?’. There was this male fear of substituted children, that women faked pregnancies, and swapped babies behind closed doors. So that noblewoman – her husband had died, and she’d be in a secure position only if there was an heir. She employed a notary who recorded every detail of what was happening in that birthing room. He looked under the bed. Essentially the midwives were frisked to make sure they didn’t have babies stuck up their jumpers.
You also introduce readers to a 15th-century mystic who you think was experiencing postpartum psychosis?
Yes, mystic Margery Kempe’s extraordinary memoir was found in a house in the 1930s. When she was 21 and had her first baby, she experienced very severe postpartum depression, and it looks like she had postpartum psychosis. In medieval Europe, mental illness was seen as a form of possession. Her description of being confined in her room, thinking devils are attacking her, sounds terrifying. She did these pilgrimages visiting places to discussed her religious visions. A man asked her to visit his wife who was confined to a room at the edge of town, so no one could hear her screaming. She was seen as this demon. She’d been separated from her baby. Margery writes about going to talk to her. This is the first known instance of peer-to-peer support of two women who’ve experienced postpartum psychosis. That knowledge you’re not alone and that somebody understands what you’re going through is such an important part of the road towards recovery.
Today, mental-health service provision in the U.K. and many countries is still terrible. And even now, when more people are writing about their emotional and mental health during pregnancy, after birth and in early motherhood, I feel like it’s still taboo to speak honestly about how it feels, especially about the difficult emotions. Also there’s this narrative around the ‘baby blues’, as if that always explains what’s considered ‘low mood’. Women feel shame if they’re not looking at this baby, thinking, ‘I couldn’t be happier’. There’s also this pernicious belief that knowing how to mother should come naturally.
You had a difficult pregnancy with your second son?
Yes, he had a heart condition [in utero], and that’s how I was diagnosed with lupus. Something in my body was saying, ‘this baby is a disease’. Also, I felt like my body was attacking my baby, which it was at a cellular level, so in my head, I was doing this to him. No one really let me talk about it much at the time, because what might happen could be horrible, whereas I couldn’t think about anything else. He’s 16 now, and is this lovely dude who’s thankfully not had any health issues.
You thought you’d be unaffected by the noise and baggage around what it meant to be a good mother?
Yes. I hadn’t expected to get pregnant for the first time. I was happy about it. But I felt guilt because I was just starting my PhD, wanted to be a really great academic and a really great mama. I did that defence-mechanism self-talk. I thought ‘my baby will sleep, I’ll be able to write and work loads’. I really thought I could emulate my very steely mother: as in, this is my baby and I’m doing it my way. But no matter how immune you think you are to the pressure, the guilt and the desire to be perfect as a mother, you’re not immune.
What do you think of the ‘struggle to juggle’, and the notion that women ‘can’t have it all at the same time’?
I think it depends, with things like flexible working and working from home. My husband and I work from home, but it’s rare to have that option. Our children are older teenagers now, but when they were small, he commuted to work, and I was doing my PhD.
The way workplaces and society are organised is not conducive to mothering. The school day is 9-3, the workday is 8-5 or 9-5. None of it fits. There’s all this struggling about what to do. Many people have to choose between having only one salary, or two salaries with high childcare costs.
I think the ‘women having it all’ question was so front and centre of womanhood in the late 90s and early 2000s when I was a young woman – you can be like the Sex & the City ladies, have the babies, the clothes and the careers. The messaging then was ‘girls can do anything’. And ‘having it all’? We’d need economic assistance and childcare provision so we don’t have to work so hard to have meaningful lives that include being mothers.
We don’t call women spinsters or old maids, anymore. Does stigma against single women still exist?
Spinsterhood was associated with being left on the shelf, having no use. But I feel like we’re rewriting that in literature, TV and films, rather than seeing child-free women as women who haven’t done their social duty and are objects of pity or ridicule, having afternoon tea with their cats. But there’s this ‘under-babied’ thing stemming from the Trump administration, the awful alt-right commentators: this resurgence of the idea that child-free women are unfulfilled, incomplete or useless women. What’s happening in the U.S. with the limitations on or complete removal of abortion care is terrifying. It’s a deliberate tactic to make women police their own bodies. It’s making marginalised women – poorer women, ethnically diverse women, single women, unmarried women – afraid of their bodies, and afraid of becoming pregnant so that they don’t have sex. So what construct is this serving? It’s about the promotion of the nuclear family, coded white and middle-class, where a woman stays at home dependent on her husband.
Anti-abortion stances are more about controlling women than concern for ‘unborn babies’, right?
If it was genuinely about children, money would be poured into maternal healthcare and childcare, with no food insecurity or housing insecurity for mother and child. But often the removal of reproductive rights comes with a reduction in supports for mothering. Because it’s not married women dependent on men who need socialised medicine, food stamps, and subsidised childcare places.
I was watching a U.S. Senate hearing and one man said ‘contraception causes abortion’. The woman debating him asked him for the medical definition of a miscarriage. He couldn’t give one. He could only think about pregnancy loss as intentional ‘murder’. She read the medical definition of miscarriage, which includes the word abortion three times [inevitable abortion, incomplete abortion, missed abortion]. The wilful disinterest and disregard of science, with ideology replacing it, is terrifying.
In the U.K., abortion isstill bound by the criminal code, but with an exemption for under 24 weeks. Currently no woman here will be prosecuted for ending a pregnancy. And people say ‘what’s happened in the U.S could never happen in the U.K’. Yes, it could, because it shows that rights women have over their own bodies are precarious. No matter how embedded you think a right to abortion is, it can be taken away by law-makers. We have to defend our right to it.
What are your thoughts on the manosphere?
The Louis Theroux documentary ‘Inside the Manosphere’ caused a lot of conversations about what exactly draws young men and boys towards this manosphere and these awful misogynists. Some people say it’s because men see women doing so well and feel left behind. But when you take women out of this conversation, what do you see? Unchecked misogyny. And when misogyny is in power, and in the White House, justifications are made for it. I asked my sons, ‘why do you think boys are attracted to the manosphere?’. One said maybe something goes wrong, like a heartbreak or a disappointment, and some boys aren’t socialised to express their emotions, so they internalise it, go online and some guy is saying ‘your life is shit because women, because feminism’.
There’s some rage-inducing stuff in your books. How do you deal with that?
Sometimes, I’ve got to take a break. I feel righteous about it at talks. At the end, when women can ask questions, it often empowers women attending to share their stories. We can talk, get angry, process, laugh. It’s connective. One way to channel our anger is to feel empowered by understanding that we’ve weathered these things for centuries, and we’ve never stayed silent. The patriarchy might try to repeat its history, but women always have, and always will, rewrite it.
*A Woman’s Work is out now.
Photo: © Lara Downie
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