Free Daily Podcast Summary
Liberating Motherhood: Daily Summaries Delivered
by Liberating Motherhood
Mothers are tired of anti-mother misogyny, household labor inequality, and a culture that expects mothers to bear the burdens of its many shortcomings--all without complaint. Mothers are vital to feminism, and have been neglected in feminist discourse for far too long. Mothers are constantly told that political problems are personal--that if we communicate better, mother better, behave better, things will improve. The only path to change is through widespread political change. That's what this podcast is about. Maternal feminism is an important prong of social justice work, and all people interested in a just world should care about what happens to mothers, families, and children.
Latest Episodes
The most recent episodes — sign up to get AI-powered summaries of each one.
- 4 days ago56 min
S4 Ep2: Jess Calarco: How Women Became the Social Safety net
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 CalarcoDr. 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.
- 1 weeks ago49 min
S4 Ep1: Gemma Hartley: No One Loves an Angry Woman
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 HartleyGemma 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.
- Aug 5, 202656 min
S3 Ep21: Angela Saini: Who Benefits From Convincing Us Oppression is Natural?
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 SainiAngela 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.
- Jul 22, 202653 min
S3 Ep20: Angela Jones: Sex as a Political Act
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 JonesAngela 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.
- Jul 15, 202655 min
S3 Ep19: The myth of misandry--and why hating men is not morally equivalent to hating women
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.
- Jul 8, 202647 min
S3 Ep18: Valena Beety: The Criminalization of Mothers and Motherhood
Two weeks ago, I interviewed Justine van der Leun about criminalized survival, and why women so often end up in prison for “crimes” of self-defense. The truth is that women often end up in prison for behaviors that aren’t criminal at all—not just for self-defense or for killing. Today we are talking about the widespread victimization of women at the hands of the legal system. Patriarchy specifically targets mothers, and women from oppressed groups, then weaponizes our identities. Sometimes it uses these identities to prosecute and incarcerate us. Attorney and activist Valena Beety has worked to overturn wrongful convictions, taught other lawyers about the injustices in the criminal justice system, and is now a powerful advocate for systemic change. She joined me on the podcast to discuss her new book, Pink Crime: Fighting Against the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer Identity. The ways our criminal justice system (and associated systems, like CPS) silence and control women. How motherhood creates unique vulnerabilities within the criminal justice system. How women can end up in jail or prison even when they are innocent, and even when there was no crime at all. The criminalization of tragedies: stillbirth, infant and child deaths, and miscarriages. Prosecutions of abortions and miscarriages. How our fear promotes victim-blaming, and how victim-blaming revictimizes women who survive trauma. Criminalized victimization, and how the legal system weaponizes women’s trauma against them. Bias in prosecution, and how prosecutors get tunnel vision and decide a woman deserves punishment no matter what. The ways in which we criminalize and punish disabled mothers. How a coercive system weaponizes women’s trauma, and can easily induce false confessions. Pink Crime is an incredible book. Read it. Buy it. Give it to your friends. Pre-orders matter greatly for the success of a book, and they show publishers the importance of feminist work. I hope you’ll consider pre-ordering it. Valena has graciously offered a coupon code for my readers, that you can use to buy her book here. Simply enter code I’ve listed all of Valena’s books, as well as all of the books I mention on the podcast, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop. The excellent paper by Valena that I reference in the podcast is here. About Valena BeetyA wrongful convictions litigator and former federal prosecutor, Valena Beety is the McKinney Professor of Law at Indiana University-Bloomington Maurer School of Law and a co-founder of the Indiana Innocence Project. Her book Manifesting Justice received a Gold Medal in Women’s Issues from the Independent Publishers Book Award, and her coursebook The Wrongful Convictions Reader is used in classrooms nationwide to teach about wrongful convictions. Her latest book, Pink Crime, examines the Criminalization of Motherhood, Pregnancy, and Queer IdentityShe lives in Indiana with her wife, daughter, and tripod dog.
- Jun 24, 20261h 0m
S3 Ep17: Justine van der Leun: Criminalized Survival
In patriarchy, there is no sure escape from violent relationships. The courts and police may not help. Friends and family may turn their backs. And even when a woman’s life is in danger, she does not have the same right to self-defense as a man. Journalist Justine van der Leun began researching this phenomenon when she learned about Nikki Addimando, a woman who killed her abusive partner in self-defense. Thanks to a grassroots campaign and some great lawyers, Nikki has now been freed, but just a few years ago, Nikki was sentenced to 19 years to life. Justine wondered how many other Nikkis were out there. Experts told her that jails and prisons are full of women just like Nikki. Her new book, Unreasonable Women, is about what we do to women who kill in self-defense, as well as the patriarchal norms that reinforce men’s right to violence—and women’s right only to die from men’s violence. In this conversation, we confront the reality of criminalized survival, and patriarchy’s unquenchable desire to punish abuse victims. Some of the topics we cover include: Criminalized survival, and why our legal system ignores women’s right to self-defense. Why being in an abusive relationship is a risk factor for ending up in prison. The crime of surviving as an abuse victim. The common theme that government will spend few or no resources to help impoverished kids, abused kids, or battered women, but will quickly and competently put those same people in prison, expending massive resources to do so. The expectation that women being attacked by men will apply a perfect legal standard of self-defense, exert more self-control than we expect from trained police officers, and behave like perfect victims at all times. The concept of violence against women as regulated rather than illegal. Stories of three women who killed in self-defense, and how all three ended up incarcerated. Unreasonable Women is out now. I hope you’ll buy it, since doing so supports feminist scholarship and shows publishers that we want more feminist work. You can find Justine’s book, as well as all books I mention on the podcast, along with several reading lists, at the Liberating Motherhood Bookshop.About Justine van der Leun Justine van der Leun is a journalist, author, and creator and host of the acclaimed podcast Believe Her. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, New York Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, and The Guardian. She has received fellowships from New America, the Emerson Collective, and PEN America, and more. Justine brings both deep investigative reporting and a thoughtful, engaging interview presence to conversations about violence, justice, and survival.
- Jun 17, 202655 min
S3 Ep16: (Rerun) Loretta Ross: Calling In, Building Sustainable Activism, and Changing Minds
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. In the meantime, I’ve made no secret that this one of my all-time favorite episodes, and that interviewing Loretta Ross is one of the most enjoyable things I’ve ever done. I hope you love this episode; it’s so important for us to cultivate the skills Loretta teaches. Today we are going to be learning from the legendary reproductive justice activist Loretta Ross. Loretta is my feminist hero and role model, and I feel so lucky that she was willing to share some time with me. How is it that a human rights movement rooted in the shared value and worth of every human being so often devolves into a toxic stew of abuse and hurt feelings? Anyone who participates in leftist political movements has seen small disagreements spiral into mutual attacks, psychological brutality, and worst of all, fractured and less powerful movements. Lasting change requires us to build solidarity across difference. At the very least, we must be able to resolve small disagreements. Ideally, though, we have to bring more people into the fold—including people we really don’t like, including people with whom we have very significant moral disagreements. I’ve often noted that the anti-choice movement succeeded by standing in lockstep with one another, no matter how much they hated each other. They built a movement for 50 years, and they succeeded. We can learn a lot from them. But leftist coalitions are diverse and highly principled. These are good things, but they can make it challenging to work together. So I’ve been thinking a lot about how we can do this. And then I found Loretta Ross’s book, Calling In. It has helped me to consider my own role in toxic call-out culture, and to seize opportunities to build consensus and coalitions rather than elevating myself and my ego. This, I think, is the only way we move forward. There’s lots of advice about how to be a better activist, what this moment means, and how to deal with people who disagree with us. I think the most useful advice comes from people who have actually succeeded at sustaining a lifetime of activism. Loretta has changed hearts and minds over and over, working with people many of us would never even want to talk to. She has done the work that progress demands, and now she’s here to teach us how to do it, too. You’ll recognize some of what we discuss from my earlier episode about sustaining hope as an activist. I cannot over-emphasize how much Loretta’s work has shifted my consciousness and influenced my own work, and I hope you find her wisdom as valuable as I do. Some of the topics we cover in this conversation include: Toxic call-out culture, and how it is destroying individual well-being as well as activist movements. How childhood wounds create toxic shame that we then foist onto our activist colleagues. How we build resilience and capacity to work across difference. Calling out vs. calling in, and how we know when to do each. Loretta’s experiences working with rapists and deprogramming white supremacist. How our egos can undermine our activism, and how we resist that temptation. The components of an effective call-in, and how to know when a call-in is likely to work. “When you ask people to give up hate, you must be prepared to be there for them when they do.” The concept of the victimized violator—the person who feels entitled to violate others because of their own victimization. How to respond to a call-out or call-in. Can we use calling in with ICE officers? How we can acknowledge the humanity of those doing harm without losing sight of their victims. How we sustain hope and avoid despair. About Loretta Ross Loretta J. Ross is a Professor at Smith College in Northampton, MA in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender. She teaches courses on white supremacy, human rights, and calling in the calling out culture. She has taught at Hampshire College and Arizona State University. She is a graduate of Agnes Scott College and holds an honorary Doctorate of Civil Law degree awarded in 2003 from Arcadia University and a second honorary doctorate degree awarded from Smith College in 2013. She also has credits towards a Ph.D. in Women’s Studies from Emory University. She serves as a consultant for Smith College, collecting oral histories of feminists of color for the Sophia Smith Collection, which also contains her personal archives. Loretta also is a recipient o
About Liberating Motherhood
Mothers are tired of anti-mother misogyny, household labor inequality, and a culture that expects mothers to bear the burdens of its many shortcomings--all without complaint. Mothers are vital to feminism, and have been neglected in feminist discourse for far too long. Mothers are constantly told that political problems are personal--that if we communicate better, mother better, behave better, things will improve. The only path to change is through widespread political change. That's what this podcast is about. Maternal feminism is an important prong of social justice work, and all people interested in a just world should care about what happens to mothers, families, and children.
Customized Recaps
AI-powered recaps with compact key takeaways, quotes, and insights.
Straight to Your Inbox
Get key takeaways from Liberating Motherhood in a 5-minute read.
Save Hours Every Week
Stay current on your favorite podcasts without falling behind.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Podzilla's Liberating Motherhood daily summary?
It's a free AI-powered email that summarizes new episodes of Liberating Motherhood as soon as they're published. You get the key takeaways, notable quotes, and links & mentions — all in a quick read.
How does the Liberating Motherhood podcast summary work?
When a new episode drops, our AI transcribes and analyzes it, then generates a personalized summary tailored to your interests and profession. It's delivered to your inbox every morning.
Is this an official Liberating Motherhood product?
No. Podzilla is an independent service that summarizes publicly available podcast content. We're not affiliated with or endorsed by Liberating Motherhood.
Can I get summaries of other podcasts too?
Absolutely! The free plan covers up to 3 podcasts. Upgrade to Pro for 15, or Premium for 50. Browse our full catalog at /podcasts.
How often does Liberating Motherhood release new episodes?
Liberating Motherhood publishes weekly. Our AI generates a summary within hours of each new episode.
What topics does Liberating Motherhood cover?
Liberating Motherhood covers topics including Philosophy, Culture, Society & Culture. Our AI identifies the specific themes in each episode and highlights what matters most to you.
Start getting Liberating Motherhood summaries tomorrow morning.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.
Free forever for up to 3 podcasts. No credit card required.