What if the most flattering thing anyone ever said about women was also the most limiting?
Feminist cultural historian Elinor Cleghorn—who kicked off Simplify's independent relaunch with Unwell Women—makes a triumphant return with her new book, A Woman's Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering. The premise she and Caitlin pull apart sounds harmless enough: that mothering is the natural province of every woman. Follow that idea back a few thousand years, though, and it turns out to be doing an awful lot of work for someone. Just not for mothers.
The conversation moves from a tiny clay boat crewed by women sailors in a Cretan cave to the founders of Silicon Valley, by way of Aristotle's distinctly horticultural theory of conception. They get into a stretch of history when a pregnant woman's word was the only evidence that counted, a Parisian midwife to royalty who was centuries ahead of modern maternity care, and the surprisingly tender origins of a word we now use as an insult.
There's also a thread about the Virgin Mary that might change how you hear the phrase "good mother"—and a clear-eyed take on what baby bonuses and motherhood medals actually reveal about the governments handing them out.
And keep an ear out for Zeus's forehead. It explains more about the AI boom than you might think.
Resources
Elinor's book: A Woman's Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering
Elinor's earlier book: Unwell Women , and our first conversation with her about it.
Ben's Rec: Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici
Caitlin's Rec: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Honorable mention: Midwifing the Mother, the Substack by former Simplify guest Angela Natividad.
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This episode of Simplify was produced by Caitlin Schiller, Ben Schuman-Stoler, and Molly Hart, and engineered by João Lucas in Berlin, Germany, for Kollo Media.
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