Motherhood Archives - Public Seminar

Activism

Against Innocence

Unravelling the myth of the depoliticized child

March 4, 2026 • by Alexandra Magearu

1. In my early twenties, I was captivated by the idea that creative processes can return us to the boundless dreamscapes of our childhood. Only back then, I thought, could we afford to experience the world somatically. Not yet captured by social conventions, our bodies had the potential to become everything. ...

Body & Mind

Mothers Resist!

Why communal care must be at the heart of feminism

September 12, 2025 • by Maggie Wyss

Privatized parenting asks individuals to do the work of a village and then punishes them when they can’t keep up....

Reviews

My Life in Wonderland

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll

July 27, 2022 • by Wendy Doniger

My mother seemed to me, when I was a child, a combination of the Queen of Hearts and the Red Queen. She was, like the Queen of Hearts, idiosyncratic and imperious, someone with whom you could never win an argument, even when you knew you were right and she was ...

Feminism

Not a Labor of Love

The radicalization of motherhood

March 14, 2022 • by Catrin Ashton and Silvia Federici

t was argued that domestic work doesn’t produce any social wealth, is a backward activity, and that it isn’t really part of the capitalist organization of work and, therefore, women who are mostly involved with this kind of work do not have the power to change society....

Literature

Libertie

In Brooklyn in 1860, a daughter watches her mother bring a patient back from the dead, in this excerpt from Kaitlyn Greenidge’s second novel

December 15, 2021 • by Kaitlyn Greenidge

I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. “It still didn’t help him much, my love,” she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That’s how I knew she was magic....

Interviews

How Much of History Is a Haunting? An Interview with Kaitlyn Greenidge

The author shares the process behind her new novel, Libertie, in a conversation with Mira Jacob

December 15, 2021 • by Kaitlyn Greenidge and Mira Jacob

Upon the publication of Libertie, novelist Kaitlyn Greenidge chatted with Mira Jacob about ghost stories, historical fiction, and craft....

How Much of History Is a Haunting? An Interview with Kaitlyn Greenidge

Uncategorized

Immigrant Mothers as Agents of Change

May 27, 2014 • by Agata Lisiak

In a recent interview with the German daily Frankfurter Allgemeiner Zeitung, Elisabeth Badinter bemoans new trends in motherhood emerging in France. The French feminist observes that growing numbers of French mothers -- though they are still a minority, she is quick to add -- are becoming preoccupied with ...