HistFest 2026: Birth, Motherhood & Custody – An Untold History

Good morning everybody at the British Library and everyone watching at home and welcome to Histfest day two and the first event of today which is birth, motherhood and custody and untold history. Um so our first uh our first participant is uh Lara Fel. She is the author of four highly acclaimed works of cultural history and a novel, professor of modern literature and culture at King's College London and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She re reviews regularly for the Guardian and contributes to a range of BBC radio programs. Most recently, um, Lara appeared as a lead contributor in the landmark BBC1 cultural history of the inter war years, art that made Made Us, and she wrote and presented a program about Doris Leing for the Radio 4 prestigious archive hour slot. She's here today to discuss her latest book, Custody, the Secret History of Mothers. And Lucy Les, she is a historian and novelist and occasionally a television and radio presenter. Her first book, George and London: Into the Streets, was a finalist for the History Today Longwind Prize. Lucy is also the author of the international bestseller Milk of Paradise, a history of opium, which was book of the week for Radio 4 and the Sunday Times. She lives in London with her husband and their wire hair dashed. She's here, sorry I didn't write these. She's here today to speak about her latest book, Born the Untold History of Childirth. And finally, our chair, Pragya Argawal, is a professor of social inequities and behavioral and da uh behavioral and data scientist. She's the founder of the research think tank, the 50% project, investigating global gender inequalities. And she's the author of four widely acclaimed non-fiction books, including Sway, which was Guardian Book of the Week, and NYPL Book of the Day. Hysterical and Motherhood were um nominated as best smart thinking and popular science books of the year. Thank you very much. Oh, good morning. Hope you can hear me. Um so we are here so I'm Pragya Garwal and we are here to talk about these two really fantastic books. You haven't read them uh you're in for a delight. Um they're thoroughly well researched and really urgent and speak to something that's hap like of the time basically although they're both historical they are very much of the time and what's happening right now. Um so I'm going to um so today we'll talk for about 40 45 minutes and then we'll take questions from the audience. So have a think about what you want to ask these two authors. Um I would like to get back to my children's birthday party this afternoon. So hopefully we can make that. Um so I think we're going to start by a reading from each of these two authors. So we'll start with you Lara and if you could give us a little background context of the reading um for about 5 to eight minutes and then we'll move on to Lucy. Thank you. >> Great. Thank you. Thanks for coming. It's great to be back in the British Library. Um so my book Custody is a history of child custody cases from 1800 to the present told through six case studies. Um, and I use those case studies to kind of illuminate the background, reading lots of of sort of ordinary case files around them, but really bringing out these big biographical intimate stories. And I'm going to read the very beginning of the book, which sort of throws the reader straight into the story of George Saund, the French novelist who um found herself in a custody case. She had married very young as people often did at that in in the early 19th century, been slightly sort of forced into marriage by her own precarious situation. And very quickly they realized that they were incompatible and somehow she had the gumption uh that rather than sort of facing it at home, she she sort of radically changed her life. She negotiated a settlement with him where she could they could sort of alternate periods when and she would go off uh to Paris. She dressed as a man. She immediately found herself with lovers and um began writing and the only thing that that she missed in Paris was her children. And and she realized that actually the more her husband was becoming increasingly sort of irassable and started sort of bringing out shotguns and chasing her and various guests around the house. and she she realized that they needed an actual separation at this point. Divorce uh wasn't possible in France and found herself in a custody case terrified she was going to lose it. It wasn't in the 19th century in England. No woman who was openly adulterous who had written books of the kind that George S had got could possibly have won a custody case. and Saund um I don't want to give too much of a plot spoiler away but she was basically the kind of only woman of her time who managed to win a custody case and it was largely we'll we'll talk more I think about the difference internationally and the law but it was largely because of French law being sort of way ahead of its time uh in in the kind of rights it gave children that that France had just really because of the language of rights that was developing but so I throw the reader right into this moment in 1836 where Saund is waiting for her case and she knows it's going to be an enormous struggle and she knows that everything about her private life is going to be sort of paraded in the press that her husband's going to read out letters that she's kind of written to him trying to be open and honest about their lives that are suddenly going to get sort of turned into these these kind of inflamed legal documents. A woman plunges into the river on fully dressed. To anyone passing by, she must look mad or worse, driven by a death wish. But for her, there is the relief of cool water slicing hot skin after walking for hours in the 30° heat. She swims in the gently flowing water weighed down by two layers of ankle length fabric. In Paris, she's becoming notorious for her habit of wearing men's clothes. But here at her ancestral home, deep in the Lir Valley, she's wearing the voluminous dresses of her times. She gets out and walks on, her clothes drying clamy in the sun, and then swims again, hanging her wet dress on a bush this time and swimming in her petticoat. Once more, she races on, testing her body, pushing it. By the end of the day, she'll have walked nine miles. She is exhausting herself with these exertions, turning the loveliness of the summer countryside into a setting as gruelling as it is ecstatic. She's waiting to appear in court, sacrificing her reputation to fight for her children against a husband driven by punitive anger. She has to keep moving because to stop would leave her confronting the quieter emptiness of sadness and fear. These children who she's always taken for granted are hers could be taken from her and they know it as children usually do. Her seven-year-old daughter at boarding school writes sadly to her mother experiencing this brief unwanted separation as the lifetime of division that her father wants for her. She tells her dutifully about the eclipse of the son she's witnessed, assuring her that she's done all the spelling and the letters herself. Her 12-year-old son is more involved in her affairs. His friends at school read about the court case in the newspapers. He knows what's said about his mother as a woman who writes and a woman with lovers and he defends her. I have courage for my age, he assures her, aware that this is a battle and that he is required to take a side. If my father loses, he will think he is dishonored. But I don't want you to lose, my poor vier. He's her protector, but he's also a troubled boy who wishes none of this was happening and fantasizes that one day his parents might reconcile. >> Thank you so much, Laura. Really touching, beautiful. Lucy, I'll invite you to to >> Thank you. Hi everyone. Thanks for coming. Um so my book starts at the beginning of what we know from archaeology which is from the Neandertols the experience of uh well any experience that that is associated with the act of pregnancy and birth or infant mortality and it finishes with what is essentially it's a new law in America uh DoddS versus Jackson but it is the unpicking of uh the right to abortion law Ro v. Wade. Uh, and it's not. So, we'll get into that, I'm sure, at some point in the discussion. Um, Ro v. Wade is not abortion on demand as many people think, but uh, Dosby Jackson is certainly uh, a conservative act that is severely limiting women's choices in America right now. And there are many, many murmurings across the world. uh moving towards very strict control of reproductive rights which is something that we should be aware of and that was what uh sparked the the writing of this book and also my own personal journey which is involved in these pages. So I'm going to read you part of the introduction and uh hopefully we'll have a good discussion later on. So mamoto is swuahili for mother child. Sadly these are necessary. I was hoping it wasn't going to be the case. It is one of the few words we have to describe the physical closeness of mother and newborn in those first early months before the two can said to be truly separate beings. Uh those of you with children will recognize that phase when they start to look beyond mom slightly and that's when self is is developing. Before that, for the Swahili, it's Mamoto. The um the state of Mamoto is just one part of what makes the human experience of birth unique from that of other primates and animals. We are born before we are fully developed, rendering us vulnerable, relying on our mothers and caregivers to feed and tend us long after most young animals have already left the nest. There are exceptions to this obviously um um throughout the animal kingdom but u we are quite unique. Scientists call this extended dependency when we are no less dependent on our mother outside the womb than we were inside the altitual state. This phenomenon is thought to be related to the fact that child birth is more dangerous for us than for most other animals. Considering the size of newborns, our pelvises are narrow, making labor longer and more painful. This means that since the dawn of humanity, women have sought assistance and companionship during childbirth. This assistance has in turn become ritualized over the millennia, creating bonds and promoting the sharing of knowledge within communities. From ancient Manoan temples to contemporary baby showers, women have found ways to build the networks of support and advice they need to help them when the time comes to cross the transformational threshold of parenthood. Vastly divergent traditions accompany these rituals of pregnancy and childirth across the globe, but they often contain themes of control from forbidden foods to prehibited sex positions, lucky colors, or items of clothing. Many of these rituals persist today, reflecting the deep mysticism and psychological shift that still surrounds the physical experience of creating new life. Even in cultures that have embraced science and raised our chances of survival. In a similar way, the battle over who controls reproduction is not new. Women have always tried to control their own fertility. Even if for most of it, most of history, the only truly reliable method was complete abstinence. There is evidence that even among the paleolithic hunter gatherers, women limited their fertility through the means available to them, herbal methods and breastfeeding, things like that. So many of the questions we are wrestling with today were faced by women thousands of years ago. And perhaps by looking back at their experiences, it can be possible to navigate a way forward. This book contains many stories of individual women and mothers pieced together from ice age bone fragments, medical scrolls, and 19th century pamphlets about contraception. But their voices have not been easy to find. Perhaps this is why this book took me 15 years to research and write, and why it often felt like I was embarking on uncharted territory, searching for the stories and lived experience that I knew existed. Because for all of history, the majority of women have given birth, but we're unrecorded. The input of women has so often been negated and overridden by the masculine voices of doctors, husbands, organized religions, and theorists who have denied the needs, challenges, and realities of pregnant and laboring women. But the history of childbirth includes other men, too. ones who dedicated their lives to making child birth safer and others who took on a supportive role as the women they loved and ch and had children with went on to change the way we think about birth and sex. When I first set out to discover the history of childbirth, my husband and I were trying for the children we longed to have but eluded us having moment. For a long time, I struggled to identify my place within the world of motherhood. Yet, as time passed, I came to realize that parenthood is far more than the quest to pass on our DNA or to build the familial bonds that will shepherd us through our lives. How a society thinks about childbirth is a reflection of how it views and treats its women. And so, perhaps it is no surprise that this fundamental power to create and carry new life is so often used to undermine women's autonomy. We are living in a time of fathomless change for women all across the world. As my window of opportunity to have a child closed, a door opened that allowed me to learn about what birth meant for others, for societ for society and people for us as people. Ultimately, every successful birth of a healthy child is a small victory for humanity and a life-changing moment for the mother. Pregnancy and birth are attended by myriad personal, emotional, social, physical dangers, but also joy, triumph, and wonder. In nine short months from two cells, the body constructs a new life and brings it into the world in a unique moment where all is possible. The practicalities and the power struggles of childbirth have shaped nations, but also individual identity and continue to do so. We begin in prehistory and end today with a reversal of Ro v Wayade, taking in the cries from the medieval birthing chair and the calls to rally of our modern age. This is how we are born. Thank you. Thank you so much. Um so I'm going to start with you Lara and um I just wanted to start from the very start. The title says custody, the secret history of mothers and I wanted to have hear your thoughts on why the secret. What does it allude to? Yeah, I mean it's partly I think that um I think there's a the common conception in the culture that custody is generally a sort of maternal responsibility that mothers are more often given custody and I think it is certainly true that in the majority of cases of separating couples mothers end up with custody but it's in fact it's been a very consistent story through the courts that women have lost custody um initially you know in sort of basically every case. Uh even there are cases in the 19th century where the man was in prison but still got custody. Um and even in the eras like the 1970s when broadly there was a kind of international sense that children needed to be with mothers, women who transgressed were losing custody. And so it's it's sort of a in a way it's saying it's it's a history of mothers who have in some way defied the norm in some way not been this sort of cultural insistent ideal of a good mother and how that that history all along has been um sort of children losing access to their mothers. So so there's that and then there's also the fact that the history of custody just hasn't been told. It's quite hard archally to piece it together. Um, interestingly, uh, legal history is quite a small area academically and it tends to be criminal his legal history that there's family law history. I sort of realized when I embarked on this there are only about three family legal historians in Britain and they're brilliant, but so far they haven't sort of specifically applied themselves to to children. Um, so it's also just a sort of history that I felt needed to be brought to light. >> Thank you. Um there are a couple of things here that I would follow up um through the discussion. The idea of um bad mothers perhaps and the idea of transgressions as well. And I just want to follow up quickly on how do you think uh this this so I was researching last year about um bias in criminal justice systems and justice system generally and the idea that there are certain ways that women are discriminated against within a court uh setting um based on the idea of how they should emote or based on the idea how they should present themselves. How do you how what have you found through your research? How much that is bearing to this case of custody? >> Yeah, I mean I so so my research has been partly archival and has also involved me sitting in as a journalist in the present. So I in a way I found the same things in both for women who are seen as too strong are seen as less maternal um that there's a kind of requirement to emote but then there's also a danger because as soon as you start emoting you might be seen as hysterical. And so one of my chapters is about a woman called Elizabeth Packard in 1860s America whose husband put her in an asylum because husbands turned out to have the she didn't know this but husbands turned out to have the right to sort of sign you into an asylum. Um and there of course then she was on she was in this asylum trying to insist she was sane. All her emoting and and crying and and sort of try struggling became seen by the doctors as as a sort of sign that she wasn't in fact a sane person. And so it kind of goes in both directions. But I think absolutely there's a a sense and I think in in the contemporary courts I sort of realize it's you know that sense that people have in the kind of psychoanalyst consulting room where everything is about the transference. Everything who however you are in that 50-minute session is is is who you are. That that's what the analyst goes on. And there's the same sense in the courts that the judge makes their decision on based on the sort of three hours they've witnessed this person. Um, and somehow your manner in that very fake scenario, uh, how how you behave to to your ex-husband who who may have been violent, who may, you know, there's this whole back history is meant to sum up who you are and who you might be with the children they haven't actually met. >> And I think this goes back through time and continues now that that there's a sense of of too much emphasis being placed on um some kind of sort of interpersonal magic in a way. >> Yeah. the idea of what a materna looks like and I think I'm going to follow up with that with you Lucy. um you talked a little bit about your motivation for writing the book and it's very um touching about why you wanted to look at the history but also how it relates to the idea of womanhood and motherhood the idea of reproduction and idea of birth and and I wonder what you found through your research in terms of how the the idea of how birth has been seen or written about is linked to this idea of what makes a good mother or not. Yeah, the there's there are lots of different there are so many views all over the world. Uh but the act of so the there are still lots of moral connections with so infertility in lots of cultures and certainly in Britain uh is linked with sha shame is something that I think we we've all touched on in in our work. Um, shaming women. Women can be shamed for anything. I mean, we all know this. Uh, um, you know, you're not smiling enough, number one. Um, but coming down, I mean, I certainly experienced a lot of shame associated with my failed pregnancies. Uh and then I because we started trying earlier than than a lot of our friends uh it became more noticeable you know when you get to 30 and then suddenly they are getting married and in the first year they're pregnant and then you're the people that have been trying and try and you're not pregnant you're still not pregnant and then you know and then it gets a bit tiresome and then and then people and it's the female friends really. they stop telling you they're pregnant even though you've heard from someone else they're pregnant and you go out with them and they don't tell you. And then I did actually confront this with a couple of my friends and said, you know, just because I can't do this doesn't mean I don't enjoy it that you can which thankfully that is something that I don't have in me that that I certainly felt sorry for myself but I didn't it didn't affect my feelings towards other people. I was really happy for them but it becomes more and there is 100% um an a journalist uh who I was on friendly terms with uh wrote a piece for the Guardian just after I'd had a miscarriage and and she just had a baby and it was about how women who've had children sit around at coffee mornings and judge other women who are in their social circle and when they've all got their baby on on their lap and they say what's you know what's wrong with their marriage or what's wrong with her and they actually say and this was appeasing the guardian. I was reading it and I looked and I was looking at her picture in it and I was thinking did she this is this is someone I actually know and I knew it wasn't aimed at me so much. It was aimed at getting paid for writing something having just had a baby. So that was why and I did send her an email and and I said Elellanena did you actually write this like and she said I'm so sorry I know how it would have come across and she said it did pray on my mind. I thought yeah yeah the check didn't pray on your mind so much. So, um, but that kind of like really hammered it home that this is what other people might be thinking about me because all my friends were really supportive and really kind and they might be getting it wrong by not by saying the wrong thing or or just saying something that hurts you at the time because as we and some people will know um pregnancy and loss and and successful pregnancies are you are living in the eye of the hormone storm. I mean you cannot predict your own behavior. Um, and you can hear your your sound brain saying, "No, no, no, no need to get wound up." And it's already out of your mouth and flying around the walls. So, you can't It's a very difficult time. And I and I certainly was ashamed of my failure. I mean, I'm for I'm 48 now. Um, just clinging on for the last few weeks. But um I've had kind of and we said that we would stop at 40 cuz you know I didn't want to be the just and that's fine if you don't stop at 40 but I had to put a limitation on the loss for me otherwise I'd have gone completely bonkers. So I've had time to recalibrate now and obviously I get emotional when I talk about these things. Um and you can't tell where that's going to come from either. Sometimes I can read that and be absolutely fine. And um so it there are learning to live with writing about also writing about this profound act of fertility, the successful birth which you realize is so culturally embedded in us like a new baby. Um and it and reconciling that with now I I couldn't have written this book eight years ago. I mean, when I I was 38, I once had to have a discussion with myself about why I should not take the baby out of the pram in John Lewis that was not mine. I actually had to have this discussion. It was really serious. It was like, I want that baby. How far could I get? Could I get to the Lake District? that actually went through my mind before the the true manhunt came on you know and um so you are it it's um you know that is a particularly uh you are living in a in a and also with pregnancy uh which is something else I think we'll we'll touch on you it's all each pregnancy is different and everything is new to you so so you are learning on the job I mean you know if you want to adopt a cat from the Blue Cross. That's three visits. You only you only need one for a baby. Uh and it's not from the Blue Cross. And uh so, you know, it it's just a learning experience the whole time at a time when you are experiencing just the most incredible emotional and physical challenges. And that coupled with societal attitudes is particularly patriarchal society attitudes. Not all men um but You're you're trying to live in a cage when you you are quite and your body is a cage. It's a protective cage. um uh you use uh onion the French and it's interesting we have completely different views because it's it means a fortified situation and I think and and I think you see that as quite por porative because you're walled off and I see it in a in a positive light uh because it's protective of the baby and certainly when when I was uh pregnant one real time in particular I was on the Millennium Bridge walking the dog and you know those zorbing bubbles Um, I was walking the dog. This is just before we got married. And um, I was walking along the Millennium Bridge with a dog and I was in absorbing bubble. I thought, "Oh my god, I'm pregnant again." And um, because I was not interested at all in I was fortified from everything outside me. It had all gone inside. every all my thought process were only any anything that was more than 3 ft away from me was apart from the dog was of no interest. That was it. And and so I knew anyway I'm I'm babbling now but um so yeah so so you are in in this situation at the same time as the crushing load of society is is around you as well. Yeah. So yeah, >> I think there is a whole sense of how society perceives womanhood and motherhood that comes across in both of your books interlaced with your personal experiences which is quite painful but humorous and also poignant at times and and which is going to come to Lara about that and I was wondering Lara I'm really interested in the process of writing this book about how how did you go about it once you decided that you want to write it um and so did it emerge out of your personal experience. What archives did you consult? How did you manage to weave >> the fragments of history into a story? You know, something I'm challenged with at the moment. >> Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a challenge. I mean just to to follow up quickly on on the shame question. I think it comes so much into >> it's interesting um how that that sort of early experience of of kind of pride or shame around becoming a mother then when you have it taken away um I think women and men who've lost all access to their children have said to me that they're so ashamed of what people think. They >> men have said they people must think I'm a racist a rapist. the women have said um what can they think I've done and even I found even when I'm writing articles for the Guardian my editor came back to me and said but this mother must have done more it's not possible that she could have lost her children only having been like this and it's sort of I think that that kind of stigma and shame is so important but on my book yes so I was involved in a custody case myself in um 2020 and what emerged I went in very innocently thinking this was going to be a sort of straightforward experience in which effectively there's no you can't meet in the middle with children. The judge would help us come up with a sort of collective solution. Uh and I was shocked by two aspects. One by how adversarial it felt like it wasn't just accidentally adversarial. It felt like it was willfully adversarial. it the court process was sort of almost designed to leave us hating hating each other far more than we had at the beginning and to leave the children scarred by that experience and then also by how this the the kind of world of the courtroom just didn't seem to be the feminist world I thought I lived in and it left me wanting to know more wanting to know how we'd got to this point in history um and whether it was an anomaly in the present or whether there were sort of lots of other cases and what I discovered in the present was it It was far worse than I'd realized and historically that it had been pretty bad for a long time. And what I wanted to do with the book was really try to find a way to bring out children's experiences over 200 years um as well as their parents' experiences. And that was sort of the hardest bit because children's voices are are so often kind of written out of court cases and certainly out of a lot of the legal reports um that that kind of report on cases. And so in finding these six big stories, I was able to find stories that had been well doumented about they're all in their ways very well-known people and in many cases the children have written too about their experiences. So, I write a chapter on Edar O'Brien uh where I'm able to use her accounts of her custody battle in her her memoir and I managed to talk to her as well. And in her novel, she wrote kind of novel after novel where she was trying to sort of get get more closely to what this experience that had traumatized her had been. and she ended up I I was interested that in several of these books she ended up killing a child uh that these children had to die because that was sort of how she'd experienced it was sort of the death of a child within this process but in her case her son has written his own memoir about this and so I was able to interweave his account with hers and then similarly uh the chapter on Alice Walker uh which is the only one of the chapters where it doesn't involve an actual court case they they managed to settle it out of court but they ended up with this very peculiar version of 5050 custody where Rebecca Walker alternated two-year periods between her parents, between these two totally different worlds, and felt she wasn't at home in either world, and she couldn't settle. And so, for me, it kind of exemplifies the difficulties of 50/50 custody that there's a sense in which children are being split in that kind of awful Solomon sense in in half. But there again, she Rebecca Walker has written a really brilliant memoir um about these years and about her experience with them. So, and then obviously that's much harder in the early periods, but what I was able to find in the in the chapter on kind of I write a chapter on Freda Lawrence, uh, DH Lawrence's wife, and the she lost almost all contact with her her children for a whole decade. Um and at that point in her case was in sort of 19 uh 13 14 15 at that point there's a kind of sudden moment in the national archives where you can read every single divorce file all the handwritten sort of notes and additions which you couldn't before that and you can't after that. So I really dug into that and read a thousand divorce files from that period. And I did find that when you get the full file, you do hear the children's voices that you hear these sort of long, often they're barely literate people, but they're kind of managing to to write sort of incident after incident about their marriage. And I heard sort of children being there's one where the the father's given custody and the mother gets access for I think two hours a week and it has to be at her former in-laws house and they lock her in a room and so when the child needs to pee, she has to hold him out of the window. And it's those sorts of you you're sort of getting at the experience of these children through these descriptions. Um, and then having done all this, it was clear that it was going to be chronological. It was clear that I was going to lead through I want when I'm writing to create quite a novelistic sense for the reader of kind of wanting to know what happens next and wanting I wanted this to be a book that people could read and bet as well as that that you're kind of reading to to sort of dwell with these people. I think it's been very touching. Lots of people have said it's made them cry. I sort of wanted that. I think I hope it's also happy and inspiring. These are sort of very energizing women I think um as well as sad sometimes ones. But I so I wanted to really kind of create the momentum of each of those stories to lead you through but to also step back and say so what was it that made this this decision possible? Say in Freda Lawrence's case like why did she lose all access to her children just because she'd had an affair? Um and then to survey the landscape around her and in Alice Walker's case say to say what would it have been like if she had gone to court would she have got a different settlement. No actually being a black mother and a bisexual mother at this point in history would not have gone well here were lesbians losing custody in sort of case after case in in the kind of 80s. So to to sort of keep the focus on the on the sort of granular central stories but to be able to step back and survey what's what's going on around them. >> Thank you so much. Um it's really interesting um to hear about the whole Yes, it does feel like a novel and it does feel like uh like a story you're telling and it's easy to read but it's also painful because at times you it it brings up my own kind of experiences and emotions as well and I want to come to you Lucy similarly with how your experience of writing the book um and how did you said it took you such a long time to actually get this story together and research for it but you're also writing from your own personal experience So I just wanted to hear your thoughts on how does it feel like to to write about painful experiences along with the the vast extensive research you've done. Um what was that experience like? How did you go about it? >> Oh great question. Uh thank you. Yeah. Um I you so because through the trying process obviously you've just read all the books and wanted to be informed and and it's amazing how many women are not informed about any aspect of pregnancy or labor and stuff but and that's crazy but so I I I kind of felt informed when I had this idea and then um I was looking at the books the texts that would inform me about the things I wanted to know how are people faces through history because as a historian that's how you think about things you how was this experienced 700 years ago or 500 years ago for me I'd started out in the Georgian period so a lot of it was to do with you know 1700 to Queen Victoria. So I had all of these ideas. So I was looking at that because we have such a a wealth of written records and all these different material culture everything else and I was thinking well you know childbirth kind of is where everything begins. So I have to look back as far as possible and see what evidence we have and that took me into a lot was done here um and also the welcome into archaeology more and because since the early 90s archaeology has come on mainly through the work of people and um institutions in Eastern Europe if I'm perfectly honest uh putting huge resources into the science behind it we have found out so many more things from bone fragments from from burials that that were opened up then covered up because we didn't know how to deal with them. So so there's just more and more developments the whole time. So that really fascinated me and then very quickly emerging themes um which also touches back on what we were saying before this idea of good women get pregnant easily and good women have easy pregnancies and good women have easy births and don't make a fuss and then they're really good mothers because they're good. That's that's that's kind of like the basic hindb brain thinking about it. As soon as you complicate it by not being very good at it or or making a fuss then bad bad woman. So you know there are those things. So and that aspect really uh fascinated me and not doing as you're told. That's another one as well. So, so and as you go through history, you realize so that so very early from the very beginning strictures are put rules sets of rules are imposed on women on on women who are trying to get pregnant. So a lot the early earliest texts we have Samrian Egyptian they're to do with women struggling with with fertility issues or gynecological issues usually uh a fifth to a third of any medical text is to do with intimate women's health whether they whether crocodile dong is going to help you or fumigation uh which also were very popular is not necessarily uh very accurate but for instance ancient Egyptians had a pregnancy test by peeing on a bag of wheat and which Harvard had done extensive tests on and it works. Uh and uh the Elommites I think it was as well also did early gender selection using peeing on bags of different seeds. Uh not to select a baby in the way that we think of gender selection now because just they wanted to know. So these kind of uh preoccupations have been with us since the earliest times uh and they're still going on now and across the world and and it also gives us a great insight to how people moved. So you get the very earliest snake imagery which we imagine is from Christianity, Garden of Eden. No, it is way way way earlier than that. And you get the same snake sculptures that are quite often um to do with earth sculpture and um because we've now got drone footage, we can see oh the same one appears in the fertile cresant and then appears on the Mexican coast and those are people that have just moved 45,000 years ago through the bearing straight and gone down the west coast of what we now term America and they're taking the same imagery with them. So and and then it gets adapted over time and then we get more and more patriarchal control. We move from the realm of women as I've said in prehistory uh to where women were not necessarily revered because there are lots of death cults around women and and associations with death regarding women probably to do with death and childbirth but not necessarily still a bit of a mystery to towards established religion where it's just really about land and power consolidation and money and status. And so the strictures become they draw on all of these old traditions, these mystical traditions because there is for I think for many men, not all men, uh a great sense of I mean this stuff that's coming out of America where they just your average man does not understand the lady parts and they just really don't. And and this is not this is not your old white dudes. This is the college kids still don't understand. Um it's like how so it becomes something other which Prague has written a lot about. So the woman is other because it's secret and mystical and there is an enormous amount of male jealousy and fear surrounding that. You are you are knitting organs in there and he can't see how you're doing it. So he wants to know and control that and because that is just it's the nature of the beast. And so the more structured things become, the more resource scarce resources become, which we are seeing this right now, the stronger this need to control becomes. And and it draws on all of our history, our collective global history, the myths, the legends, the superstitions, everything, the the morality of it all, it draws on that to create a framework of control. And it's just it's shutting down tighter and tighter all the time. We we we tell ourselves we can have everything. Yeah, you can have everything, but you can also do every unpaid wave labor job, which is what motherhood is. It's unpaid labor, which is your duty out of love. Well, it's still unpaid labor. And then you can go to work as well because women should work and should contribute and do all these different. So, you know, you can have everything, but do you really want to be carrying everything around with you all the time >> when when it's not expected of other people? >> Sorry, that was >> No, no, no. Thank you so much. I think it's really gives a great idea of the scope of the book and and how how across cultures and across time it's all about I think something else that kind of I feel like goes across both books is the idea of control and the idea of controlling people but especially the idea of maternity and maternal performativity in a way it's about performativity it's about conforming to a certain idea. societal idea of what motherhood should be like and what womanhood should be like. I wonder how it was for you to write about your own personal experiences in it and how do you feel about that like how vulnerable and and >> yeah I mean I've written about personal experiences throughout I think when I wrote my book on Doris Leing I sort of realized that her leaving behind two children when she left her first marriage was going to be a sort of key question for me in writing about her and that I was going to bring my own experience to thinking that through. how could you not? And that it felt more honest to bring myself right onto the stage. And so I in that book and then in in the one I wrote after on DH Lawrence, I sort of used my day-to-day experience as a kind of prism through which to examine what I was doing. I think in this um in this book, I just wanted my experience to be a kind of starting off point. I wanted to be saying, I'm not sweeping in from afar and looking at this material. I have been in that courtroom, too. I know what it's like to be interrogated by a barristister. know how what happens to your most intimate experiences when they become a kind of bullet points on a statement and when you're trying if you're someone who sort of lives with complexity and and sort of celebrates complexity how how do you then sort of say but no that's not quite there kind of all that is is somehow eliminated so that was for me the main I didn't want to write much about myself but just wanted to be in Yeah. Um I was interested when you were talking and and sort of thinking there was a side of me that that sort of thought it might be worth talking about the men in my book too in a way that um I think I am very sympathetic to to the men in in my book and and that probably hasn't come across but I think sort of what happens with these ideals of the good mother is that it it kind of it's bad for everyone that the kind of idealization of the good mother and therefore the kind of punitive victim victimization of of of the bad mother means that there are then also ideals of of sort of masculinity that the men are pushed into and that they find themselves kind of bewilderedly using the same language and kind of criticizing the women for the for the same things and and kind of getting involved in these court cases and actually it it felt to me like there's sort of something that happens in a in a marriage I think as well where people become extreme versions of themselves and kind of define against each and with with say the kind of opening chapter on uh an woman in the 1830s in in Britain called Caroline Norton who who sort of who lost three children. She didn't know that she didn't have she was very much the main car for them. She breastfed herself unlike many women of her time and then suddenly the husband got fed up with her because she was too flamboyant and glamorous and write and wrote books and he felt a bit left behind and decided he was going to show her that actually he owned their children. And I think what happened with them was that he sort of you can see him becoming a kind of worse version of himself year after year, but that he doesn't begin he begins sort of genuinely rather good humored and affable and adoring her and and not quite knowing what he's found himself in in. And it's it's the kind of ideas of 19th century masculinity that sort of trap him in a way as much as the the kind of ideas of femininity trap her. >> Yeah. I think they these ideas very fixed ideas of a femininity and masculinity disad advantage men as women. Um and I think in both the books I what I found really interesting was that there is this this expectation from women to be mothers to be a certain kind of mother but then the same ideas are weaponized against them and used against them as well. Um, so that's something that I found really interesting. But I I I I think we could talk for so long about these books and that's really interesting. But I would like to take some audience questions now if that's okay. There's a somebody here. I was probably sat in the most awkward place. Um, so I'm really fascinated about these links between what motherhood then means, not only for your role as a mother and your identity as a mother, but also how that then impacts on how you're seen in every other dimension of your life. Um, and I think that kind of touched on briefly for both of of you in there that about these ideas about kind of morality and what is good and what is bad. Um, so complete disclaimer, I have no children for lots of different reasons. Um, and I'm also a pediatrician. Um, and repeatedly throughout my training and my career, I've always been told, um, well, you'll never be a good doctor because you don't have your own children. You have no idea what it's like for anybody else. How could you possibly empathize with any of your families? Um, and equally, I see my colleagues who do have children also have it flowing back right the other way about, well, how can you be a committed doctor if you have your own family and won't they always come first? So, you know, there's there's you can never win, right? Um, but it just fascinates me. These are two completely distinct parts of your life and your identity and your role. And yet the morality perception of motherhood is felt to be a valid judgment on everything else we do. >> As a mother, if someone starts a conversating question about morality, no, I'm just I'm going to throw it back to both of you. Lucy, please. Would you like to say about >> Yeah, it's the same thing. It's we have a lot of this with this current American administration just only because it's and I don't say it but you have it. K star has done it as well when they're talking about the behavior of women or the behavior towards women in any given sphere. Starmmer is a a criminal for it. Um as a father you know um and and they do it all in the time and in America. But as a father, what that validates your position on whether you think women shouldn't be raped like that's and and as a mother it means suddenly you're the earth mother and everything you say is it's it's it comes from a place of love >> and it's just so and then which is so the sentence doesn't I can't remember anything to do with the sentence after as a mother as a father um because they don't mean anything doesn't validate your position it it's something that's biologically you have undergone and um experienced and your experience is absolutely valid and part of who you are. But it does not give you the right to judge someone else or or to to that your experience is then their experience or or should influence their experience. God forbid. So unless in it's in an extremely positive way in a difficult moment ob you know if you're imparting empathetic sharing information that helps but as a mother no um and there is certainly that >> that can absolutely um >> yeah I mean I think what happens in in custody courts is that and if you are a mother that's that's meant to subsume your identity and a lot of the women in my book are punished because they've asked for more. They've said, "I'm a mother, but I'm also an activist or I'm also a writer." And that, you know, that may mean writing about difficult material that wouldn't be suitable for a child to read, say, and does that make you then a bad mother because you're writing books that you wouldn't want your child to read. It sort of becomes so um difficult to disentangle these identities. I think that's true. >> Absolutely. And I do think that this this idea of uh if you're a professional, you cannot be a mother and you're not committed. This idea of motherhood penalty exists. Of course, be even before a woman becomes pregnant because they wouldn't be committed. I know I've encountered that in my own life. For a long time, I didn't talk about being a mother because I thought that would kind of invalidate how committed I was to my career. But on the other hand to be to consider that somebody can't be a good pediatrician or have the necessary skills and experience and empathy if they haven't experienced in their own lives is another sort of judgment. So this idea of morality linked with the the label of being a mother is is is through history. That's what I think you both have written in your books as well. It's very true. So thank you for that. Any other >> great question >> and there's one over there. >> Uh thank you. Just question well not some observations really for Lara just by way of background. I've been a family lawyer for nearly 50 years um dealing with children cases. So your comments I find extremely interesting and I I agree with the vast majority of what you say. Um just interested to note uh you said that you were attending family courts now as a journalist which is something that's only happened relatively recently. What sort of factors would determine which cases you decided >> you would like to look at? And the reason I asked that is that when this was brought in a few years ago um certainly myself colleagues expected lots of interest and I have not had one of my cases and I'm in court and I have been nearly every day for the last 40 years. Not one case uh uh have I had a a journalist once sit in on. So I was just interested on that. >> Oh, I mean have you been in touch with journalists about cases? Because it's partly that journalists, you know, it's sort of very random what you hear about. But just to answer, so I kind of began by just doing a week slightly at random at different courts. Some courts you can have designated um transparency. I mean, this might be a conversation to have after it might be a bit niche, but some designated judges who talk to journalists who'd sort of tell you, "Yeah, we've got this final hearing you'd find interesting." I've also had some barristers write to me saying, "You'd be really interested in this case." And then I've since starting to publish, I've had a lot of parents writing to me. But the danger then is that I only go to the really extreme cases and I want to keep sort of just getting the sense of like what a day is like. And I I quite like just sitting in with a judge and doing their whole day and sort of um getting a sense of the different cases interacting and not feeling because otherwise um I may be seeing only the very best or the very worst judges that can feel like where I end up. But yeah, I think it's really difficult to get that many journalists into courts and there are lots of initiatives trying to do it. It's really expensive if you're a salary, if you're like a freelance journalist going into court for a week and not knowing if you'll find a case that will make a national newspaper. So, you sort of I was doing it because it was part of this larger research project for my book and I had had the time and I I'm now doing it because I'm kind of addicted to being in court. But, um it is there aren't that many journalists and there aren't going to be I think >> I think there was another question here. They're here. How have you um seen kind of uh influencers and on kind of motherhood on the internet? because I I know uh well um I don't want to kind of like shame my sister or anything but you know I know I get the impression that you know some of this can kind of put pressure on people to be the kind of like the perfect mother and bring up their children in the kind of perfect way. I mean have have you seen a kind of big psychological impact on either this or the children or is it is it positive or negative or Yeah. What have you really seen on that? >> Uh oh, that's really interesting actually. Thank you for the question. Um yeah, well influencers it depends how much I mean I love a bit of Instagram. Um the recipes and everything. I'm all over that. And um yeah, the there is there's definitely I think I think kind of social media we're entering a new social media as well where I mean there are people who make Night Rider out of their Daxonss. I am a sucker for a Daxon video as well, I tell you. Um, you know, he's got the flashing collar and everything and they do night shoots in a car park and they've got a script and everything. So there and the expectations are high. Um, um, yeah. Um, he's called Sepy, by the way. You can find him. He's great. And so yeah, and I've se also actually I do watch because of the cooking ones. There are quite a lot of um and also I did a in 2013 I I did some teaching in Cleveland in Ohio which included teaching people who are going to be working with the Arish and we went to see the Arish and all that also fascinating because that's not going to affect them what they're doing. Um but that so and so I see I end up seeing because of the algorithm algorithms I end up seeing people who cook in an Amish fashion or or whatever and how how they cook for their children big families. Uh and then there are also expectations of motherhood. This is quite interesting. There is a lady I cannot remember her name for the life of me. I think she's got eight children. That's a significant load. And she also works full-time and she makes enormous meals either pre-prepared or at night when she gets in. And you can see she's absolutely exhausted. This is there is no curation involved in this. She is just telling you how it is. Her kitchen is not perfect. She is getting as much packed into these kids nutrition-wise as she can that she can make in 40 minutes. That that's basically her life. the comments on there was tons of people who were supportive of her and there are loads of people who are like oh opening another can and things like that you know and she but she keeps going because she hasn't got a choice and and I think that people like that out there are enormously refreshing there are tons of people who I mean it's like the matern maternity version of the rich kids of Instagram you know 180 pound baby grows and things like that. Yeah. But also, you know, there are reasons for having people put in asylums. Just because your husband doesn't like you is not not a valid one. Um it's they exist for a reason. But um so it's it's I do think that there is a lot of pressure brought about by social media. Do I think that people put pressure on other people all the time for no reason anyway? Yeah, kind of. Um, and luckily I never had to compete about baby grows. That's one positive. Um, but yeah, we're yet to see how far that goes because there are extremes in social media that as we all know that are not witnessed in in daily life. But do I think that social media changes? I do quite a bit of work with um creative writing workshops for uh teenagers and I've done some work in all girls schools and I always say and they say well you have to have someone sit in with you okay that's fine and I say but if it's when we do Q&A can we just have the room to ourselves and some schools agree some schools don't but when they do agree it's amazing what the girls come out with now even in the last seven or eight years um because expectations of them of their behavior sexually. I mean, who was having those? You certainly weren't having those conversations in the ' 90s. Not in my schools anyway. Um, but what because they're articulate kids, what is going on in their heads? And and the expectations of them now are so massive, it can only ripple over into female identity and the whole spectrum of pregnancy and birth. Sorry. >> Yeah, thanks for the question. I think it's a really fascinating question and um I just wanted to touch on it because I researched that a lot for my own book and uh for a very long time Instagram was a very curated especially Instagram was a very curated platform and motherhood was being performed in a certain way what to feed your children how to dress them this kind of beige kind of clean images of motherhood and then um we moved on to and there was all this about motherhood and mother Mary and all those kind of abusions as well. And then we moved into this idea of being we going to be honest and we going to be very chaotic and messy and show the real motherhood. But I what I want what I touched on was that who's allowed to do that or who's not allowed to do that and who we see in there a very white middleclass motherhood and not other people because they're judged more for being messy and brown workingass black mother for instance. So I think there is all these things happening but we have to think about even in these platforms who's visible and who's not and what that means for how motherhood is performed in society. So thank you for that. Um, first of all, I just wanted to say that the >> sorry, the shame thing is all women, no matter what your position, as somebody who is by choice childfree, I also got the same shame. >> What's wrong with you? >> It's Yeah. >> What's wrong with you? >> Um, I wanted to talk about the parallels in fiction, Lara. Um, the one that immediately sprang to mind because obviously we're going to be hearing about the Bronty's later on today is the tenate of Wildell Hall. Did you feel that your research was in any way influenced by things like that? >> Yeah. Yeah. Great question. I mean I yeah I have a big digression on the 19th century realist novel actually and I think for me the the kind of great custody story is Anna Corinina um where uh I think that the scenes between Anna and her son are so much more passionately and movingly written than the love scenes between Anna and Bronka. the more I read that book, it seems to me primarily a book about about custody and about um about Anna's loss of her son and and and sort of how that's both inevitable and um and tragic and how it kind of then you know sets in motion what's what's going to come for for Anna by the end of the novel. Yes, absolutely. Tend to welfare. Also Hardy um do the obscure. Um, yeah, I think custody was a very live I mean, it's partly what what I kind of argue in a way is that that family law and the realist novel kind of developed in tandem and that people hadn't turned to courts to settle their intimate lives and people hadn't written massive books about um family life and somehow those those happen together and I think that that is um kind of more than a coincidence and I think they they really illuminate each other those two worlds. Thank you so much and I think we'll have to bring this to a close now. U please join me in giving um Lara and Lucy a big hand and also their books are available. Please do buy them and read them. They're fantastic. So