Who gets to define motherhood? A conversation with Elinor Cleghorn

Liverpool is delighted to welcome back the acclaimed feminist cultural historian Elinor Cleghorn for an evening of conversation, history and radical rethinking.

In her latest book, A Woman’s Work, Elinor Cleghorn uncovers the radical history of mothering and asks what happens when society treats women’s bodies as public property.

From the politics of falling birth rates to the enduring pressures of pronatalism, this is a conversation about who controls motherhood, whose work is valued, and whose voices have been written out of history.

Elinor brings mothers, othermothers, midwives, activists and community leaders back to the centre of the story — reclaiming the acts of growing, birthing, nurturing and loving as skilled, powerful and profoundly important work.

And we couldn’t possibly let her leave without returning to the book that started so many conversations about women’s health-Unwell Women.

In Unwell Women, Elinor exposed centuries of medical myths, dismissed pain and the ways women’s experiences have been misunderstood and overlooked by healthcare systems. Together, these two books invite us to ask some uncomfortable — and urgent — questions about women’s bodies, health, motherhood and power.

Come for the history. Stay for the conversation.