Ep 146. Amy Westervelt: How America Messed Up Motherhood
“As women gain more independence and take up more space in society as individuals, the expectations placed on motherhood tend to increase.”
Amy Westervelt
Amy Westervelt is the author of Forget Having it All: How America Messed up Motherhood and How to Fix It; the founder of the Critical Frequency podcast network, the host of the podcast, Drilled; and an award-winning print and audio journalist. She contributes often to The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and many other outlets. For her pioneering and fearless journalism on environmental and gender issues, she’s won an Edward R. Murrow Award, a Folio Award, a Rachel Carson Award. As the head of Critical Frequency, she has executive produced more than a dozen podcasts, including her own show Drilled -- the first ever true-crime style podcast to examine the creation of climate denial.
In this episode Stew and Amy talk about the historical roots of the conditions that have made life difficult for mothers in America, particularly how the nuclear family evolved and the impact that social structure has on mothers and fathers today. Amy describes the central challenges we face in aiming to change our culture and create a more just world for mothers. They talk about what Amy has done in her own life to gain greater control over her own family’s destiny by adopting, at her husband’s insistence, the Japanese management principle of kaizen, or continual improvement. They also address how the dread realities of climate change are affecting the current generation of people at child-bearing age and the choices they are making about whether or not it is morally sound to have children at all.
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