Are “Cool Moms” A Menace?
The Waves: Gender, Relationships, Feminism
Slate Podcasts
4.2 • 903 Ratings
🗓️ 2 February 2023
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On this week’s episode of The Waves, Slate senior editor Rebecca Onion is joined by NPR political reporter Danielle Kurtzleben to unpack all the fears that come with pending motherhood. They unpack Danielle’s brilliant Substack piece, “A Professional Lady Correspondent Stares Down Motherhood,” their fears of “cool moms” and…the possible merits of ”lean in feminism.” Heavy emphasis on the possible.
In Slate Plus, how Danielle navigated covering abortion post-Roe while pregnant.
Podcast production by Cheyna Roth and Tori Dominguez with editorial oversight by Daisy Rosario and Alicia Montgomery.
Send your comments and recommendations on what to cover to thewaves@slate.com.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm going to Welcome to the waves, Slate's podcast about gender, feminism and fretting over impending |
| 0:21.4 | matressence. |
| 0:23.1 | Every episode you get a new parapemannist |
| 0:25.1 | to talk about the thing we can't get off our minds. |
| 0:27.4 | Today, you've got me, Rebecca Onion, |
| 0:29.7 | a senior editor at Slate. |
| 0:32.3 | So my daughter just had her six birthday and I was thinking about |
| 0:36.0 | how before I became a mother I thought about it for about five years before going |
| 0:40.5 | ahead and deciding to do it and so in the course of that I had a lot of conversations about it with friends who were |
| 0:45.8 | parents, friends who weren't. |
| 0:47.8 | I made a lot of Google documents. |
| 0:50.4 | I wrote about my fears around Division of labor for slate.com and other places. |
| 0:55.9 | I made pro and con lists. |
| 0:57.4 | I tried to talk to my husband about many many possibilities which he was |
| 1:01.1 | mystified by, frankly. |
| 1:03.3 | One time I remember I was talking to a friend who turned out |
| 1:06.5 | to be the first one in our friend group to have kids. |
| 1:09.4 | A totally lovely woman, a great mom whose son also kept me up all night at one tightly |
| 1:15.0 | packed house party super overstimulated crying about wanting iPad at |
| 1:20.3 | light two in the morning he is now a preteen and he's absolutely wonderful. |
| 1:24.0 | Anyway I ranted to this friend about all the things that I love doing that I worried becoming a mom would take away from me. |
| 1:30.0 | At that time those things were like rock climbing a lot of yoga reading watching very |
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