Our Mothers Ourselves

As mothers, we try to raise our children with all the resources, attention, love, and support we can muster, but sometimes forces far bigger than us make doing so impossible.  This week, Katie speaks with Simeng Dai, a Facebook data engineer who grew up in China under its One-Child Policy.   In her conversation with Katie, Simeng discusses the challenges she and her mother, Aiying Huang, faced in...

This week, Katie talks with Dr. Malaika Horne, a public policy scholar and author, and her sister Gwen Moor, curator at the Missouri History Museum, about their inspiring mother, Flora.  Flora Horne was born in Mississippi to sharecropper parents in 1916. During the Great Migration of the 1930’s, she moved to St. Louis with her family. There, she married and raised six children at the height of th...

Maria Tallchief   was  born Elizabeth Marie Tall Chief  in 1925 in Fairfax, Oklahoma, where her grandfather had served as chief in the Osage Nation. Seventeen years later, she found her way to New York and became one of the most famous American ballerinas of the 20th century. She rejected suggestions that she change her name to Tallchieva, at the time when many American dancers adopted Russian sta...

As anyone who's watched the new HBO documentary Tiger can tell you, when you catch the golf bug as a kid, it can stick with you for a lifetime. Amy Alcott fell for golf when she was a little girl growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s. Her mother gave her garden over to her daughter's passion, and the front yard became a putting and chipping green. Soup cans were hammered into the ground...

In 1929, Anne Spencer Morrow,  a 23-year-old introverted intellectual, married a man who was, at the time, arguably the most celebrated person in the world. He was Charles Lindbergh, and his incredible solo flight over the Atlantic in 1927 had catapulted him to a wild level of fame.  It was Charles Lindbergh, decades before Jackie Kennedy and Princess Diana, whose fame first gave rise to packs of...

"She's probably the most resilient person I know." -- Emma Walton Hamilton For the holidays, we're revisiting Katie's conversation  with Emma Walton Hamilton , daughter of the extraordinary Julie Andrews, about her mom's difficult childhood and her determination to give her own children stability and, above all, constant love. Julie Andrews's two memoirs, Home ,...

  Gurki Basra knows a thing or two about dating. She even starred in Season One of the Netflix show Dating Around , in which she went on a famously bad date. Her mother, Tanjeet Basra, on the other hand, had never been on a date, right up to the day she got married when she was 22, which also happened to be the day she met her husband for the first time.  Katie talks to Gurki about her parents&apo...

[Note: This episode is dedicated to the late poet (and editor non pareil), David Corcoran.  We miss you, David.] In this strangest of holiday seasons, when so many of us are missing our extra limb of extended family, I’m not so sure it’s just cheer we could use. As we turn this final page on our dark 2020, we might need something that transports us in a different way. The wisdom of the poet and ph...

Updated Jan. 21, 2021 Alison Aucoin  doesn't seem like the type of person given to making  profane gestures. But after her mother, Lynn Evans, contracted Covid and died last April in New Orleans, Alison -- livid with anger -- posted a photograph to Facebook that quickly went viral. Alison's post, a raw rant straight from the heart, was directed at Donald Trump and his egregeious mishandl...

When I started this podcast just before Mother's Day 2020, my main goal was to shine a light on extraordinary mothers. I figured the world was plenty sated  with books, articles, films, blogs, and podcasts about ways in which women fell short as mothers, and, given that we could use some uplifting stories, devoting attention to those who were simply great mothers seemed like a good idea.  In...

"Yoo hoo! Look what I found down here!" Who could possibly could resist a mother's call to investigate? Elizabeth Mushinsky Mitchell came by her parenting instinctively.  She lost her own mother when she was eight, but had a feel for what it took to be a great mother: true engagement, genuine pathos, and a generous dose of inventiveness. From 1992, she was coordinator of the Gold Ke...

Some people are just plain born with moxie. Meet Elizabeth "Betta" Dixon MacCarthy Ehrenfeld , who left her hometown of Chapel Hill, North Carolina in 1942, at the age of 16,  got on a train -- by herself -- and headed north. Her first stop was  Bronxville, N.Y., and Sarah Lawrence College. By the time she was barely 21 she had a law degree from Yale. Back then, women with law degrees we...

She's considered Brazil's "Pope of Fashion," and to most people in the fashion world she is known simply as Costanza. Costanza's parents, Gabriella and Michele Pascolato,  emigrated from Italy to Brazil in the aftermath of World War II, and in 1948 they started the Santaconstancia textile company, which became a fixture in Brazil's world of fabric and fashion. By the...

A self-described “Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet,” Audre Lorde had a poem for every occasion, says her daughter, Dr. Elizabeth Lorde-Rollins, in this week’s conversation with Katie Hafner.   Lorde's lifelong love of words led her to a life as a renowned poet and author of more than a dozen volumes. Her poetry is unflinching, raw and filled with rage against social, racial and sexual no...

"She is probably the most resilient person I know." -- Emma Walton Hamilton This week, Katie talks with Emma Walton Hamilton , daughter of the extraordinary Julie Andrews, about her mom's difficult childhood and her determination to give her own children stability and, above all, constant love. Julie Andrews's two memoirs, Home , and Home Work , are at once heartbreaking and aw...

What with the country in total turmoil, and people doing a lot of fretful handwringing, it might be time to take a breather and celebrate someone who's brought an abundance of solid joy to the palates of so many. Katie talks with Fanny Singer, the daughter of famed chef and farm-to-table trailblazer Alice Waters, who in 1971 started her Berkeley, Calif. restaurant Chez Panisse intending to fe...

In the wake of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death, Katie takes a close look at the influence her mother, Celia Amster Bader, had on her daughter. Katie interviews Jane Sherron de Hart, a historian and professor emerita at UC Santa Barbara. Celia was the daughter of immigrants who came to the United States in 1901 to flee the pogroms that were taking place across Eastern Europe....

In this era of uncertainty and anxiety, some things are a reliable fixture. Exhibit A: The tenacity of Erin Brockovich, who took on PG&E for its water contamination, won a mammoth settlement for her clients, and inspired an Oscar-winning film. In the eponymous role, Julia Roberts was plenty feisty but by many accounts she wasn't as in-your-face fiery as the real Erin Brockovich, a self-de...

Our series commemorating the 19th Amendment ends with the second segment on the first female Vice Presidential candidate, Geraldine Anne "Gerry" Ferraro (August 26, 1935 – March 26, 2011). In this conversation with Ferraro's daughter, documentary filmmaker Donna Zaccaro, Katie takes a closer look at Ferraro The Candidate. When Walter Mondale   chose Ferraro as his running mate on th...

Our series commemorating the 19th Amendment continues, with the third and final installment. The subject: Geraldine Anne "Gerry" Ferraro (August 26, 1935 – March 26, 2011) In the first of a  two-part interview with Ferraro's daughter, the filmmaker and producer Donna Zaccaro, Katie explores the late Congresswoman and vice-presidential candidate's early life and first years in C...

It's a big week for the history of women's rights. August 26 -- Women's Equality Day -- commemorates the 1920 passage of women's suffrage in the U.S., with 19th Amendment Centennial Day. This episode is the second in a three-part series celebrating the centennial of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Katie speaks with Coline Jenkins, great-great granddaughter o...

This is the first of a three-part series published over the course of three weeks, honoring the 100th anniversary of the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote.  A Woman's Place is in The House (the title refers to Abzug's famous campaign slogan) celebrates Bella Abzug, a lawyer, Congresswoman and leader in the fight for women's rights. She was Glori...

Part Two of the conversation with Nina Lorez Collins about her mother, the late filmmaker, playwright, and writer Kathleen Collins. Nina talks about THE TRUNK, what it was like to be the shepherd of the many works her mother left behind, and the instrumental role Nina played in seeing to it that her mother's big talent find its rightful place in modern American literature. Katie and Nina also...

In this, the first of two parts, Katie talks to Nina Lorez Collins about her mother, the groundbreaking filmmaker and writer, Kathleen Collins. Collins died of breast cancer in 1988, when she was just 46. She was one of the first Black women to direct a feature film. In this episode, Nina talks about her mother's childhood in New Jersey, her stormy relationship with Nina's father, a Whit...

What are you to make of it if your mother isn't demonstrative with her love? She doesn't hug you or kiss you or tell you she loves you. But still, you know at your core that she loves you truly, madly, deeply. But how do you know? Katie explores the phenomenon of invisible love with the writer Will Blythe, whose mother was too shy and reserved to express her love for her four children in...