"Inconvenient truths" for "ambitious progressives" can actually be very helpful
Why I love Elena Bridgers' Substack (and other content)
It is very rare to come across someone online in the gender/feminism/parenting discourse space who is offering a fresh, sane, and useful perspective. So I was delighted when, a few months ago, I came across Elena Bridgers’ Substack “Motherhood Until Yesterday”. It looks at what the historical and contemporary research of hunter-gatherer societies tells us about how humans raised children for most of our evolutionary history. I cannot tell you the number of times I have read something there that has made me think “that reallllllly could explain a lot!”.
The scale and speed of Elena’s success (in just a couple of years she’s amassed a sizeable social media following, climbed to the #4 publication in her category on Substack, and scored a book deal) suggests I’m not alone. Her writing has resonated with me largely because I am a mother (of three young and closely-spaced wonderful-but-high-energy boys, pray for me) and, as you may have also noticed, a modern day lady. But I don’t think her stuff is only interesting or valuable for mothers – I think the “evolutionary mismatch” lens Elena looks at the world through reveals things that can help explain (and potentially, to help address) all kinds of vexing modern day problems: falling birthrates, political polarisation between genders, gender pay gaps, childcare & parental leave policies.
I have seen some criticisms of her (in Instagram comments, and on Reddit, where all good haters gather) accusing her of “ragebait” and “condescending lactivist bullshit”. While I will pay that “lactivist” is a great burn, I feel it is unfairly applied in this instance. I agree that some of her claims are hard to hear, but I do not see someone posting “ragebait” or judging women who can’t or don’t breastfeed. I see someone frustrated by the systems and culture that make motherhood in the post-industrial modern world so much harder than it needs to be.
Anyway - here is my review and recommendation:
NB: Annoyingly, it was only after I published my review that I saw Lyman Stone’s critique of Elena’s interpretation of birth spacing and family size research. I would have included his complaints in the piece otherwise. Basically (I think?) he is saying that she is wrong in her explanations for why family sizes, historically, were smaller than most people think. (He says it’s simply down to mortality, and that Elena’s more complicated explanations around breastfeeding norms/caloric expenditure affecting fertility are wrong). Now, I might be a dummy who’s not understanding the significance of these stats properly - but I kind of feel that even if Stone is right that Elena is wrong in her interpretation of this data, her overall point still stands? Like - for whatever the reason, having lots of babies, close together, is not normal, and an incredibly challenging thing for our brains/bodies to do, given the way we evolved and given modern living conditions rarely offer the same kind of social support networks that our ancestors had. Feel free to let me know if I’m wrong about that.