You can also find this episode on Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Anna is a social scientist and a New York Times bestselling author. She has written two books so far. The first was The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation—which includes a lot of fascinating original research. And more recently, she wrote Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us.

Anna and I are both interested in questions about systems and stories. Where do our systems come from? How do we inherit culture without even realizing it? What are the stories we tell ourselves and one another about the systems we’re a part of? We’re also interested in how powerful—and empowering—it can be for us when we become aware of the cultural forces that shape our worldview.

Today, we talk a little bit about all of this—along with some 80s TV characters and family myths many of you will recall.

The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of Martin Luther King, Jr, Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation

Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden From Us

Follow Anna on Instagram

Anna’s Website

ELISE:

When you think about the cadence of the books that you’ve written, three The Three Mothers, which is a brilliant conceit, and I’m so happy that that book did so well because it’s actually wild that it’s not part of our consciousness to even think about. I had never asked what was James Baldwin’s mother about or I mean, you don’t hear about MLK Jr’s mother,

ANNA:

Right? Yeah, it was crazy.

ELISE:

Is there material? Obviously there was plenty of source material, but…

ANNA:

There was almost nothing out there. When I started writing the book, I went in with just a question. My undergraduate work is in anthropology, and so I’m trained more so in Ask the Question without having much of a theory and just go in there and see what you find. And so my question really was just who were these women? We spend so much time talking about these incredible men, and I’m not at all trying to take away from our celebration of them, but more so if we know these men so well or we claim to know them so well, why haven’t we asked who raised them, who was surrounding them when they were these little boys? And we’re just thinking of how to dream and how to live and thrive. And that was my question, who were they? But if I tried to Google them, there was nothing.

All I could find were estimates on their birth dates. It wasn’t very clear. Obviously we knew when the famous men were born, so that was a moment that I could flag in the women’s lives. Then we knew when their sons passed away, so of course I could then, this was obviously a moment in their lives as well, but all three of them outlived their sons. So then I was trying to find at least what years they passed. That also was kind of murky, and if I did find any evidence about their lives, it was taken out of context clearly. And the patriarchy surrounding it was really obvious. So for example, Louis Little Malcolm X’s mother, it was said that she had gone crazy and she was sent to an institution how many times we heard throughout history of a woman gone crazy, and it’s in fact that she’s just resisting something or she’s standing up to something. And so that’s all there really was. There was one other scholar, a professor at the University of Illinois who had written an article about her. So I started there, but most of my book, about 90% of it, I’d say is original research of finding letters from the archives.

ELISE:

It’s amazing. And then with Erased, and I think this is where obviously we’re both interested in questions about systems and where these systems come from and the way that we inherit culture, and then we tell these stories about how things are and we take them wholesale and say, oh, that’s how they’ve always been without really, not necessarily litigating, but even understanding, oh, these are the cultural forces that are shaping my perspective about the world, who I am and how things will inevitably go.

ANNA:

And the people who them, I think a lot of times we think there’s no face to it. We think it just sort of came out of nowhere and we’re all up against this system, and it feels so vague to many of us

ELISE:

And unhelpful, right, because it’s like a boogeyman where it’s no patriarchy and it’s, well, actually, so much of this is unconsciously promulgated and upheld and yeah, it’s

ANNA:

Like, and also consciously by many who are very strategically upholding it, and then the rest of us are sort of falling into it. And I think that’s why for me, it’s important to find kind of these start and stop moments. It doesn’t just come out of nowhere. And yes, there is this progression of patriarchy globally, right? I’m not in a raced arguing what the very beginning of patriarchy was because there’s so much conversation on that already, and it’s actually unclear. People disagree as to why this became the dominant system around the world, but we can point to when in the US it was decided we are choosing this and this is how we’re writing our patriarchy. And when Abigail Adams says, remember the ladies and do better by us than the monarchy and the founding fathers say, no, that is a moment where we can point to and say, they made a choice. They wrote this into the Constitution. We can point back to them rather than blaming each other or finding ways to just reproduce that hierarchy that was created by men.

ELISE:

Totally. It’s interesting though, and I might be more optimistic and maybe more naive and Pollyanna-ish than you. I think that there are these instances, and you can talk about something like Project 2025, and I think it’s one of the clearest articulations of, oh, there are these malevolent fucks who are plotting and incredibly organized and with very clear long-term goals and are manipulating our systems for these outcomes in a way that I’m just not that much of a planner. I have so much I want to believe in people’s better natures. And so I like to think some of this is just how the cards have fallen, but I think Project 2025 is an example of what you’re talking about, which is no, actually people are architecting plans

ANNA:

And

ELISE:

Executing them with a lot of foresight and we are now experiencing it.

ANNA:

Yes, absolutely. And I think the thing is patriarchy is not the natural order.

And so we can trace it even back to colonialism. If we’re looking at religious beliefs, let’s say some of the indigenous beliefs on the West African side of the African continent where my dad is from Ghana, and if I try to go back and look at what were the original belief systems of the people there, they were very inclusive. They were very feminist. In fact, they were very okay with non-binary identities and this ability to honor women and the female body without saying that women were superior, but that everybody had a role to play and everything was about harmony and about balance. So that actually felt like more of an natural order where you’re thinking of how you’re connected to nature and animal, all of those things. But then there is this entry point of people saying, we need to reorganize this. We need to decide who gets to be elevated.

Others. We need to create the scarcity mindset and how do we maintain that? And so there’s always, in any of these different systems across the world, you can point to a moment where something was interrupted that really did go against the natural instinct to find balance actually versus to promote hierarchy. And in the US we’ve seen throughout American history, those who want to maintain the vision of the founding fathers, which is hierarchy and how do they maintain control in their own hands and those who are trying to find balance and humanity for all and resources for all. And that feels like a simplification, but in reality, that is the tug of war that’s been happening. Are we protecting hierarchy or do we want to achieve balance? And there’s a spectrum on both of those sides, of course, and how we think we achieve balance. But yes, project 2025 is a perfect moment where you see that in order to create something that is not the natural order, you have to impose certain rules. You have to impose consequences. You have to strategically erase evidence of anything else. You have to write it into law. You have to make it so that women can no longer leave their homes. You have to make it. You have to create it. And it doesn’t just happen on its own without all of those rules and the rigidity of it.

ELISE:

It’s interesting. I feel like there’s something about Ghana. I know this is a sweeping generalization, but it produces really incredible women in particular. I feel this way too about Montana where I’m from. We were the first state to send a woman to Congress, Jeanette Rankin, before women had a right to vote. There’s something about the dynamics of some parts of the globe where, I don’t know, something happens, and I don’t know what it is, and there’s probably no way to understand it, but I talk about Montana a lot in the context of this current moment. It historically has always been a very purple state. Right now it’s quite red, but it has this strand of, it’s not libertarian because it’s not financially minded like I randian in that way, but it’s a very live and let live independent strong. And I never mean it’s not sexist. It’s a weird, it’s an interesting, there’s no dominant hierarchical culture, if that makes sense. I think it’s also because people just need to survive,

ANNA:

But

ELISE:

It’s more egalitarian, I feel than a lot of other places in this

ANNA:

Country. I think you got to write a book about that. I’d want to go deep into Montana’s history. How did it happen?

ELISE:

Do it. This is more your jam than my jam. But it is really interesting to think about these parts of the globe that do indicate these are the dynamics on which humans first organized and emerged and were affiliative engaged and staying alive. And there wasn’t the gender dynamics of you do this and I do this and all that culture, which is so contagious.

ANNA:

And it’s interesting to see because that was the original belief system. But sadly, now there’s a lot of patriarchal practices in Ghana, right? There is a lot of this culture of men are supposed to dominate women, and we are anti L-G-B-T-Q people and all of this. And the thing for me is I want to help more people return to these pre-colonial mentalities, these pre patriarchal mentalities, because that is actually, if we’re trying towards turn to ancestral practices, it wasn’t rooted in this kind of western, colonial, patriarchal way

ELISE:

Of

ANNA:

Things.

ELISE:

I’m sure you have this experience, but I feel like when I talk to groups of women primarily about my work, and when you drop some of these really quickly at the beginning of the book, just 1, 2, 3, about even the size differential between men and women is likely bred into us and not actually function of who we are based on quality of calories that were given. I think it’s cattle hayek and I guess modern day Turkey where the men and women are essentially the same size, same amount of soot, suggesting that they were doing the same amount of indoor versus outdoor work. So a lot of these things that we take as take wholesale of men being dominantly much bigger than women are not actually fact. They’re not a biological destiny, I

ANNA:

Guess. Exactly. And we’ve seen that throughout world history, multiple moments where men and humankind, we have made something happen to our biology. We know that from trauma, that trauma gets passed down through our genes. We know that if you have a policy where you’re going to kill off all the girls, well, there’s going to be less girls. We’ve seen that we can alter our genetic makeup. And so it isn’t that wild of a theory to think, oh, over time, if we weren’t giving girls the same nutrients as we were giving boys, then over time they did become smaller. They did become weaker. And I think a lot of people, and this is where I tend to lean towards as well, in terms of the theory of the origin of patriarchy, that we believe that if women were the ones and we say the female body was that was able to create life and hold a child and birth a child, then maybe it was that insecurity of we need to control this because what are we if they do it all right?

And so that insecurity is the thing that in my opinion, drove everything and wouldn’t surprise me if the decision was okay, we need to remove power from them. So now we create this male figure that is God, or we claim that we were the original creators, even if women can hold the children while men are the ones who are the divine, or now we are going to make it so that girls do become weaker, we are going to trap them. And so I think it’s very possible that that theory is correct, that over time our bodies changed as a result of that. I don’t think it’s far reaching, but I think people would say, no, women and girls are just slower and women and girls are weaker. And that’s part

ELISE:

Not at long distances. I mean, if you look at ultra marathoners and ultra long distance runners, women just crush men. Yeah, it ceases to be a contest. And no, it’s also complex and fascinating, including just how we source calories, all of it. But I think it goes back to sort of, and it’s not hard for people to imagine this, go back for example, to Montana 200 years ago. How do you think that people are surviving? They’re doing it all together, right? Again, you’re not engaged in a debate about who’s going to go and procure food. You’re just staying alive. Even

ANNA:

In the US generally, when we’re thinking about histories of slavery in the US and how, as I argue in this concept of patriarchy in the US American patriarchy, meaning that we’re also pushing certain groups out of a gender hierarchy and telling them, we actually don’t think there’s much distinction between you all. The way in which black women are treated versus black men when they’re enslaved is not all that different. They’re doing the same amount of work. Even if a woman is pregnant, she is being forced to go out into the field. And so we also see those similarities there physically. If it’s about our survival and if it’s about what just needs to get done, then suddenly we forget that there’s supposed to be this distinction between man and woman.

ELISE:

And one of the things obviously that emerges now is, I mean the whole hashtag trad wife theme, but this nostalgia for these days that literally lasted for a decade for sort of a classic middle American family in the fifties, but it was captured by tv. And I know you write a lot about media and storytelling and who’s telling these stories. And so this idea of the June cleaver leave it to Beaver, 1950s post-war, single income, middle class family is largely a myth. And yet the consciousness of this country is somewhat arrested by this idea that that’s how it’s supposed to be. And in truth, in order to stay in the middle class, minimum two parent working home, certainly from the seventies on, and then you get into more complicated stories, you write about Claire Huxtable, who was sort of the mom that we all wanted. But yeah, when I think about that, I’m like, alright, how was that all happening? Right. Can you talk a little bit about Claire Huxtable?

ANNA:

Yeah. I mean, I think that also even before we get to Claire is as you’re talking, I’m thinking about how, this is a question also of classism in this American patriarchal system and how the founding fathers were also distinguishing who got to be considered man or woman by elitism, and who they considered was good enough to be amongst them. They wanted to maintain power in their own hands. They also were not really considering poor white people in this. So they are saying in their letters to their wives and to their daughters, no, you stay at home and you don’t work and you don’t participate politically. And if you learn any skills, it’s for the benefit of your husband and what you can teach your future children. But as we’re mentioning, actually poor people have always had to work. People of color have always had to work.

We didn’t have this access to this already. Again, hierarchal, patriarchal system that oppressed women, yes. But that at least acknowledged the women in their lives and under the guise of protection said that they shouldn’t exit their home. So that is already a horrible dynamic, but it wasn’t actually something that was ascribed to everybody. And so if we then move forward through any wars that we’re participating in, or we’re trying to compare ourselves as Americans to these other nations and saying in some way that these other nations do it all wrong, a lot of it comes back to this notion of what that nuclear family is supposed to look like. So it’s used as an image during times of war to say, Hey, these other countries are making their women go toil, and we don’t want the women of America to do this. And we are protecting our families and we’re protecting our homes to present it as what we need to do to even be American.

So then if we get to what I’m talking about with Claire Huxtable, we’ve told all these other groups who weren’t initially considered man or woman by the founding fathers that if they can assimilate enough to the two recognized groups, then they might have access to the same resources. If they aren’t able to feed their families or protect their families, it’s actually because they’re not assimilating to these two assigned groups well enough. So we need you to do that. Don’t worry about the system, don’t worry about correcting this hierarchy. Worry about how you can ascend this made up ladder. And so Claire Huxtable really is the symbol of that a black woman who is taking care of her family, they’re both well off, they are both acting in the way they’re supposed to in this notion of who gets to be elite. But it’s also combined with a new wave of feminism that’s telling women, sure you can work outside of the home so long as you do the thing that matters most and always has mattered most, which is be a wife and be a mother.

So if you’re going to be making a decision that is you’re going to bring some more money into your household, fine, but make sure that those two things are always the priority. And I talk about in the book how this creates this illusion because there’s no possible way Claire Huxtable is able to be a lawyer and take care of these endless amounts of kids and this beautiful home where we never see anybody support her in doing that. So then you have women watching this, especially black women watching this, unsure of how this is possible and feeling like they’ve not played the role well enough. They haven’t worked hard enough because Claire can do it so well, and she’s the one we all look up to. So why can’t I accomplish that? Well, the answer is because it was all illusion from the moment the founding fathers were deciding what families should even look like in the United States.

ELISE:

Do you remember, now I’m trying to look this up real time, but the show with Michael J. Fox is the young conservative, and it’s another big eighties. I’m just curious, did they have, because that was another example of this sort of upper middle class two professional parents, Meredith, and do you know what I’m talking about?

ANNA:

I know the show, but I don’t think I ever watched it, so I’d have to actually do some research on it. Oh, it’s

ELISE:

Family ties.

ANNA:

Did they have any help?

ELISE:

Now? I’m really curious. I feel like, yeah, it’s Reagan era, American, traditional suburban,

ANNA:

Because the families that we saw before the Claire Huxtables, we would see black help in the Home.

ELISE:

Yeah, I don’t think so. I don’t know that they had, I don’t remember that. But it’s an interesting question because to your point, what’s modeled for professional women is yeah, you’re going to go and kill it. And they were hippies, super progressive, and I feel like she was even more dominant or breadwinner in that particular family. But yeah, I don’t recall anyone hoping to make, I guess it doesn’t make such compelling tv.

ANNA:

Well, it’s one of those things, even if they had, and I mean, again, I haven’t watched every episode of all of these shows. Even if they have somebody show up once or twice, the fact that we can’t really recall, they’re not a main character, meaning somehow it wasn’t that they were there every single day supporting this person or this family, I should say. That isn’t enough. Even if we were able to find one episode where somebody showed up randomly, the fact that it wasn’t a main part of the story

ELISE:

Story

ANNA:

Order for this family to persist, there is another character who is helping it all happen. That’s problem enough

ELISE:

And to persist, but also maintaining TV standards of cleanliness. Yeah, I mean, it goes back to this foundational part of your work, which is everything that happens that supports the work, this idea of the role of mothers historically, hopefully that’s parents now. But even someone just gave me a copy of Wife Dom, which I haven’t read, which is about George Orwell’s wife or Helen Lewis’s book, the Genius Myth. She writes a lot about, I think it was Tolstoy’s wife and Lee Krasner who was married to Jackson Pollock, just the role of these women who are largely invisible, but who structured and contained and sometimes actually did the work of their famous spouse. And it’s a fascinating question. Well, I think it busts that myth that we have about hyper individualism, rugged individualism,

ANNA:

Self-made man, et cetera, all of those things. I mean, and with these three women, with the mothers of MLK Jr, Malcolm X and Dame Baldwin, they all in their different ways had their intellectual tradition that they were passing on to their sons, their activist tradition that they’re passing on to their sons. So yes, they birth them, yes, they raise them. Yes, they do all the mothering things. And Louis Little was an activist. She was a part of the Marcus Garvey movement. She was a secretary in the branch, meaning she wrote for the Negro World newspaper. She was intelligent, she was multilingual. She was an organizer. And Alberta King MLK’s mother, she participated in marches and in thoughts. Her parents are the leaders of Ebenezer Baptist Church. So she is like the daughter of Ebenezer Baptist Church. People look up to her. She has a teaching certificate, she has a bachelor’s degree for the early 19 hundreds.

For a black woman to have accomplished these things is no small feat. She teaches her husband, she teaches her children. And then with Bures Baldwin, she was also an incredible writer herself. She believed in the power of words and language and how you can help people through their darkest time through your writing. So with these three women, yes, they do all these incredible things that have to do with what we traditionally think of with mothering, but they also make it very clear that mothers are passing on their passions. They are passing on their talents, they’re passing on their skills. These three men walked directly in the footsteps of their mothers. They were not self-made, and they also didn’t believe they were. When I wrote the book and found the letters and evidence of Malcolm X saying, my mother was the first to teach me this, he didn’t say that the Nation of Islam was the first to teach me this.

He said in a letter, my mother was the first to teach me this. It was the historians and writers who heard him say that and decided that doesn’t really fit our notion of how this world works, and we’re going to leave that out, even though Malcolm X himself was acknowledging it, MLK Jr wrote letters to his mother saying, you are my mother, dear. I tell everybody I learned things from you. He knew it was his maternal lineage that had this intellectual tradition of Morehouse and Spelman. And then with Bures Baldwin, James Baldwin constantly is bringing all of his people to meet Bures Baldwin, Maya Angelou, Tony Morrison. He knows how important she is in his life. He’s calling her for counsel. All of this is this relationship in a conversation that helps us celebrate the reality of motherhood. I know my kids are walking in my footsteps as well, as well as their dads, but it would be wild in the future if my kids go on to do whatever it is that they’re going to do in this world. And everybody just says, wow, Michael Tubbs did an awesome job. And that’s what we’ve done to these women. That’s exactly what we’ve done to them. And it doesn’t do us any favors to not fully understand how these three men who we so revere became who they were.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, I think it’s such important and vital work. What are you working on now? What’s the through line? What’s your red thread?

ANNA:

I’m trying to do so many things, but I’m grateful for the inspiration that I get, so I can’t complain about it. So Erased was a part of a two book deal. So I already know I have another nonfiction that I’m starting on, and I work with an organization that’s led by women who were formerly incarcerated. And I’m always incredibly inspired by them, and especially at a time right now where people in our nation feel very lost and they feel like we’re in this crisis of, oh, we’ve never seen people get thrown into vehicles and we’ve never seen the National Guard. And I’m like, actually, yes, we have historically seen this. And the women who I work with are like, of, this is brand new. We’ve been resisting this every single day. And so I’m writing a book that is about identifying strategies of oppression and tools of resistance by using them as a case study for how you move through these moments that seem like crisis, but really is a highlight of people’s privilege if they haven’t had to fight like this before.

ELISE:

And

ANNA:

I think I’m calling it Welcome to The Resistance. So we will see, but I’m starting, I actually have a call with my editor today to just tell her about the outline that I’m thinking of working through, but I’ll start that in January because I had a novel idea and I really want to write that before I jump into another

ELISE:

Nonfiction.

ANNA:

So

ELISE:

Fun.

ANNA:

It’s really exciting. And then I’m turning the three mothers into a film, so I wrote

ELISE:

This. Oh, amazing.

ANNA:

And I have a producer attached now, so we have it out to my kind of dream director, and I’m hoping she’ll say yes so that the other pieces can fall in place, but a lot of different things.

ELISE:

That’s amazing. Thank you. It feels like, of course, that should be a movie.

ANNA:

I hope so. I hope everyone feels that way.

ELISE:

Yeah, no, for sure. I mean, it’s so rare. I feel like the general public is like, of course these things happen. These things become movies, but it’s rare to even have something option much less be in conversation. So congratulations,

ANNA:

It’s very hard. Thank you so much. I’ve had so many conversations about it over the last five years since it’s been out, and it just wasn’t the right fit. And I felt like people were trying to highlight the men too. It was just not the right balance. And that’s when I realized, actually maybe I can write a script. I’ll just try. And then my team was like, yeah, this is good. Let’s go out with it. So we’ll see. It really is just step by step. I feel in my heart this will be a successful project, but it just might be like 10 years from now. You just never know. Timeline could be in their lives and the themes of their lives, they’ll be applicable at any point. So I’m not rushing it. It’ll be worth the time spent and the time waiting, so we’ll

ELISE:

See. Yeah. Well, amazing. I can’t wait. I know it can be really hard in these moments of turbulence and chaos and change to understand what’s happening. I do think that there are maps in our history that help and that also suggest, oh, so much of this is story. So much of this is passed down to us as fact when in reality it’s story. And these are collective cultural stories that we’ve shared about who gets power and so on and so forth. And of course there’s an endless amount of proof suggesting that these stories are fact or immutable or can’t be changed. But we are far more creative than we give ourselves credit for. And I think when you start thinking about history and our future in that way, it starts to become fun and less scary to think about what would happen if we changed the story?

What would happen if we stop believing that this is how things have always been and therefore this is how they always need to be. And then what does change look like? Of course, I’m interested in change that is practical, inclusive, and respectful, even of people who don’t necessarily agree with me. I think that there is a commonality of both experience and also an underlying fear that once addressed really loosens people up to try something new. And I think it’s really important to understand that there are architects amongst us who are looking to put supreme courts together and systems of power together that are less mutable. And so Anna’s work erased in particular, is all about asking those sorts of questions. Alright, this is the last hard thinky episode of the year. I promise I’m going to be joined by my dear friend Nora McInerney for some good times and maybe even some discussion of reality TV next week and a solo.

And we are into 2026, which hopefully is less of a dumpster fire than 2025. Alright, friends, I’ll see you next time. If you got something out of today’s episode, I would so appreciate your help spreading the word. Please rate and review the episode, follow pulling the thread on your preferred podcast platform, and share this episode with a friend who would also enjoy it. That’s how we grow this thing. It’s so helpful. Thank you.