Name: A Woman's Work: Elinor Cleghorn
Start: 2026-03-23T19:00:00+00:00
End: 2026-03-23T20:30:00+00:00
Location: Foyles

Elinor Cleghorn visits Foyles to talk about her new book A Woman's Work, which unravells the extraordinary and untold history of mothering.
About this Event

Mothers make history. For centuries, motherhood has sparked social and political change. Yet the acts of growing, birthing and nurturing children - and the power they hold - have been pushed to the margins, overlooked in our narratives of the past.

In A Woman's Work, Elinor Cleghorn reveals the mothers, othermothers, midwives, activists, and community leaders who have shaped this extraordinary history. It is a radical and inspiring new history of mothering, and a timely reminder that the fight for reproductive freedom is far from over.

Elinor Cleghorn is a feminist cultural historian, writer, and researcher living in Sussex. After receiving her PhD in humanities and cultural studies in 2012, she worked for three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford on an interdisciplinary arts and medical humanities project. Her writing on women’s health and its histories has been published in The Wall Street Journal, BBC History, BBC Science Focus, New Scientist, and Vogue, and she has discussed her research on BBC’s Woman’s Hour, NPR, and numerous podcasts. Elinor is the author of Unwell Women, which has been translated across the world.