We love our boomer moms. And our boomer moms are complicated. When Tracy Clark-Flory first told me about her memoir — in which she discovers the half-sister her mother had at age 19, and was forced to give up for adoption — I immediately thought about how so many of our boomer moms' choices were limited in ways we struggle to imagine. No matter how feminist their current politics may be, it doesn't change the fact that so many of them grew up (and became adults) in deeply patriarchal, racist, restrictive, and incredibly anti-sex families and communities.
So in this episode, Tracy and I work to activate some deep empathy for boomer moms just generally — but we're also very real about how some of the patterns they couldn't escape have affected their children. We talk about boomer moms who loathe feminism, who've dealt with un-present partners, who struggle with bitterness, who reproduce the criticalness of their own parents, and who really, really want to give gifts. The goal for this episode is empathy that doesn't shy from consequences; became a paid subscriber so you can continue to work through these themes in the comments!
THE NEXUS OF LLMS/A.I. AND CREATIVITY: A.I. Boosters argues that LLMS can free us for more creative endeavors — or "facilitate" our creative work. THOUGHTS???? (This one's with the brilliant Vauhini Vara, whose work grapples with these questions in a way I've never seen before). Hopefully this piece on how A.I. keeps wasting my G-D time will spark some questions on your end.
WOMEN'S FITNESS INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX. As our co-host Zoe Rom puts it: "Women are told they need to do fasting, creatine, lifting, fueling, and recovery differently than men. Sometimes the science backs it. More often the "different" is a marketing mechanism: invent a gendered problem, sell a gendered protocol, collect the markup." What's going on here? Where have you seen it, what pisses you off about it... take this wherever you'd like.
HOW HAVING A FAMILY BECAME SO DAUNTING (and DIFFICULT). Anna Louie Sussman is coming on the pod to talk about her incredible new book on the feeling of "impossibility" when it comes to contemporary family. We can talk about fertility, cost, equal partnership, affordability, safety, climate grief, so many things.
QUITTING. Journalist Lindsay Crouse's forthcoming book asks, "In a world that prizes persistence, when does perseverance work against us?" What are your thoughts, fears, and questions around quitting? What are you struggling to quit?
Anne Helen Petersen: Hey, everyone. Just wanted to let you all know that we're taking next week off. We only take two weeks off a year, this week, and then also a week at Christmas. So hopefully this gives you a chance to catch up on some episodes that you may have missed, and to come up with some great questions for our next batch of recordings.
So let me tell you about some of the episodes we're working on. One on the joys and importance of quitting. This is especially important for people who have internalized that they should never quit. So please give us your questions, your curiosities, everything quitting related.
Another one on AI and creativity, like how does using AI interfere with creativity? How has it boosted creativity? If you found that to be the case, we can take this one in any direction.
We are also talking with someone who has done a ton of research, has a new book coming out about basically how inconceivable it is to have a family. So this is both the difficulties in getting pregnant, the difficulties in having enough money to be secure enough to start a family. So whatever questions you have about your own life, what you're seeing around you, this one's gonna go in so many different directions.
And then another one about the women's fitness industrial complex. I am so excited to talk about various trends that we're seeing. We can talk about protein and weightlifting. We can talk about pink washing. We can talk about protein again, all sorts of supplements. So that one's gonna be fun.
You can submit your questions at tinyurl.com/culturestudypod, and that's also where you can send in your questions for Ask Us Anything. We always need more of those. And please also suggest topics for new episodes.
Thank you so much, and we'll see you in two weeks.
This is the Culture Study Podcast, and I am Anne Helen Petersen.
Tracy Clark-Flory: I'm Tracy Clark-Flory. I'm a journalist, essayist, and the author of the memoir, My Mother's Daughter: Finding Myself in My Family's Fractured Past.
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay, we're gonna start sentimental.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Okay.
Anne Helen Petersen: I wanna start by asking you about your favorite memory of your mom.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Oh, gosh, that's such a hard one.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, if you wanted - the way that Melody phrased this, I liked, which is, when you think of your mom at her best, what do you think of?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Mm, yeah. I mean, honestly, and I hate to say this because, well, you'll see why. It taps into so many gendered tropes, but I think my happiest memories are with my mom, the feelings that are just suffused with such warmth are her cooking…
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm.
Tracy Clark-Flory: … and her taking care of me when I was sick as a kid. So it's like the washcloth held to the forehead.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: You know? It's the bowl that I need to puke in that she's bringing to me on the couch. It's her in the kitchen grilling up a grilled cheese sandwich with some Kraft Singles.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: You know? Like, those are core memories of being cared for. You know?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. So all of this matters because we're talking about boomer moms today, but we're talking specifically, at the beginning at least, about your boomer mom, and we're gonna use this as, your story as a way to kind of work through some of these larger questions about our relationships with our boomer moms, some of our difficulties.
But first, let's talk about your new memoir, My Mother's Daughter. It came out in May.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yep.
Anne Helen Petersen: What's it about? That's a huge question, I know. And there's a great Modern Love segment that we'll point people towards that gives the recap, but for people here right now, what's the elevator pitch for it?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah. The elevator pitch is, so it's called My Mother's Daughter: Finding Myself and My Family's Fractured Past, and it's a memoir about how a DNA test connected me with my sister Cathy. I knew that my mom had gotten pregnant as a teenager in the Midwest in the '60s, 20 years before I was born. I also knew that she had been sent away to a home for unwed mothers, that she had the baby, a girl, and placed her for adoption.
And I also knew that she was then committed to a mental institution in her grief over losing her baby. That is all I knew, just those broad strokes of a story. And my mom had died years earlier, so in finding my sister Cathy, we had all these big questions about what had happened back in 1965.
So like a good journalist, I dove in and did my research. And I learned that my mom was one of an estimated 1.5 million women who were sent away to homes for unwed mothers in the pre-Roe era.
Anne Helen Petersen: Startling. Startling.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Startling. And it's like three million who are estimated to have placed babies for adoption between 1950 and 1975.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Like, thousands of parents were sending their young pregnant girls away every year in that era.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And so I learned she was pulled into this coercive system that was designed to turn, quote-unquote, "bad girls" into proper women and wives and mothers. It was meant to control women's sexuality, promote marriage, bolster the white nuclear family norm.
And in this research, I came to understand that my own life had been profoundly shaped by my mother's past. But I also uncovered a bigger story about shame and family secrets, and race, the control of women's bodies, and also probably most relevant to what we're talking about here today, everything that we inherit from our mothers in a world that hates them.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Which is a lot.
Anne Helen Petersen: One of the questions that we actually didn't use because it actually got so straight to the heart of the issue is, why do so many Boomers' moms hate other women? And it's just, it's this internalized misogyny that is really, really, really difficult to grapple with.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah ...
Anne Helen Petersen: And our goal with this episode is to complicate the way that we think about Boomer moms. It is not to rag on Boomer moms. We have a lot of Boomer moms in the audience, and obviously we are not Boomer moms, so we are talking from the perspective of Boomer daughters. So we're gonna be doing our best to talk about what we understand, but would also love, of course, any Boomer moms who are listening to come and offer further context and experience in the comments.
There's this quote that I get that from the very beginning of your book that I keep coming back to, and you're talking about looking at the home for unwed mothers. Like, you go and visit it, and you are looking at it outside. And you're like, "This building is part of my origin story."
And you say, "I understand that now. I spent so much of my life facing off with shame as a young woman grasping for sexual empowerment and as a journalist exploring taboo subcultures. I wanted to believe that I was free of that wagging finger, but I inherited my mom's shame along with the world that shamed her."
Tracy Clark-Flory: Oh. You know, I just thought I would open the book up with a very light moment.
Anne Helen Petersen: Or there's another moment where you're talking about, like, just thinking back on how your mom grappled with the daughter that she had... was forced to give away for adoption, and all of these years of not knowing what happened to her and trying to really reconcile herself to that fact. And you say kind of offhandedly, you're like, "How did it not eat away at her?"
And then you realize, like, oh it fucking did.
Tracy Clark-Flory: It did.
Anne Helen Petersen: Every day.
Tracy Clark-Flory: That it was always there in the room with us, right? I mean, that was the thing is, I definitely had a moment in my life where she finally told me about my sister and about being sent away, and so much of what I'd observed in my mom started to make sense, but it was really just only the beginning, right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Like, I had detected as a little kid this secret at the heart of our family. You know, I had some sort of sense even of a sister it seems. Like, I would lay in bed at night as a little kid and concoct stories about the secret sister that my parents were keeping down the hall from me, and I would hold my breath in hopes of being able to hear her breathing.
So there's this way in which my mom's secret was, was sensed, was there, was always in the room with us. And so to some degree, when she sat me down finally as a teenager, and told me the very basic details of what had happened, it was like, oh, okay. Yeah. Some of this is starting to make sense.
But it was really only once I found my sister, dove into the research, understood what these homes were that I made these bigger ties to, like you mentioned, the fact that my mom was sent away in shame, and I in some ways turned shame into my career by confronting it, investigating it continually as a journalist covering the sex beat.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah, yeah, which is so fitting. But also, you know, you're still doing the work. Like, you still have to confront that shame over and over and over again.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Over and over, and never, and never fully escaping it either. Yeah. I mean, that's the thing that's so interesting. I think it was both.
Like, it was- I was writing against what had been done to my mom. Like, the earliest histories, one of the things that I was most fascinated by and just totally stunned me was that the earliest histories of these homes, they started as an attempt to, quote-unquote, "save sex workers" before they redirected their attentions to unwed mothers.
And I'd spent so much of my career writing about sex worker rights, writing about the porn industry. Like, and it just was like, oh my God. I didn't even realize that this thing has been driving me. And so I was writing against what had been done to her, her being sent away in shame, right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: But I was also stuck in it, you know? So it was both at once. Like, the fact of publishing very personal essays about sex on the internet and then being met with messages from vile, misogynistic internet trolls. You know? Like, this was this constant re-experiencing of shame.
Anne Helen Petersen: When was your mom born?
Tracy Clark-Flory: 1946.
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay. Yeah, so this is the other thing is I think our moms are kind of on the opposite ends of boomer-ish-ness. My mom was born in 1956. She's about to turn 70. Yeah ... and then there are also boomers who are younger than that. Like, one of my good friends, I think her experience is markedly different than my mom because she's another, like, five, six, seven years younger.
Right? So, we're going all the way from your mom to my friend's experience in terms of they're... It's like millennials, right? Like, an elder millennial has a very different experience than the youngest millennial. But I just keep thinking about, I was looking at, okay, birth control's introduced in 1960, and I think people often point to that date as like, "Oh, yeah, sexual revolution."
It was not legal to have if you were an unmarried woman in, like, 23 states until 1972.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Right. Yeah. It was taboo. I mean, it was like you had women putting on fake wedding rings to go to the doctor to try to get a prescription, right? It's not like it was suddenly just we're swimming in birth control pills here.
Anne Helen Petersen: No, I know. And I think sometimes we're like, "Oh, everything changed when our parents were growing up." Like, oh, there was all of these different, like... People believed in integration suddenly, and everyone understood that queer people were people. Like, no. Right? No. Like, a lot of these beliefs are hard-won over the course of their adult lifetimes.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Totally. And I think about, like, specifically for my mom, who was sent away in 1965, she was very much just a little too early -
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: - to kind of have been protected by some of the winds of the sexual revolution.
Anne Helen Petersen: Totally.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And so it was right at this kind of turning point where she was still sent away in shame.
She was a bad girl. She was all of those things. And it was as the sort of narratives about unwed mothers were starting to shift, where it was like it had been that they were kind of a species of mental patient almost, and then it was like they're dangerous sexual revolutionaries.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And, and she was kind of caught up in the swirl of all of that pathologizing, you know?
Anne Helen Petersen: Well, and also just patriarchal control, and I don't just mean, like, the patriarchy. Like, I mean their dads controlled what happened to them. Like, my mom, this is a story I've heard my entire life, and I don't think it always sinks in the way that it should. My beloved granddad, who I loved so much, he told my mom, "You cannot leave the state for college."
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, she had a National Merit Scholarship, she could have gotten to so many different places, and he was like, "No, you're not leaving the state." Her older brother was allowed to leave the state, but not her. Right?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah. Right. Well, and gosh, I mean, I've thought about this so much in the context of these homes, because in terms of what felt possible for these women. And certainly when my mom presented this story to me initially, she said, "My father sent me away."
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes.
Tracy Clark-Flory: So, there was a lot of clarity there. And I also do a lot of writing in this book around this generational inheritance, even just going back to my grandmother. Like, my grandmother spent basically every day of her marriage hoping that her husband would die so that she would be free, and she was very explicit about that at the end of her life. When she was on her deathbed, she called the whole family into the room and said to him for all to hear, "I should have left you the day I married you. You promised me a second shot, a second chance at a happy life." And he literally had promised her that he would die first. “So just hang in there. I will die first and then you'll be set for life.”
Anne Helen Petersen: And just holding on for that, right?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Holding on for that. And then for it to come out, turn out to not be true.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And so I just am thinking about that in the context of these... My mom always called that a deal with the devil. And it was this story that she told me growing up, and it was a warning about how a woman could find herself trapped in marriage, right?
But then my mom had her own deal with the devil in the sense that a lot of these adoptions in that era are, these histories about that era refer to them explicitly as such, that here, you can place your baby for adoption, and then you can return to a normative life. And especially since most of these women were white, it was a promise that you could return to white privilege, that you had fallen off your pedestal by getting pregnant, and now here, let us help return you to it. Granted, they were also left traumatized and grieving, and struggling with mental health issues for the rest of their lives. So it was quite a lie what they were sold.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right. We should also note here, and this is very central to the book too, in part because your sister is Black, and part of the reason that there was even more shame and taboo on your mom becoming pregnant when she did was because the father of the baby was Black. Yes. And I didn't realize, though, that they did not have similar institutions for Black women because these institutions were understood as a way of, like, reinstating white privilege, like keeping the moral purity of these white women, whereas Black women were just supposed to just have the baby.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah. And then, I mean, it really is just like when you look at the way that unwed pregnancy, the paths were determined along racial lines so clearly. So Black women were expected to raise their own children, often within their extended families, and then they faced a host of associated consequences like lost education, poverty.
They were targeted with harassment by welfare officials, sterilization, and then the visibility of Black single mothers was then used to make arguments around segregation in schools and, and stuff like that. You know, it was used to argue against the civil rights movement. You know, it's very clear, you very clearly see the conspiracy at play here.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah. The way it played out. Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And if they did try to give their kids up for adoption, they could be accused or persecuted for abandonment.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah ...
Anne Helen Petersen: What a systematic piece of fuckery going on there, right?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Ugh.
Tracy Clark-Flory: I mean, that was the thing that really, totally overhauled my sense of my mom's story because I had thought of her as having faced a difficult personal choice or predicament.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: It was like she was a teenager, it was the Midwest, it was the '60s, she was unmarried. Then I came to see this larger system at play and saw that, well, one, it wasn't a choice at all, that these adoptions were coerced and sometimes just outright forced. But two, that she was pulled into the gears of this racist and sexist machine.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. Okay. So, look, we got so many questions.
Tracy Clark-Flory: I bet.
Anne Helen Petersen: So many questions. And I like this first one, 'cause first of all, it puzzle pieces well into the things that we've been talking about, but also for the way that this question asker, whose name is Emily, just opens up the question. It's just perfect. So, let's hear from her.
Emily: My boomer mother is an extremely rich text, but the facet of her that I've never been able to make sense of is her and feminism. She faced severe sexism and discrimination in both her first career field as a musician and her second career field as a kitchen and bath designer running a remodeling company.
She complained loudly about it for years. She eventually started her own successful company that lasted 25 years, and she still faced sexism from clients and contractors that whole time, to her great frustration. She's the reason that I became an outspoken feminist at 14, and yet she loathes feminism.
Even now when she and I have really thoughtful discussions about how frustrated she is with my dad's very sexist refusal to do most housework, she's so quick to disavow feminism as doing anything other than hating men, no matter what I say. I know that some of this is rooted in her conservative, now very MAGA cult mindset, and it shows up in other places, like her deep love of solar and wind power, until Trump required them to hate it, but what else is going on?
Does this have something to do with her growing up politically apathetic in Oakland in the '60s? It just feels like her values are diametrically opposed to her beliefs. I just cannot make sense of it.
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh. I love Emily. I love, like, your mom is a rich text. All of our moms are rich texts. And I think sometimes it's useful to approach our loved one's political beliefs from this idea of, how do I analyze -
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: - or break down where they're all coming from. And obviously, we don't know all of the details about Emily's mom. I'd love to know exactly what year she was born, and more about her family in Oakland, and who did they vote for, and that sort of thing. But what comes to mind here?
Tracy Clark-Flory: I mean, I'm immediately reminded of how my mom, who held a lot of very feminist beliefs, truly, would refer to herself as a humanist.
Anne Helen Petersen: Ah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: In a very pointed way. You know?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And she also introduced me pretty early on to the dissident feminist Camille Paglia.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Well, I'm embarrassed to admit I had a Camille Paglia phase.
Like, I don't know. Many of us do. And then I got over it.
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh, yeah. I think a lot of people have a Camille Paglia phase.
Tracy Clark-Flory: But I did. But we bonded over it. And Camille would just rail against feminists' victim mentality. Right? And I very much see my mom's positioning around all of that as arising from her being sent away and pulled into this system designed for oppression and a system that left so many women traumatized, and then emerging from that system not with a sense of sort of what it had done to her and so many other women, but more so with a sense of personal responsibility. Taking personal responsibility for her choice, even though it was coerced. That she saw it as a source of her personal shame, and she never came to see the broader context of it. And also, she sort of… I think there was so much that she boxed up in order to survive that trauma.
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Tracy Clark-Flory: She boxed up her feelings about what had happened. She boxed up her feelings of, of loss over her f- first baby. Um, and she became this very, like, tough, searingly smart kind of woman who would not take shit from any man. Um, and I think implicit in that is that kind of, like, personal focus on personal responsibility, personal empowerment, personal savvy for kind of- Yep
navigating this dangerous world that we live in, right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And that can feel empowering. It can feel empowering to feel like, "Well, it's in my hands."
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And I think it's scary oftentimes to admit to look at this broader system because it can feel so disempowering.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. I think one thing we have to remember is that feminism was exoticized, turned into bra burners, right? Like, do you remember this from when you grew up in a different cultural context than I did in North Idaho in the 1990s.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Berkeley was quite different.
Anne Helen Petersen: But the images of the bra burners were so salient to me as what feminism was, like, not shaving your armpits and not wearing a bra.
Like, such a very simplistic… and that was passed down to me, not just by the media, right? But people who were older than me talking about what feminism was. And also just an incredible feminist backlash through the '80s and '90s. Like, we did not say the word feminism, it was an embarrassing thing to talk about out loud.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: But when I hear Emily talk about her mom, I'm like, "Oh, this is a girl boss," right? Like, there are a lot of things that are similar between what Emily's mom is doing in trying to navigate this whole world. Like, she just wants to succeed on her own terms…
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yep.
Anne Helen Petersen: And not have it be about her gender and not interrogate these larger systems that… or leaning in. Like, Emily's mom would love to lean in. right?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah. Right. Exactly.
Anne Helen Petersen: It's like, "Oh, I just need to behave like men." Instead of, I need to change the system to not make it so everyone has to behave like men.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Exactly. Yeah. And I can, I mean, to empathize with her mom, I really can in the sense that I think it's scary to face the lie of it all, right?
Like, the lie that you can just lean in.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: The lie that it's possible to individually navigate out of patriarchy, especially when you're not even able to say the word patriarchy to start, you know? Yeah, yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. You're just like, "Oh, these people don't respect me, but if I work harder, they should respect me."
Tracy Clark-Flory: I'll just keep trying.
Anne Helen Petersen: It's very meritocracy, right?
Tracy Clark-Flory: 100%. I don't know. I mean, I don't know why I'm thinking this just now, but it makes me think about even just how little kids will personalize whatever dysfunction is happening in their family, and then start acting out.
And then they get negative attention, and they can say, "Oh, well, I caused that." That there's this sense of agency that's created. Like, who knows her mom's larger backstory, her childhood, all those things? Like, what is it that makes her feel like she needs to kind of take this on as, this is mine?
I don't know. It feels like there's something deep there.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. And also just the anger that somehow, I see this sometimes too when people, including people of color, are very anti-infer- affirmative action. Like, they don't want someone blaming a larger political movement for their success.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And I think that that is sometimes at the root of anti-feminism as well. It's like…
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah…
Anne Helen Petersen: … feminism didn't do this for me, I did this for me.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah. Well, and there's something too about wanting to be the exceptional woman. Yes, yes. Like, again, with the internalized misogyny, it's like you want to set yourself apart from all of that badness that we're told is women.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: You know? But not me.
Anne Helen Petersen: And a lot of these women, and this is something that we have to remember, a lot of these women were first. Right? Or the onlys. And I think about this all the time when I think about my family doctor, who was one of the first women, not first first, but one of the first class of medical students that also had a significant amount of women, and then was the only woman in her, the larger practice, one of just a handful of women. Or some of my professors who were sometimes the first professors in their field, right? Or the only person in their grad program that was a woman. And what do you come up with?
You come up with a protective armor that's coldness, directness. All of these things. And sometimes you have a larger feminist politic that goes alongside that. And sometimes you're like, "I'm just as good as men, and do not talk about my gender, and my gender doesn't matter."
Tracy Clark-Flory: Right. I am proof that you don't need feminism.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yes. And that women who are clinging to that, have a victim mentality.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. Okay, next question. This is about boomer moms and their relationship with boomer dads. This is from Emma, and Melody's gonna read it.
Melody Rowell: As I get older, I find that a lot of my frustrations with my own boomer mom stem from the lack of support she has received from my boomer dad.
I don't wanna let her off the hook for everything, but I can't help put most of the blame on the type of men available in the '80s and '90s when she got married. My dad wasn't abusive, absent, or controlling, he's just not a partner in the sense that we expect partners to act in 2026. Raising kids with an emotionally unavailable partner must have been incredibly hard, and without a true partner to turn to, it's no wonder she struggles with some of the stuff she deals with today.
Besides encouraging therapy, I find I have little to say to her other than, "I'm sorry you didn't have the help you needed." How can I encourage her personal growth without fully throwing my dad under the bus and criticizing their relationship?
Anne Helen Petersen: So Tracy, your dad seems pretty great, at least the way he comes off on the page.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Oh, yeah. I mean, he's wonderful. I mean, I do... You know, if I'm totally honest, and I'll say this 'cause I'm pretty sure he doesn't listen to your podcast [laughter], like he was like a very present father. And that was a really big part of my narrative growing up was like my mom was so emphatic around the luck of me having a good dad, like a cuddly dad, a warm, present father. You know? Like, this was, in many ways I feel like she'd chosen him for me, in this way 'cause it wasn't what she had from her father, who was this 1950s tyrant…
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah ...
Tracy Clark-Flory: … who sent her away. And so there was definitely that feeling of her correcting upon the previous generation's mistakes, right? But I will also say, they had inequities within their relationship, like her doing most of the cooking. However, my mom inherited money from her father, who had sent her away…
Anne Helen Petersen: Wow.
Tracy Clark-Flory: … that she then maintained as her own within their marriage, that allowed her a degree of freedom around food and cooking, which is to say we ate out a lot. Like, she... And so it was this very fraught literal inheritance for her of the father whose love was very much conditioned upon her being sent away, placing her baby for adoption, being traumatized by the experience. Then, gave her money across the course of his life that allowed her some degree of freedom within her marriage that made it so that they didn't ever have to confront that particular kind of domestic inequity.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: So...
Anne Helen Petersen: Also, okay, so correct my timeline if I'm wrong here. So, your mom got pregnant with you when she was 37?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah, or 39. Or something around there. In ‘84.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. And they had been together for at least…
Tracy Clark-Flory: For a while.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, they'd been married for, like, seven years.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Seven years.
Anne Helen Petersen: But together I'm assuming before that for a bit.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And your mom had lived some life. Like, she got - I mean, apart from everything that we've already been talking about, but had lived her 20s, she got a master's degree.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah, she had lived her life and your parents had a long relationship before you arrived.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And I think, I mean, we see this now, that I think oftentimes, so if you have time to kind of figure out who you are in relationship to one another, and who you are as a person, it's oftentimes a little bit easier to negotiate parenthood, and seeing only having one kid in the family at that time, right?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yes. Well, and also, I think about my mom was very clear that before she met my dad, she was very clear she thought she was gonna never get married. She, in her own words, she was like, "I figured I would have affairs for the rest of my life," because she didn't see herself becoming a wife because she couldn't imagine finding a man who would treat her as an equal.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And so, it's really interesting. She was like, "I'm not gonna do that." And then she found my dad, who she felt like was a man who was willing to treat her equally enough, right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. And as an intellectual equal.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yes, which I think that was number one for her. Yeah. Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Whereas my mom got married immediately out of graduating from college, which was very standard at that time.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Mm-hmm.
Anne Helen Petersen: And so many people got married in part because there was still significant taboos in the 1970s about living with someone if you weren't married to them.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yes.
Anne Helen Petersen: Absolutely living in sin. Like, really not okay. And your parents still had this legislative control over your life even after you graduated from college.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And I think a lot of my mom's future was directed in other ways because she got married that young.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yes.
Anne Helen Petersen: And also had babies pretty young. And it was the right decision for her in so many ways. But also, my parents shouldn't have gotten married.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, they got divorced when I was 15, in part because, that's the person - like, if I got married to the person I was dating when I graduated from college, oh my God.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Oh my gosh. I feel like so many of my friends, we've had that sort of mental exercise of can you imagine?
Anne Helen Petersen: Right, and the person I was then and the person I've become. And so I think about that with this question, that -
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: - it's really hard when you… obviously, there are so many people who get married that young and figure it out, but also if you go straight from your mother's care to your wife's care, what skills as a man are you developing, I guess I would say.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah. It's such a good point. Yeah, and I think too about how this sense of a generational divide between a daughter looking at her mother, because I think, my mom had this reaction to her mom's unhappy married existence in terms of who she chose as a partner, right? And then I had a reaction to my parents' relationship and who I chose as a partner. And I think, these reactions too can create this real divide that is, I mean, I think a really positive thing in the sense that it is in the best cases, a case of kind of, we are evolving, we are moving forward, we're kind of escaping some of the traps of the past.
But then it can be kind of hard to meet each other and understand each other across that divide.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. And I think about this all the time. I've talked to my mom about this, and I've written about it a lot, how so many of my larger choices are in some ways reactive to, I'm not gonna have the life that my mom had.
I'm gonna try to figure out more active choices, whether that's, like, I'm not married. I could totally be married, but, I'm not married, I think in part because I wanna keep choosing that choice. Or always having a life raft, so that I'm not in situations where you have to stay in a marriage or anything like that.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Right.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. But sometimes that becomes just this fetishized independence as well.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Well, I know, and it's hard 'cause it's like we can also become so trapped in our reaction to our moms.
Anne Helen Petersen: Totally. Totally.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Like, that's the other thing. When I think about, again, like me writing about sex, it's like there's both the very positive here, where it's like, my mom was sent away in shame and her experience was shrouded in secrecy, right? And then I kind of did the opposite, like, "Here's a personal essay about sex that I'm gonna put on the internet." And I think that's a positive sort of movement away from shame. But also, you get trapped in these things where you're trying to prove yourself against your mom's past, her unhappiness, her pain. That is not always the best way to kind of move through and process that pain.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yep. That's great. Okay. Our next question comes from Lisa, and we got so many variations on this one. Melody's gonna read it for us.
Melody Rowell: Are boomer moms more critical? My mom is the kind of mom who once greeted me by telling me my roots were showing.
My mother says she's critical because she wants what's best for me, and others to think well of me, that it's a form of love. Is this a mother-daughter thing? Did generations play into it? Immigration and proving ourselves in this place?
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay. So what do we think? Is this boomer specific, or is this mom specific?
Tracy Clark-Flory: I don't know. That's a tough one. Like, I mean, I'm like instantly hearing this, like I'm flashing to this memory of my mom, who was not very typically feminine in in her self-presentation.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: She liked to be comfortable. It was all about -
Anne Helen Petersen: Same. My mom too ...
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yes, which I love. I love that for her. It was like, she always wore these stretchy black pants, like basically the same ones every day. And then comfortable, flexible, flat-soled shoes. And I remember her putting her makeup on, 'cause she had a graphic design business that she'd started in San Francisco.
And, and she's putting her makeup on and she's like, "I don't like doing this, but I have to do it to look professional." And so I just think about this generation of women in the workplace, and how they tied their appearance and self-presentation to legitimacy, like the ability to excel, to strive.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah
Tracy Clark-Flory:. But also how appearance was like, "This is how you get a husband," also. Like, the growing up with those kinds of messages. So both in the romantic/marital sphere, but also in the career world, like how important... That appearance was part of what we were talking about before, this kind of personal savvy of navigating this world and excelling within patriarchy.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah ...
Tracy Clark-Flory: Like, it's you don't want your roots to show.
Anne Helen Petersen: My mom's mom was incredibly critical. Like, she also had tremendous amounts of anxiety, to the point that like at various points in her life, and again, these are things that my mom would tell me all the time as part of our family lore, is she had so much anxiety that she couldn't learn to drive.
She would… just I think her life would be very different now with the medications that we have now, but maybe not, because she might have been too ashamed to seek them. But lived in suburban Saint Paul and didn't drive, was absolutely terrified, and it got worse as she got older of being around other moms and how they would think about her.
Just so much going on that I think my mom reacted to that very strongly as, "I'm not gonna be critical of you. Like, I really want you to be playful and figure out what you like to do with your appearance and all these things." And also like your mom, loves to be comfortable.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And has her own sense of style, but it doesn't align with the professional norms.
And when I was a kid, all I wanted was for her to be critical in that way. All I wanted was for her to be like, "Let's go get you a better bra," or you know what I mean? Like, just to care. I wanted her to care about all of the things that my friends' moms cared for.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Right. That is really interesting. I mean, I had a similar experience of growing up with a mom who didn't care, and then comparing her to the moms of my friends who really did care. And I just like have, as it lives in my brain, it was like all my friends' moms were the kinds of moms who had VHS workout in the living room, and they had the little workout gear and all that stuff. And my mom was so adamantly against that, which now I'm like, ugh, I feel so lucky and grateful in many ways to have grown up with my mom given that. But I remember at that time feeling like, oh, like my mom is not like other moms.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes, same.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And you know, there was some adolescent embarrassment around that. That she just didn't care, and that she wouldn't wear makeup unless she really had to for professional reasons.
Anne Helen Petersen: There was an after school meeting, and people who read The Hairpin, I wrote a piece about this at one point.
But there was an after school meeting for cheerleading that I wrote a letter to my mom about exactly which dress she should wear, one of her teaching dresses, and was like, "Don't wear a sports bra," 'cause she wore a sports bra.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Oh my God.
Anne Helen Petersen: And then at the end of like, "If you could please just do these things. Love, your daughter, Annie Petersen." And the full name just always gets to me. But I think that I was trying to get her to access these ideological norms and to -
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: - to put them on herself and to put them on me, 'cause I was already working so hard to put them on me, you know?
Tracy Clark-Flory: I think that's such a good point, too, because I think that is part of the criticism comes not just from moms wanting to protect their daughters from the sort of consequences of appearing not right, but also that they feel their daughters reflect upon them. 100%. And I think that's like this, it's both at once.
It's like they're wanting to protect you and themselves.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. And I think sometimes moms have done more work to excavate themselves from this larger stew, and maybe have figured out their own sense of style and what feels important to them, and sometimes they haven't. And that doesn't mean they're a worse person. It means that maybe the constructions were stronger where they grew up. Maybe there wasn't any other options. Maybe they saw very vivid evidence of what happened and how people talked about people who didn't meet these ideas.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Right.
Anne Helen Petersen: And you internalize that shit. Like you can try to unlearn it, but it's just there. It's just this well of judgment.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Right. Right. Well, that's the thing, is I think there are some critical periods in our life where we really absorb these kinds of things. And it is remarkable, but it is also true that for some, for a woman in her 70s, that it's really hard to escape that socialization that she got when she was in middle school.
Like, all the intervening decades, maybe there's probably been some growth in that period around this stuff, but it's always gonna kinda haunt you, I think.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah. And I even think about that phrase, what it... “You look nice.”
Tracy Clark-Flory: Mm.
Anne Helen Petersen: And like I think oftentimes what moms are looking for is for their daughters to look nice.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And what does that actually mean, right? It means, it looks like you are a person who fits in. It looks like you are a person who is nice.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Well, and there’s an implied just like compliance there.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. Right.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Right? Which feels so important. And I think that is part of, I think it's part of what all of this is, is like signaling compliance. Like a willingness to conform.
Anne Helen Petersen: And you know, we didn't get any specific questions about this. Maybe one, like the difficulty sometimes I think in dealing with some gender unruliness too, experimenting with different ways of self-presentation. Like, I think that can be hard because that was absolutely not allowed for our moms.
Like, my mom had to wear a dress or a skirt to school until she entered middle school.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Right.
Anne Helen Petersen: Like, it's still so difficult for them to understand that this is okay.
Tracy Clark-Flory: It is okay.
Anne Helen Petersen: And that you're still gonna get jobs, you know what I mean?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Right. But that is kind of, I think, what the stakes feel like for many of these women, is that it's like you won't have a job. You'll be unhirable.
Anne Helen Petersen: Or you won't find love.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Love too. That you won't have security in this world.
Anne Helen Petersen: And that those things, and this gets to our larger point, that those things matter. Safety matters more than happiness.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that's a really kind of traumatized perspective. Like, that is the perspective of someone who's in survival mode. You know?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Who's kind of learned that and taken that on and never been able to let go.
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay, this next question comes from Jackie. We got, I'm not kidding you, I think like 25 versions of this one.
So it is clearly a thing that people are still dealing with. Here we go.
Jackie: Why are boomer moms often so progressive and willing to learn and grow about so many things, but still unable to let go of diet culture? My mom was a lifelong progressive and feminist despite living in a small town and having a somewhat conservative family, but she never stopped wanting to be skinny.
What's up with that?
Anne Helen Petersen: So I have to plug Virginia Sole-Smith's piece from a few years ago called “The Grandparents Are Not Okay.” This is actually, I did an interview with her even before that piece about what I was noticing about a certain generation and the way that they talked about food.
And she's just super smart on the lessons that this generation had to internalize.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: But what do you think? What are your thoughts here?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Oh, man. I mean, so many things. I mean, okay, my first memoir was titled Want Me.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And it was a sexual coming-of-age memoir that was in part about me channeling my wants into being wanted by men. And so maybe I'm a little biased here, but I think that this want to be wanted runs so deep in women's socialization across generations.
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And that desirability is deeply tied to measurable real world rewards and punishments. And fatphobia is fundamental to ideas about desirability in our culture. Yeah. Right? So it makes sense. I mean, and that's across generations. I also think across generations it's true that we can hold certain political beliefs that might be in tension with our own private sort of struggles and insecurities.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And we might feel bad about having those insecurities given the way that they might seem to contradict with our politics.
Yeah, but I guess for boomer moms especially, I wonder about the pop culture that they grew up with.
Anne Helen Petersen: Oh, my God.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Like, I guess I'm just thinking about Weight Watchers and, I don't know, the diet soda boom, and SlimFast and all of that stuff. Like, I mean, I feel like that was also in the mix for me growing up, but I think it was directed very much at my mom's generation.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes, absolutely. And then there weren't positive representations of people being fat and happy, right? Like, this is again a way that people were othered and made abject, and you internalize that if you are that sort of person, this is how people are gonna talk about you.
And I think we see this. I've just heard this from a lot of people talking, their boomer moms, the way that they gossip is about, this person got fat. And this is a way of regimenting control and normalizing this over and over again. Like, when people get fat, we talk shit about them.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: And it's so harmful for so many kids, but it also, this is a programmed thing of how you police yourself, is you have to show that this is how people will talk about you.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yes. Well, and that feels so related to what we were talking about with the makeup stuff and self-presentation stuff. And it being a way to signal compliance. Like, thinness or feeling bad about food is a way of signaling compliance right?
Anne Helen Petersen: “I'm so bad. I'm so bad. Like, I'm eating this thing. Yeah, ooh.”
Tracy Clark-Flory: “I shouldn't!” Exactly.
Anne Helen Petersen: The other thing I'll note, and this is just trying to really, really be empathetic, is a lot of moms of this generation did not get to exercise control in their professional lives, did not get to pursue the things in the public sphere that they might have wanted.
And so what you do get to control is the private sphere. And that can be the ways that you raise your kids. It can be your house. Like, being very fastidious about cleaning is another thing that I see a lot of.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Mm.
Anne Helen Petersen: But then also you exercise that control on your own body.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah.
Anne Helen Petersen: Right?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Right, you exercise power where you can. I'm immediately just in hearing you say that, I'm thinking about how in the book, there's this moment where I am confronted with all the various teacups and little serving dishes that my grandmother collected.
Anne Helen Petersen: Mm-hmm.
Tracy Clark-Flory: And this family member remarked, that if she was going to have to entertain my grandfather's business associates, she was going to have the nicest dishware set possible. And it was like, this family member remarked, she exercised power where she could.
And so it's that idea of exercising it on the body, exercising it within the home, in the domestic sphere.
Anne Helen Petersen: I wanted to end the episode on a slightly lighter tone. And I love this question so much. It comes from Katie.
Katie: "What is up with boomer mom food culture? And how did millennial food culture get so different?
I think I'm mostly talking about white American boomers and millennials, but I'm open to being challenged on that. Why does my mom want a recipe for roasted asparagus? Why must everything be steamed? What is the purpose of egg beaters? When I'm home, I'm constantly surprised at how little I cook like my mom, and how little she cooks like me.
Is there always cooking generational divides, or are millennials rebelling against '90s food norms for a specific reason?"
Anne Helen Petersen: So I have a twisted reaction to this one, which is that my mom doesn't cook like I think a lot of other boomers. And that is in large part because she was constantly reacting to her mom's horrible Midwestern cooking.
She was like, "Casseroles are banned in our house." She said that.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Oh, funny. Oh my gosh.
Anne Helen Petersen: And now I'm like, "I love a casserole." Oh. But they were, she would constantly tell us about, in her house, you would steam... Like, growing up, her mom would steam the broccoli until it was like you could push your finger in. Right? And it would just turn to mush. And the way that they would season it would just melt some, like a block of Velveeta. So some of my food tastes are like, I loved going to grandma's house and having a block of Velveeta on something.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Oh, totally.
Anne Helen Petersen: So my mom tried to be as gourmet mom as she could in Lewiston, Idaho.
Like, you couldn't get basil, but she could still cook something from the back of Bon Appétit. You know what I mean?
Tracy Clark-Flory: Right. Right. My mom was very similar. I mean, my mom, I grew up with Midwestern comfort food, was what she did.
Anne Helen Petersen: What was her recipes?
Tracy Clark-Flory: It was like… Gosh, what would she... I mean, she'd do things like fried chicken, potato gratin. There was a corn souffle. She had a corn souffle. Oh, yeah. I loved it. Here's the thing. I grew up - I mean, this is so funny, 'cause I grew up in Berkeley, right?
Anne Helen Petersen: Yeah.
Tracy Clark-Flory: But it was not an organic food kind of household. It was frozen dinners in the fridge. And then the Midwestern comfort foods.
Anne Helen Petersen: That's all I wanted was the frozen dinners.
Tracy Clark-Flory: It was pretty great. Like, that frozen turkey tetrazzini was actually very good.
Anne Helen Petersen: Totally bomb. No, and I should - my mom absolutely loved to take us to Taco Time, and we would eat Tony's Pizza all the time, so I'm not trying to make our house sound more gourmet than it is. But the reason I wanted to do this question is 'cause I think the way that we learn to cook in our 20s, it sticks with us no matter what.
So like, I think the kids of millennial parents are gonna be like, "Why do you put avocado in everything? Why do you love this air fryer so much?"
Tracy Clark-Flory: Yeah. Oh my God.
Anne Helen Petersen: They’re gonna stop making air fryers, and people are still gonna have their air fryers from 30 years ago and just be popping everything in there, you know? Like, there are things that stick with us.
Tracy Clark-Flory: I think that's very true. And that's certainly true for me in the sense that I never really properly learned how to cook in my 20s, and that has stayed with me, so.
Anne Helen Petersen: But my mom taught me a lot of things. I really appreciated that. Like, she just taught me some basics, and then when I was a nanny, I was so bored that I would just plan meals that I would go home and make my roommates at night. So that was instrumental for me as well.
Tracy Clark-Flory: I would've loved you as a roommate. My gosh.
Anne Helen Petersen: I'd be like, "Oh, here's this thing that I found at the back of Gourmet or whatever.”
Tracy Clark-Flory: Incredible. Oh my God.
Anne Helen Petersen: Okay. So can you stick around for our Ask Us Anything question? It's a good one.
Okay listeners, if you want our advice on boomer moms and gift giving, become a paid subscriber at patreon.com/culturestudy.
Tracy, where can people find you if they wanna hear more from you?
Tracy Clark-Flory: You can find me at tracyclarkflory.com.
That has all my links, but you can also, if you wanna listen to my podcast, you can find that at direstraightspod.com. That's straights with a G-H.
Anne Helen Petersen: It's so good. Oh my gosh.
Tracy Clark-Flory: It's a feminist critique of hetero love, sex, politics, and culture. My co-host is Amanda Montell, a wonderful author and writer. And find me on Instagram @ TracyClarkFlory, but also please go buy my book.
Anne Helen Petersen: Yes. Yes, please. Thank you so much for joining me. This has been a real pleasure.
Tracy Clark-Flory: Thanks so much for having me. This was really fun.
Anne Helen Petersen: The Culture Study Podcast is produced by me, Anne Helen Petersen, and Melody Rowell. Our music is by Poddington Bear. You can find me on Instagram @ AnneHelenPetersen, Melody @ Melodious47 and the show @ CultureStudyPod. Thanks so much for your support.