Motherhood: A Nightlife
This Valentine's Day, we're celebrating motherly love
This week, we’re thrilled to announce our next new Featured Author, Nadya Williams.
Nadya Williams is a homeschooling mother and classicist who writes at her Substack and elsewhere about the importance of understanding antiquity for making sense of modernity. She is managing editor of Current and the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church and Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic. Her next book, Christians Reading Classics, will be published in Fall 2025 by Zondervan Academic.
She’s written for us before on ancient and modern scientific misogyny, equality between the sexes in the early Christian church, and the women of ancient history. Here’s what Nadya has to say about Fairer Disputations:
In Nadya’s first piece as Featured Author, she writes about the “nightlife” unique to mothers: an invisible yet productive time of love and service.
Motherhood: A Nightlife
Nadya Williams
The social nightlife is visible because it is communal and located outside the home. The maternal nightlife, by contrast, is confined to the private domestic space. As a result, it tends to be invisible. It is unseen, because everyone in the house is usually asleep at night—except that nursing baby or sick preschooler. Yet this work of invisible nighttime care is, of course, essential and irreplaceable. It is, after all, first and foremost a work of mercy and love.
This Week in Sex-Realist Feminism: Simone de Beauvoir, Assisted Suicide's Danger to Women, and Porn Everywhere
This week: Serena Sigillito interviews Abigail Favale on Simone de Beauvoir, Sarah Ditum on how assisted suicide could unleash male violence towards women, and Valerie Stivers on how every aspect of life has been pornified. Plus: the gender gap, forcing women to change in front of men, the work of celebration, the major implications of minor sexism, our Flowers of Fire book club—and more!
From the Archives:
Featured Author Nadya Williams writes on what it means to make history—whether we can say that ancient women truly had a part in shaping it.
The Ordinary and Extraordinary Women Who Made Ancient History
Nadya Williams
“If we’re honest, many of us care about our legacy; we dream of “making history.” But how do such grandiose dreams connect to the unglamorous reality of the activities that we spend much of our lives doing, whether we work outside the home or not—making meals, carrying babies within the womb and in our arms, caring for sick children and various other relatives, doing laundry and dishes? All of these activities weave the fabric of our daily lives no less intricately than the fabric so many women in this book literally wove as part of their own household duties.”