Under the Influence with Jo Piazza

Motherhood makes history, but history keeps trying to erase mothers. In this episode of Under the Influence, feminist cultural historian Elinor Cleghorn discusses her new book A Woman’s Work: Reclaiming the Radical History of Mothering and unpacks how motherhood has been written and rewritten to strip women of agency. From ancient birth rituals and the long, maligned history of midwifery to the Virgin Mary as an impossible maternal ideal and the witch trials as punishment for women who refused the “good mother” role, this is a conversation about why telling the real story of mothering is still an act of resistance.

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Who was your gateway influencer?

For us, it was Love Taza—Naomi Davis—the Juilliard-trained ballerina (yes, a different one) turned mommy blogger and social star who made New York City look like a candy-coated dream of red lipstick, tiny apartments, and five kids in technicolor. And then she disappeared.

This week’s episode welcomes author Ali Hoff Kosik to talk about her new book Too Blessed to Stress, to dig into some weird Love Taza conspiracy theories, and to explain the correlation between pickleball and Evangelical Christian TikTok.

You’re welcome.

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Jo has been working on a brand new podcast about birth for the past year and she is so excited to share it with you all.

Today we are sharing the very first episode of Birth with Babylist.

In our first episode, we walk through what birth actually looks like, from early labor through delivery. We talk to experienced OB-GYNs and midwives as they break down the stages of labor, what’s normal, what’s unpredictable and what you can prepare for. 

And because no two births are the same, real parents share what it was really like for them.

You can listen to all the episodes of Birth With Babylist here.

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Financial advice for parents usually lands in extremes, either panic-inducing warnings about how expensive kids are, or unrealistic frameworks that don’t account for how life actually unfolds. This week’s guests, Christy Shen and Bryce Leung became well-known after publishing Quit Like a Millionaire and retiring at 30 with over a million dollars invested, but their path started from a place of real financial precarity. Christy grew up in deep poverty, at one point living on just cents a day, which shaped how she thinks about risk, security, and the appeal of financial independence.

Now parents, their new book Parent Like a Millionaire Without Being One turns that framework toward family life, breaking down how to spend intentionally without getting pulled into the high-pressure baby economy. They talk about buying secondhand gear that holds value, building childcare swaps and babysitting co-ops, and leaning on community rather than defaulting to commercial solutions.

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Close your eyes (not if you’re driving) and picture your old lady life. You wake up when you want. You wear glorious caftans. You’re strong and you’re rich because you built yourself a safety net.

Today we’re chatting with Amanda Holden, the personal finance educator behind the new book How to Be a Rich Old Lady. We get into why women are trained to feel “bad at money,” how that keeps power in someone else’s hands, and what it looks like to take it back. Amanda breaks down her “10-minute missions,” the order of operations for getting financially stable and then secure and how to start investing without turning your life into a spreadsheet. We also talk about financial “influencing,” scammy advice, and the kind of money resistance that hits corporations where it counts without blowing up your future.

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In celebration of the Winter Olympics (the best thing to ever happen to Peacock) we are bringing back one of our favorite episodes of Committed with professional figure skaters Chris and Alexa Knierim. 

These two shared the same dream when they fell in love and got married—get to the Olympics... together. They didn’t let broken bones or a mysterious illness get in their way. Their love story is even better than every Gen X woman's favorite romantic comedy, The Cutting Edge. 

You can binge Committed here.

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Today’s episode is a grab bag — a hodgepodge of the stories people have been asking me about in my DMs for the past week.

First up: the Ballerina Farm raw milk scandal. We break down the failed raw milk tests, the health concerns, and why the internet reacted with such gleeful ferocity. This isn’t really about unpasteurized dairy with cow poop bacteria in it. It’s about influencer perfection and the collective desire to take it down a notch.

Then we get into “Hating on the Katies” — the online backlash against lifestyle influencers and everyday women who are only now speaking up politically and why progressive s might be getting this one very wrong.

And finally: the rise of the Intellectual It Girl. From celebrity book clubs to “becoming disgustingly educated,” we unpack why smart is suddenly chic again and why I hope it destroys the soft girls, stay-at-home girlfriends trends.

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Moms drive the majority of household purchasing decisions. Recommendations from mom influencers outperform traditional ads. They even convert better than celebrity endorsements. And yet, they’re still treated like they should be grateful for a free product and an affiliate link.

This week we talk with Chelsea Clark, founder and CEO of Momfluence, an influencer marketing agency built specifically around mom creators, about how the mom-influencer economy really works and why it continues to undervalue women’s labor even as it explodes.

We get into why moms chronically undercharge, how the lack of transparency mirrors other female-dominated industries, and the uniquely brutal experience of having your work publicly judged every day while also parenting.

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Every January, parents are asked to plan the entire summer for their kids months in advance, spend a lot of money, juggle waitlists, and pretend this isn't a hellscape of doom. In this episode, we chat with journalist Katherine Goldstein about the overwhelming amount of summer planning we all seem to be doing and why so much of it falls on moms.

There are a ton of reasons for this that are uniquely American. We have long summers, very little paid time off, a culture that expects constant supervision, and a childcare system that’s mostly private and wildly expensive. Put all of that together and summer often ends up being more logistical nightmare than break.

Katherine also pushes back on the idea that kids need nonstop structured programming to have a “good” summer. She talks about why the pressure to optimize every week is exhausting, and about what happened when her family opted out of the camp scramble and tried something totally different.

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If you’ve had kids, you’ve probably wondered at some point if you’re a bad mother. I would say this is true for 99.9 percent of us. And the other 0.1 percent is Ruby Franke.

On today’s episode of Under the Influence, we're joined by Cut culture writer EJ Dickson to talk about her smart, sharp and wildly satisfying new book One Bad Mother: In Praise of Psycho Housewives, Stage Parents, Momfluencers, and Other Women We Love to Hate. “Bad mom” is one of our culture’s favorite labels, and EJ pulls back the curtain on where it came from, how it evolved, and who it’s actually attacking.

We talk about why the moral panic tends to land on women (and especially women of color), and how the modern parenting advice industry and influencer economy keep moms perpetually off-kilter. We also get into Mommie Dearest and maternal mental illness, the pressure to perform “good motherhood,” and why even the most self-aware among us still find ourselves blurting out, “I don’t usually give them this much screen time.”

This one is a lucky, a permission slip to stop chasing impossible standards and let ourselves just be moms.

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