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Jan. 16, 2025
Good Girls No More
As a woman, you can roll along with the assumption that your body belongs to you and you alone. That you are an autonomous human being like everyone else. But then your fertility, your baby-making capacity comes into view and suddenly you are subjected to powers far outside yourself.
Guest on this episode, UK journalist and author of The Positive Birth Book, Give Birth Like A Feminist and My Period, Milli Hill, has reported on and written about this complicated zone, the zone where woman meets “system”, and the power struggle that often takes place between you as an autonomous woman with inherent rights - and the powers that be.
In this hour we talk about the much-contested world of childbearing and Milli’s writing and activism to empower women and girls to reclaim their self-determination. But also how Milli, mid-career, has found herself under attack by gender ideologists and how she is now documenting the ideological capture and implosion of her own former community - women’s organizations in the areas of menstruation, breastfeeding, pregnancy, antenatal care, and birth - that once were exclusively for women and girls, but are that no longer.
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Credits
Host: Elle Kamihira
Produced by Elle Kamihira
Audio Engineering by Jason Sheesley at Abridged Audio
Cover Art by Bee Johnson
Music by Beware of Darkness
Milli Hill
Author and Journalist
Milli Hill is a writer and freelance journalist with a passion for reframing the narrative around women’s bodies. She is the author of the bestselling Positive Birth Book (2017), Give Birth like a Feminist (2019) and My Period (2021, for preteen girls). Her fourth book, Ultra Processed Women, will be published by Harper Collins in April 2025, with a fifth book to follow in 2026. To date, her books have been translated into seven languages.
From 2012 to 2021 she founded and ran the Positive Birth Movement, a global network of antenatal discussion groups aimed at improving birth and giving women better access to support and information. She ended this work, in part, due to the online abuse she received as a result of advocating for sex-based language in maternity care.
Milli has spoken nationally and internationally about positive birth, obstetric violence and female autonomy in health. As a journalist since 2013 she has been a columnist for the Telegraph women’s section and written for many publications including Mail, Guardian, Independent, ipaper and Mother&Baby, and has appeared on BBC Breakfast news, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 2, BBC 5 Live, talkradio, LBC and many leading podcasts.
She writes on Substack about women’s health, feminism, and issues around sex and gender including the erasure of women from language.
Milli lives in Somerset with her partner, three children and two dogs.