“Not everybody has seven mothers.”

In Copenhagen in 1972, during the exhilarating early days of women’s liberation in Scandinavia and dramatic social change around the world, seven women had a child together. Recounting her mothers’ history—from the passions and beliefs they shared to the political divisions over sexual identity that ultimately split them apart—Pernille Ipsen’s chronicle of gender, sexuality, and feminism as it was constructed, contested, and lived reminds us that new worlds are always possible. Here, Ipsen is joined in conversation with Adriane Lentz-Smith.

Pernille Ipsen is author of My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women's Movement and professor of gender and women’s studies and history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Ipsen is a historian of gender, women, feminism, race and colonialism in Scandinavia and the larger Atlantic world.

Adriane Lentz-Smith is associate professor of history, African American studies, and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University. Lentz-Smith is author of Freedom Struggles: African Americans and World War I.

Praise for the book:

"This book is a treasure, especially for a second-wave American feminist who was thrilled to learn of the boldness and courage of our Danish sisters at the very start of the 1970s women’s movement. I can’t recommend it highly enough."

—Vivian Gornick, author of The Odd Woman and the City

"My Seven Mothers certainly is not all happiness and light, but that makes it even more moving, and as an American feminist I felt a sense of recognition infused with my own memories."

—Linda Gordon, author of Seven Social Movements That Changed America

"Compulsively readable and historically insightful, My Seven Mothers reveals the spirit, courage, and tenacity required of the women who paved the way for second-wave feminist organizing in Denmark."

—Birgitte Søland, author of Becoming Modern: Young Women and the Reconstruction of Womanhood in the 1920s

My Seven Mothers: Making a Family in the Danish Women’s Movement by Pernille Ipsen is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.