“Not everybody has seven mothers.”
What was it like for you to have seven moms?
Pernille Ipsen:I do get that question quite a lot, and I get it because not everybody has seven mothers.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:I love that as an understatement, by the way.
Pernille Ipsen:Hey. My name is Pernille Ipsen. We're here today to talk about my book, My Making a Family in the Danish Women's Movement, which I am super excited about. I am a historian and writer. And in the book, I tell my own personal and collective story of my seven mothers who met in the Danish women's movement in the early seventies and formed a commune in a squatted house downtown Copenhagen, Denmark, where I was born in 1972.
Pernille Ipsen:The book is about my mother's lives in and with a social movement. It's about how my mother's created a new alternative family. And it is simultaneously about how challenging and life giving, devastating and wonderful it was for my mothers to live a social revolution and create a life radically different from the one that their parents had presented to them. It's about feminist alliance across difference. In my mother's case, differences in class and sexuality, which in the beginning started out being a motivating driver for them and for their activist work and ended up splitting our commune apart.
Pernille Ipsen:I originally wrote the book in Danish, my first language. It came out exactly five years ago in the 2020, the first COVID summer. And I've been talking about it ever since in Danish. But now with this edited and translated edition and a new prologue that I wrote for the American edition, I'm super excited to get to talk about it in English. And I'm just thrilled to start the conversation here today with you, Adrienne.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Hey, I'm thrilled to be here. And I, for all of y'all listening, am Adrienne Lint Smith. I'm an associate professor of history, Af Am, and gender, sexuality, and feminist studies at Duke University. And I have the great pleasure and honor of talking to my friend, Pernille Ibsen, about her book, My Seven Mothers. And so I am, I mostly work on the black freedom struggle in the long twentieth century.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:I study social movements to some extent, not solely, but that's a big part of what I do. And so reading this book was, in some ways as a scholar, about reading a lot of different kinds of comparison, right? Thinking about the Danish women's movement, thinking to some extent about The US women's movement, but also really thinking about the black freedom movement more broadly. And that what you said, sometimes liberating at the same time difficult, the kind of life giving and hard work of living a social revolution, is a story that you hear over and over again among veterans of groups like the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, or any other thing. So parts of this felt very familiar to me.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:And then parts of it also felt new, right? Because I'm not a historian of Denmark, and so I got to learn a history through your voice, which was really delightful. There's also this thing, I mean, I love memoirs, and I feel like memoirs bring one in to a history and kind of like create a field of connection and intimacy that a kind of traditional historical monograph doesn't necessarily allow space for. So I found myself reading My Seven Mothers both as a fellow scholar, but then also as someone who knows you, who got to learn you a different way. And that felt remarkable.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Possibly artificial because there's a way where a reader feels a connection to an author that an author doesn't necessarily know about, but in some ways, just different from what we would have through conversation, even through this conversation. So that was super neat. That's a long winded way of saying I'm left with a lot of questions and things that I want to talk about. And so maybe I will open with a big one and then we can see where the rest of it takes us. Does that sound good?
Pernille Ipsen:Sounds great.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:All right. So this is a history that takes place largely in the 1970s. And I'm wondering what it is about the 1970s that allows or encourages things to happen in the way that they do. Is it a particularly plastic juncture for radical political possibility?
Pernille Ipsen:So the Danish version of the book is called An Open Moment now in Danish. But I changed the title for the American version, or we did. But it is very much a story about an open moment still. It's about a moment of radical possibility that, in my story, starts in the 1970. And that moment comes on the back of or at the tail end of the 60s, right?
Pernille Ipsen:And the 60s in Denmark, as in The US, was this moment of social movement and activism on many different fronts. And my mothers were all coming to Copenhagen at a moment in the late 60s, between '65 and 70, when they could get involved with youth activism, environmental activism, squatting with anti Vietnam War protests and with anti World Bank protests. That part of the story is very similar to the American story actually, that the late 60s is this radically open moment. The story of my mother's entry into the Danish women's movement or them making the women's movement in 1970. So the Danish women's movement is typically started in April 1970 when 12 women walk down a walking street and yell about women's rights is a culmination of years of activism in these other rounds of the youth movement and versions of the civil rights movement in Denmark as well, where my mothers learned their activist chops along men on different fronts.
Pernille Ipsen:But over those years and in that work realized that their issues are not being fronted, their voices are not heard. And, you know, the typical saying is that they were asked to make tea for the revolution, right? That they were asked to put their issues on the back burner and wait till the revolution was over and then they could start talking about women's rights. So that story is very familiar to Americans, bet, or to many Americans who know about the women's movement and about the 60s. And what I then want to show in my book or in my mother's story is that for women, the real radically open moment doesn't appear until the late 60s, very late 60s, and in Denmark in the early 70s.
Pernille Ipsen:So in 70s, '71, '72, when high on all the possibilities of the late 60s, women start forming activist groups on their own and centering their needs and their interests and building a social movement around that. So that's what the 70s mean to me. So the story starts in 1970 with the women's movement and then ends in '76 when a commune breaks up. But it is very much a story about the early seventies, you know, the very, very early seventies.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:When you're describing your mothers and how they end up taking an act. Right? Like, you know, like any good book, or not like any good book, but like many good books, this one opens with someone choosing to do something, right, that kicks off all of this action, at least for us, the reader, and for her as one of the protagonists. But the thing that moves her to act is exhaustion. And I circled that word when I read it.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:And I think for another one of your mothers, there's someone talking about suffocation, right? The sense that if they didn't do something, they wouldn't survive. And I found that palpable and powerful, and again, familiar from other readings on people entering social movements, that you act when you can't stand, when you can't stand in action, right? So that life giving isn't actually metaphorical for them.
Pernille Ipsen:And it's also not a positive choice necessarily, right? Like that you circled the exhaustion is right on. So all my seven mothers had grown up in families and in contexts that were not able to give them what they needed to become themselves. Like they were stunted in different ways because they couldn't perform or couldn't live the ways they were expected to as good girls and because they couldn't do what was expected of them when they became young women. And so they kept banging their heads against expectations that they couldn't live up to.
Pernille Ipsen:And they had had some pretty hard years behind them, several of my mothers, of searching for a place that they could develop as they needed to and become the people that they wanted and should be. And so they were pretty exhausted. For some of them, it was kind of the last straw almost, or it feels like. And the opening story is of one of my mothers, my birth mother, who happens to read in a newspaper an ad for a summer camp for women only and decide to sign up for it and spend a month on this tiny island South of Copenhagen where she lived. And that became the beginning of a radically new life for her.
Pernille Ipsen:And that's where she meets my other mothers. And so the whole first part of the book takes place on this small island where they all come with their very beaten up lives. And especially for my birth mother, it was a weird coincidence. And for years I had to ask her again and again, how did you do that? Because she was socially awkward and very introvert and not the type of person who would just throw herself into a super intense summer camp with 200 naked women who were changing their lives.
Pernille Ipsen:But she needed to do something and she needed to do something now. And she saw that ad and she did it and that was the beginning of her new self. And it's been fascinating to me both as a child and then as a historian how fragile these moments were that they decided to do something different in the early 70s. Because my other mothers have similar moments where they do something that in the moment must have seemed super random, but in hindsight is so meaningful because it puts them on the path to meet each other and then to form these new lives.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:I mean, again, as historians, we're big on contingency. Aren't we? Yeah. And this is one of these contingent acts. Also, just as a decide, I imagine that this is not something that is as striking in Danish, but in a Latin derived or Latin adjacent language, like English, particularly when I am going to mangle the Danish, but for the island to be called what I read as fem o, felt very like, oh, if this were fiction, that would be like, as your editor, I would be like, are we gonna give it that name?
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Because that's very on the nose, right, for an island of an all women's camp. So I adored that. But so, I mean, they make many things, right? This kind of contingent coming together of these many women, but what coalesces as a group of seven who end up forming part of, and then eventually their own commune. And you write that your mothers called themselves a commune instead of a family, but it amounted to the same thing.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Can you expand on that a little bit? Like, what did they see themselves as making in this group that ended up coalescing around you specifically? And what did it matter?
Pernille Ipsen:So my mothers were not very keen on the word family when they entered the women's movement in the early 70s and when they later then formed the lesbian movement, because they had grown up with a very negatively loaded understanding of family. Many of them had left their families without looking back as much as we might today and had grown up with a sense that if they were to form a family of their own, they would be forced to behave like and live as women in a way that they weren't comfortable with. So they were sort of turning away from the word family and from using that concept when they first met each other. And so they were looking for other ways to create durable community that were not called family. They often called it a commune, right?
Pernille Ipsen:Like forming communes, which was huge on the Danish left in the 70s anyway. But they were sort of steering away from the family idea, but they were also steering away from the word. And then as they got me and or when they found out that my birth mother was pregnant, they started leaning more into the word. And they tell me interesting stories of how they first sort of, I don't think that's in the book, but they had these sort of moments when they started thinking about having a baby where family all of a sudden got a whole new glow and became more interested in reviving the word family and or putting new meaning into the word family. And so by the time I was, you know, born and a couple of months old, they would think of themselves more as a family and make it sort of a project to call themselves a family and then do the work of explaining to people that yes, you could be a family and be seven women and one child.
Pernille Ipsen:And yes, we all call her our child. And yes, she thinks of us all as our mother and so on. So that's why in the beginning they might call themselves a commune, but the emotions that they put into that commune are very similar to the things that we would put into a family today and or that they call it later. Yeah.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:I'm wondering about what some of those differences are, right? Because literature, fictional, nonfiction, is replete with stories of families organized different than the nuclear family. We can see them in US history and other histories and utopian stories as well. What does your story bring to that literature or to conversations about what people thought family might mean?
Pernille Ipsen:So as a historian, I've been very interested in all kinds of different types of families through time, right, and how people organize differently. I think one of the angles that my story sort of approaches that question a little differently is that my mothers were so interested in making a family that was radically different than their parents' family. You can think of what family means in societies where the nuclear family is not the most important, right? Or where extended family plays a bigger role than it does in the typical sort of nuclear family in the Western world today. Or you can think about how societies historically have organized differently around family.
Pernille Ipsen:But this shift that my mothers participated in where the unit they were forming was something they had never seen before was very interesting to me. So the Danish book also has the sub subtitle When My Mothers Did Something New. And for me, this book has been a sort of quest into thinking about how you do something new. Like how do you take everything that you got through your upbringing and all the ways of understanding the world that you grew up with, the ways that you were socialized, and then you do something really different than that? So my mothers knew of communes.
Pernille Ipsen:There were lots of communes forming in the sixties in Denmark, and they were all thinking pretty early on in the 60s that they would like to live in a commune, but they knew of no women's communes. Later in Denmark and later in the 70s, becomes more common to have women's communes. But they had no model for it, right? And so when they started talking about having a child together, they were just starting from scratch. Like how do we do that?
Pernille Ipsen:And that I think is different from some of the utopian fiction from the 70s definitely are toying with that question. Right. And think about that question. It's fiction. I think that one of the cool things about doing this project for me was that I could sit with my seven mothers and ask them again and again and again.
Pernille Ipsen:So like, how did you actually change your mind? Like how did you actually make sure that you don't fall back into the habits of what you had been socialized to do? And how do you learn to walk differently? How do you learn to sit differently? How do you learn to have different relationships with other people and to think differently of yourself?
Pernille Ipsen:Being so close to the story as I am being their daughter allowed me to ask them questions that I wouldn't have been able to otherwise. And then the enduring relationship so I worked on the interviews for ten years plus and would have conversations again and again and again and could always go back. And so, like, I really don't understand how you did this. We have to get closer to it. And at the same time, I was far enough removed from their story that I could be curious about it and then open to what's because a lot of the things they sort of take for granted as, well, of course, we just did that.
Pernille Ipsen:We just wanted to do that. We did it. But that's, the shorthand of the work that they actually had to do.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:So what did it look like in practice? Like, what were the divisions of labor? What were the hard things?
Pernille Ipsen:One of the things that they really struggled with was allowing people to do the things they were good at. So because they were all learning things from scratch, like speaking in public, right, or like writing with an authoritative voice or painting or cooking or whatever, speaking to the press, they had very little sympathy for or tolerance with people taking on leadership roles. They were against leaders, as most many social movements are in the early '70s. But in their case, it was from this sort of understanding that we all have to learn how to do this. And so if the person who's really good at speaking to the press always speaks to the press, other people are not going to learn how to do it.
Pernille Ipsen:Or if the person who is really good at building a wall always does that, other people are not going to build a wall. So there was a lot of managing of who did what when and who were supposed to do what when and a lot of policing of that. And that was pretty stifling, I think, at times. And so the learning process was hard work at times. And it was challenging to both transform yourself into something you hadn't been before, so you're in a constant personal development process while not policing other people's process.
Pernille Ipsen:So like, if you have this grand new vision of what you think the world is supposed to be and your role in it, it can be difficult not to want to propose that role for other people as well, and to start telling other people how they should be living their personal transformation. And I think that was really difficult. The actual sort of division of labor of who did what in the household by the time we lived by ourselves, so we first lived in a squattered house where there were lots and lots of people in and out of the commune, a much bigger commune than the one we ended up with. And by the time I came around, my seven mothers had sort of coalesced around me and had become a more sort of solid unit. But before that, there was a lot of people in and out.
Pernille Ipsen:And so it could be fairly stressful to live in the middle of the social movement like that. But I don't think they ever had real arguments about sort of actual practical labor. Like practical labor was just something everybody did all the time because they lived in this very old house that was falling apart. And so it was part of their daily lives to build walls and repair things and paint and all that.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:I mean, it's so interesting, right, because they're creating something. Right? They're breaking with something that they've known before and making something new. You arrive in it, right? You arrive in the middle of the creation.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:And so what you know as it's your first norm, which is so radically right? And I'm wondering, and you must get some versions of this question a lot, which is both, what was it like for you in general, but more specifically, what was it like for you to have seven moms?
Pernille Ipsen:I do get that question quite a lot. And so I've given a lot of talks on the book in Danish, of course, over the last couple of years. And that is a question that comes up in some version every time. And I get it because not everybody has seven mothers.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:I love that as an understatement by the way.
Pernille Ipsen:I did meet a woman at one of my talks who had nine mothers, a Norwegian woman. She was a couple of years younger than me. Yeah, so that question comes up a lot. And my short answer to that is that I thought it was really wonderful. Like I think it's given me so many so I was their only child and I got a lot of very positive attention and I got a lot of love.
Pernille Ipsen:And my mother still loved me very much and I love them. I think it was a real privilege and a fantastic gift that I got all these mothers. I also think I got super lucky that I didn't go through puberty living with them all and that I didn't grow up living with them all. So my birth mother and I moved out of the commune when I was four. And after that I was a weekend child.
Pernille Ipsen:So I would only spend every Wednesday and a weekend a month with my other mothers, unless there were birthdays and whatever, you know, other occasions. And this meant that I didn't have to sort of form my adolescent self in relationship to all seven mothers. I'm not quite sure how that would have worked. People, friends I have, people I know who have grown up in communes and who have lived in communes throughout their adolescence have told me stories of how challenging that could be. By the time I was an adolescent, my mother's my other mother's not my birth mom, but my other mothers were more like really doting aunts or like very wonderful older people in my life or adults in my life who were not trying to sort of rein me in, which was difficult in my adolescence.
Pernille Ipsen:Having been listened to as much as I was when I was very young, so my mothers all agreed on the 70s pedagogy that a child's opinion is just as worthy as an adult's. And so I was asked my opinion about what I wanted, what I liked, what I wanted to do from very, very early on. And when you have that many people sort of helping you get what you want, you did or I developed an independence and a sense of self worth that was maybe a little challenging in my adolescent years for the adults in my life. But it has come in very handy as an adult. Anyway, this is to say that I feel very lucky the way that it played out in my particular situation that I had seven mothers.
Pernille Ipsen:I also find it really fascinating to think about why people ask me that question or where that question comes from. Because for some people, it comes from like, wow, that is so different from anything I've ever thought of. But for many people, it comes from a place of recognizing what it's like to have a family that's different than a nuclear family. So many young people especially are very used to having many adults, you know, because in their lives, for many reasons, right? There are many more queer families than there used to be.
Pernille Ipsen:There are many more, you know, divorced families with many adults. And it's much more typical in the generation after hours to to have families that are bigger is my experience. Maybe in particular in Denmark, but no, but also in The US. I think that if you grow up with a family that's just even just a little bit off from a nuclear family and you hear my story, it gives you a space to tell your story as well and to be recognized in that your family does not have to be a nuclear family. And that if you grow up with just one parent, it's not a lack.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:I also am still back thinking about what it would be like to be an adolescent. Even never mind seven mothers, just seven adults, where part of what you're doing in adolescence is differentiating, right? Figuring out who you are as different from the people around you. So if you have seven quite different, and many of them quite strong personalities, like, where do you go? People do it.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:You're right. But it seems like a very different kind of work than the work that is familiar to me.
Pernille Ipsen:I think so. Because like you, in adolescence, there is this process of both differentiation, but also of breaking free in some sense, or making your own needs separate from this other person, right? Or from two people maybe. And sometimes it's challenging even with two people responding to a young person finding themselves. And I know that my mothers, even though they in theory agreed on how they wanted to approach pedagogy and how they wanted to approach me, were such different personalities.
Pernille Ipsen:So I probably would very quickly have found a way to sort of play them out against each other, I could imagine, or like always make sure to ask the right person. I mean, I did that already as it was. I always knew who to call for one thing or another. One mother would be very lenient in one way and another mother would be lenient in another, right?
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Yeah. That is part of the savviness of children learning to maneuver unequal relationships of power, actually. So you said you and your birth mom left the commune when you were four. Why?
Pernille Ipsen:So in part three of the book, I tell the story of our last couple of years together in the commune. And part three is called No Liberation Without Community, a quote from Audre Lorde, the American Black lesbian feminist poet. And it's a story about how feminist politics seep into, or it's never been separate from our commune. Our commune was formed in the middle of the women's movement. And the women's movement in Denmark, as the women's movement in The United States, had some big controversies and some fights over the role of lesbian feminism in the women's movement.
Pernille Ipsen:And my mothers ended up on different sides in that fight, in that political battle, meaning that all my mothers were interested in lesbian politics to some extent, but two of my mothers were not interested or did not think that lesbian politics should play as big of a role as four of my other mothers. If you count up, there's one missing, but it's because there's one who was going back and forth a little bit between the positions. Four of my mothers formed the movement that became known as the lesbian movement in Denmark in 1974. And so my story is also a story of how lesbianism was for the first several years in the Danish women's movement made almost impossible, or like it was almost impossible to do lesbian politics and or to be outwardly fighting for lesbian rights in the women's movement, in the broader women's movement, not in our commune, but in the broader women's movement. And so for four of my mothers, it became increasingly impossible to be who they wanted to be and also to do the activism that they wanted to do and to fight for the causes that were very close to their hearts in the women's movement.
Pernille Ipsen:And so they founded a different movement, which was a smaller movement and a more theatrical and dramatic and outward facing and very out and proud action movement in Copenhagen. And for two of my other mothers, there was a big sadness and it angered them that they would form a different social movement. And they would say draw energy and power and excitement out of the women's movement by organizing for themselves as lesbians. That became impossible for my mothers to live with. And so in part three, I tell the story of how that became impossible.
Pernille Ipsen:Now I have grown up with my mother's being close, close friends. I didn't know why the why we moved out. I've heard different stories about it all my life. Like, there's been different versions of it. Sometimes they've mentioned that there was something about lesbian politics, but mostly they would explain it with this one woman who was one of my mother's girlfriends who they didn't like and something something.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:The bougie lady.
Pernille Ipsen:The bougie lady. So the girlfriend who worked for IBM and carried a briefcase around and was not performing the working class aesthetics as my mothers all were living at the time. So in my work with the book or in my interviews for the book, I have spent a lot of time getting to the roots of this problem and getting them to talk to me about what actually happened at the time. And it took a while to sort of unpack what was going on because they had very different versions of it. And because they're very close friends today, they were protecting each other.
Pernille Ipsen:They were skirting around the issue in these very interesting ways. And for me as a historian, was a fascinating problem. But for me as a daughter of them, was a very important emotional problem to solve because I have always wondered like what happened and not been able to piece their stories together because they didn't fit those pieces. And so it's not so surprising I couldn't get it to fit. So that has been a really important and productive process for me to get to talk to them about that larger political conflict and why it was that they couldn't talk about it and to think through how that generation who have always said that the personal was political could not figure out that the two were completely enmeshed in their issues has just been fascinating.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:And that part really felt like Black freedom movements in the era. It felt particularly painful for me to read because you understood both, or at least I understood both, the women who started the lesbian movements need to do something for themselves and be in a space where they didn't have to, where they didn't have to explain certain parts of themselves. And the sense of loss and betrayal for the women who were like, but we just made this thing together and yourself seems like it's pulling you away from me or us, right, because they spoke in this language of we. And that, like, I could hit it as a historian and I could feel it as a person who has negotiated friendships and allyships and all of these things. The difficulty of intimate solidarity, I think, was really beautifully expressed.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:So as a writerly question well, so it's a question both from me as a writer and as a member of a family who has my own disagreements with other members of my family about family narratives and how they're remembered or what we mean. You write in your book, you say, how does one write about one's closest human relationships? And I find that idea of doing so terrifying, so I wanna hear how you'd answer that question. And then even more, how do you write about your mothers in a way that allows them to be something more than what you might need them to be, and also something more than what they might need to remember themselves as having been?
Pernille Ipsen:So the moment that I write about is the moment in my mother's lives where they became the women that I knew, right, and that I grew up with, and also who they became when they became who they wanted to be after much struggle. So it is the most important moment in my mother's lives. Like maybe having those of them who had more children will remember the births of their children as super important as well. But this moment in their 20s when they were making themselves in this movement was so formative, so important. And so picking at that history, I knew that I was getting to the core of something super important for them.
Pernille Ipsen:They live off that history. They live with that history. And of course they were super excited that I would write that history, but they also had not thought through what that would mean, right? That I would actually take ownership over that history. And when I first started working on the projects, I describe in the book how I first got the idea to write a book when I was 16.
Pernille Ipsen:At a gathering, we were all sitting around a table and they were telling their stories about the women's movement. And they are so fascinating, so many of those anecdotes. And at some point I was like, I want to write a book about you. This is so cool. And they said, Oh, of course, that's so wonderful.
Pernille Ipsen:And of course you should do it, you know, because you know us so well, blah, blah, blah. There's been other stories about them since and before. Like they were used to telling their stories, but they loved telling me their stories. As I got older and I became a historian and when I finally started interviewing them and thinking about writing a book for real, it was both so meaningful to pick up that story that I had carried around with me forever and fairly terrifying because how in the world was They're pretty stubborn people, as many movement people are, and they cling to and they adore this story. So how would I ever get the freedom to actually tell a story?
Pernille Ipsen:So in the beginning I thought I might write a collective something where we would write it together and I would write something and then they would edit it and they would blah blah blah. And the first time I did anything close to it where one of them read some of my text, I realized that was never gonna work. Right? Like, I there was no way I was gonna be able to control that and or find myself in it, and it wouldn't be it just wouldn't work. So for years, I sort of didn't share text with them.
Pernille Ipsen:And even though I didn't share the text with them, we had all these many, many, many, many conversations also as a group. And so I was fully aware that they would have many reactions to this story. There was no way they couldn't. And so I developed these two principles. So I read some other books over the years.
Pernille Ipsen:I've read books by journalists about social movements and about communes. Journalists and some historians too will sort of pick the biggest conflict and center on that. And then they will write people up against each other. And they will say, Oh, this person has this story, and this person has that story. Isn't it interesting how differently we remember the past?
Pernille Ipsen:Right? And it is very interesting how differently we remember the past. That scared me pretty cold to think of that, right? Like to pull my mother's stories up and say, aren't they different? And that the difference should somehow be what was interesting about it.
Pernille Ipsen:So instead, I developed this principle that their stories all had to be taken at face value. Like they all had to get the space that they needed to have their stories represented and told, that I wouldn't write them up against each other. So I wouldn't, like in one paragraph, sort of place two different, very different visions of how something played out next to each other, which is a tool that journalists will use all the time. Right? Because it heightens the conflict level.
Pernille Ipsen:And for me personally, but also sort of politically, it was very important to tell a story about how difference is productive and how difference can be a motivator and how feminist alliances across those differences are super helpful and interesting. And so writing the conflict up too soon and too early was not what I wanted to that that that was not what I was about, but also not what I was interested in. And so I tried really hard not to write them up against each other. And then I just tried also to forget that they were ever gonna read it. But there's no question that all the way through, they were the first readers on my mind leading up to the point where they were actually gonna read the manuscript before I published it.
Pernille Ipsen:I thought of nothing else. Like, had not thought of, like, all the other readers that would read it afterwards or and or the life my own life after they read it for that matter. There was just that that date in December when they were going to read it, and then there was no after. And it was super intense when they did read it. But I think that that's right to the core of that problem of writing somebody's story, right, and writing a person so close to you's story because you take ownership over it in a very different way when you put it down.
Pernille Ipsen:Right? Like, when it's there on paper, you're taking a piece of their story away. Right? And you are made of the story of how your mother treats you. Right?
Pernille Ipsen:And you are made of all those stories that if you were born four years earlier or four years later would be so different. Right? I have a younger sister who was born after we moved out of the commune who didn't have all these extra mothers, she had a very different life and she has a very different life. And we talk a lot about what difference that makes, but it colors and it shapes everything that she can think about our years together as well. Right?
Pernille Ipsen:Because the beginning was so different. And as historians, we know how important the beginning of a story is. And I think that's why it was such a gamble, like taking my mother's seven different perspectives and seven different stories and trying to weave them together. And then I don't know that they had understood how much I was gonna do with the conflict that they had with each other. Especially for one of my mothers, it was a very it was very, very hard to read about the conflict.
Pernille Ipsen:And that took a lot of diplomacy and a lot of back and forth and a lot of phone conversations, her and I, together to get to the point where she could feel okay about the book by the time it was published because it was too close. Some of what we needed to do, her and I, was to understand the difference between the story as it happened back then and her hurt over that and her therapeutic need to deal with that and that I was the one who told the story and to separate the responsibilities there. So the memoir writer Dorothy Allison
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Bastard Out of Carolina.
Pernille Ipsen:Bastard Out of Carolina. Yeah, I was at a writing workshop with her and Madison some years ago where somebody asked in the audience, a young man, what do I do if I break my mother's heart when I write my memoir about her and abuse and blah, blah, blah. Like what do I do if I break my mother's heart? And she said, the best thing you can do, you cannot write the story. She had this whole thing about stories will find their way out into the world and if you've been given this story you're the one who needs to tell it and you can't like you can't run away from that responsibility.
Pernille Ipsen:But then the thing you can do is to make sure you're in the room when you break your mother's heart. So when you've written the story, you take it to her, like you don't send it in the mail as she might have back then. You go to her house and you sit there while she reads it so that you can be there when her heart breaks. This was in '14 or '15 or something like way before the book was done. And I wrote in my handwritten notes from that workshop, I got to be in Denmark when they read my book, you know, when they read the manuscript.
Pernille Ipsen:And so when I had finished the manuscript, I did fly to Denmark and I did, you know, make sure that they all got a physical copy. And then I went around to meet with them all individually and to talk to them about the book. That was an intense week.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Yeah. Tell me, how did they react?
Pernille Ipsen:So they all cried, right? They also all laughed. And most of the tears were produced by either happiness and or nostalgia or like reliving things that they hadn't thought about in years. They all had very strong reactions to some things that I had no idea that they would react to, like was super random, like, some of the things that they reacted to. And other things were very, like, I could have guessed that that was where they would have reacted most strongly.
Pernille Ipsen:A couple of places I had broken my own principle about not writing them up against each other. So in the chapters about my birth mother, there was a scene where at the feminist camp that first summer called her boyfriend a lot on the very, very intricate, very old fashioned phone that they had at this camp. She would talk to her ex husband who she had left. And so she wasn't proud of having had these phone conversations with him that summer. And one of my other mothers had told me that she was on the phone a lot.
Pernille Ipsen:And even, you know, then we had some at some recording I had from a meeting where we were all together, they had had a sort of a little back and forth about it where one of my mother said, you were on that phone all the time. And my other mother said, no. I, you know, I barely called him or something like that. They were definitely disagreeing about it. And I had written that into the text because it was too funny.
Pernille Ipsen:Like, it was just like I had gotten carried away. And so I had put a bit of their dialogue into the text. And my birth mother who didn't wanna have in writing that she might have called her ex husband more than she wanted to that summer, she said, like, I really don't like that. And I was like, of course not. You don't like it.
Pernille Ipsen:I'm gonna take it out right away. As soon as she said it, was like, what the heck was I doing with that anyway? Except that I had just gotten carried away. But like that did not, that was exactly what I didn't wanna do. Right?
Pernille Ipsen:Like I didn't wanna question her authority to remember that summer. It was even in her chapter. So they each have a chapter in the first part. There are seven chapters that you have a chapter. And in that chapter, they get the authority to tell their story.
Pernille Ipsen:Like I'm not interviewing old boyfriends or old lovers or friends or sisters or anybody. It's their boys, they get to tell their story of how they get to the women's movement. And so like, what was I thinking bringing in this dialogue? And so that was easy. I could just take that out.
Pernille Ipsen:But in a different place where I had broken my principle was in part three, where they were already fighting about these issues that were super important for them. I had an opinion, and I tried really hard not to have an opinion. And I tried to keep my opinion out of it because to make room for these seven different perspectives, I really had to keep myself in check and not pick sides on whether the lesbian movement should have been founded or not. I do have an opinion and my mothers kind of know and by now they definitely know, but they also probably knew then. But that wasn't supposed to be in the text.
Pernille Ipsen:And I knew that I wasn't supposed to have that opinion in the text, but I accidentally took one of my other mother's opinion and put placed it in a place where they were sort of written up against each other. And that took me a while to understand that I had done that and that that had triggered that one of my mothers just completely collapsed. Like, just she cried and cried and cried and wrote me an 18 page single spaced letter about all the things that was wrong with part three and how she wanted me to change it. And she said, here, read this. I'm just gonna go sit in the other room, and when you're done, we can talk about how you can rewrite your book.
Pernille Ipsen:And that was the hardest moment of this whole process. And that was what then took all this diplomatic back and forth and conversations. And I didn't rewrite the part, but I found these places that had triggered her. And then I had to roll it back from there because once she had been triggered like that, it was hard for her not to disagree with everything. Right?
Pernille Ipsen:Like, once you heard, like, I'm not seen, I'm not represented. You didn't hear me. You listened to the others more. You're closer to the others. You didn't see me.
Pernille Ipsen:You didn't hear me. Once that mode has sort of entered the conversation, then it gets really hard to roll it back. So delicate. So that I learned a lot from the hard way.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Excruciatingly. And again, where the, in this case, the personal and the historical, her relation, like that her response would be, you're closer to the others than to me, tells you she's not a reader responding to a writer's misrepresentation. She's not a source mad at a journalist. Like, again, it feels like a betrayal that echoes earlier betrayals. Your saying this also highlights something for me, which is that in reading this book, after eighteen, nineteen years of knowing you, I still felt like I was like, wow, I know Pinaud better right now than I did.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:But it's not because I mean, of course it's about you. All writing is autobiographical in some certain way, but you're not you are an important presence, but not a big presence. I mean, literally, you're like a wee thing. But I know you better because of the strength of the portraits of the seven people who began to raise you. And the part of me that is very much a black southerner, that question of like, who are your people?
Adriane Lentz-Smith:I'm like, oh, these are your people. And through learning them and learning about the world from which they emerged that they sent on new trajectories, I see you more clearly. I mean, in some ways we've already talked about this, but I'm wondering what writing this book gave you, especially whether it was different from what you anticipated writing the book would give you. You said you've been planning to write it since you were a teenager.
Pernille Ipsen:So it's given me so many things. It has, first and foremost, brought my mothers back together for me in a way that was very powerful. So I started interviewing them in 2009 when I had just gotten a job at University of Wisconsin and had moved to Madison. And I was really homesick. And I was wondering what I was doing so far away from my many family members.
Pernille Ipsen:And I also was realizing that if I was starting a ten year track job, I might as well just start this project too because there was never gonna be a better moment. Before that, I had always sort of put it aside. I was getting a degree in history. I was having children. I was doing, you know, I was doing other things.
Pernille Ipsen:And I couldn't wait any longer. And so I started interviewing them every summer. So it was a summertime project. All of my recordings have all these birds and warm weather in the background of Danish summers. So it became a very personal project for me in that moment when I was longing for Denmark.
Pernille Ipsen:So it gave me a lot. And at the moment when I started writing it, I think in 15 when I first wrote a book proposal and was going to send it out, I started writing it in English and it did not feel right. And so I ended up writing it in Danish. Writing that book in Danish was so important for me because it also kept my Danish alive and my whole life on the Danish side of the ocean while I was teaching in English and having that busy professor teaching life. It did a lot of emotional, practical, psychological work for me all the way through.
Pernille Ipsen:But then getting to dive into this conflict that they had and figuring out what to do with that was also very important for me. And lastly, and this is especially something that I realized after it's come out and my birth mother has been so, so happy with the book and with the reception. And like none of them had foreseen it would be read by that many people in Denmark and that that many people would have opinions about it and want to talk to them about it and all that. These five years have been very busy that way. But since then, I've also come to think a little deeper about what kind of emotional work it's been doing for me.
Pernille Ipsen:And I think one of the things it has done is that my mother, as I said early in this conversation, was really an introvert. She passed two years ago, and she never one to have many close relationships with other people. And she has not really had a life partner that worked well for her. She's had a handful of close friends, but the commune was definitely the closest she ever got to a durable family, like a real safe and productive place for her emotions. And so bringing them back together around her, with her, with me was also a way for me to show my mother that that's what she needed.
Pernille Ipsen:You know, it was not a coincidence that those were some of her happiest years. This is something that I think I haven't been able to think through as carefully as I can now because she was still alive. But now that she's not here, I can sort of see that in a different light.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:That's lovely. Yeah. So the book, as you said, it hit hard in Denmark, right? My older sister was very excited to see it, or when I sent her the still of it on a bookshelf in that TV show that she's addicted to, Borgen, I hope it's
Pernille Ipsen:called. Yeah.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:What kind of conversations has the book sparked among Danish readers? And were those different kind of in you said it came out in the midst of the pandemic. Was were those different in 2020? What kind of work is it still doing in 2025?
Pernille Ipsen:I think that that one of the things I wanted to do with the book from the beginning on, and, like, the reason one of the motivating factors when I started the book, As I was growing up and, you know, both as a young younger person and then as an adult, we didn't have any very many stories about communes or social movement lives that took those lives seriously and or that tried to lean into them and really understand what was going on and what work it did and what it meant for us who came after. So both in Denmark, but also in The States, many stories about the 70s are kind of mocking and make these social movement lives very laughable or
Adriane Lentz-Smith:like Privilege.
Pernille Ipsen:Ridiculous almost. And there are stories out there of children growing up in the movement that are very negative. And I do not want to take anything away from those stories. I'm sure that there was a lot of really complicated situations to grow up in as a child in these social movements. No question about it.
Pernille Ipsen:But that was not my story. My story was that it was a real privilege and very amazing to have all these mothers. So I wanted to have that story out there. And that has really resonated with a lot of people from my generation, but also younger people who want to live different lives. Just the sense that other lives are possible, right?
Pernille Ipsen:And that even if you don't make the perfect utopia on the first try, the process of trying to do it is going to give you a lot in and of itself, and you're going to learn so much that you can take to your other projects later and not be so afraid to lean into the more transformative and different ways of living. And a lot of young people in Denmark are trying to live differently now. Now often because of dread over the climate catastrophe we're heading towards, but also because they understand that they need to organize society differently and that that starts with them and their communities and the ways that they organize. And I think many Americans too, many of the students who I've spoken to are just happy, are interested in hearing a story about how that might look like in practice. And for my mother's own generation, it was just the sense of recognition that somebody from their children's generation was interested in their story, wanted to hear it.
Pernille Ipsen:Yeah, and then I think the way that I wrote it as a memoir and because I wrote it as a memoir, people identified with different characters. So like everybody has a favorite or two that they follow into the movement and into their transformation. And I think that worked well. I got lucky that I had seven mothers. It's also a very lucky number, but it was also a very useful way to tell a story about a social movement, it turned out.
Pernille Ipsen:Yeah.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:I had one character that I followed in, and that was sort of my entry, and another person who was my exit.
Pernille Ipsen:Do you wanna say a little bit about who and where?
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Well, so I think that like, I wrote in my notes at some point, Vivica is a boss. Like, you know, she's I mean, I imagine she was many people's interests. Right? She's got this presence and dynamism, and I remained attached to her through the book. But I think it's is it Inge, the one who, as the commune breaks up, a lot of people have something to go to.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:If you're in the lesbian movement, you're choosing something else. If you're deep in the red stocking, you know, if you're Hannah and you've organized everything, then you have that. Inga really felt like she had given herself to this. And so the breakup was extraordinarily painful for everyone, but in some ways they all left her. Like, literally, like, watch and that for me, like, I almost cried.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Like, I was like, you what are you doing to like, I was mad at your mothers in that moment on her behalf. Because part of me, again, it's like, learn the Audrey Lord lesson. Like, this is not something to break up over. This is something to fight through, to, like, learn how to give each other more space to do something, but you don't need to be over.
Pernille Ipsen:That's a beautiful that's a beautiful thing to say, Adrienne. You don't need to be over.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:And I think one of the gifts of the way that you wrote it is, I know, like, as painful as that moment is, because you write about process as you're writing, because I know that they're going to be talking to each other, I know that that particular beautiful thing won't come back, but something will come back. And that's how you're able to kind of bear that moment. One final question. You mentioned that you started writing this book in Madison, Wisconsin, that for the past twenty years or so, you've divided your time between The US and Denmark. Do you think that this is a different book because of the time that you've spent in The United States?
Pernille Ipsen:I definitely think that living in Madison and teaching gender and women's studies in in Madison shaped how I wrote the story, for sure. Both on the sort of emotional personal side, as I mentioned before, but also in my growing interest in telling the story to younger people about how the second wave was not just leaders on the front cover of Ms. Magazine who wanted to and claimed the leadership and sort of became the face of a very white and very upper middle class women's movement. And so like telling a story of the very different people my mothers were and the very different backgrounds they came from was a way for me to sort of open it up and say, but so many things happened in the second wave and also in The US, right? And so teaching Gender and Women's Studies 01/2001 and teaching the history of feminism in medicine, I became more and more aware of all the different things that happened in the 70s, right?
Pernille Ipsen:The disability movement and all the different types of women's movements and the different racial organizations of women's movements and all like there was so much stuff happening that I didn't know of when I started teaching in The US because I was more familiar with the European version of the history of feminism. But also that many of our students had no idea about because they sort of written off the second wave as too white, too upper class, too cisgender, too boring also. And that if anything, it was definitely not boring. But also familiarizing myself with the American version of the story was super helpful because it made me think a lot about what it is that is worth taking with us from the second wave. And also what hurt it does and or the problems we run into by just writing all of it off as not productive.
Pernille Ipsen:Now, I think that that has changed since I started teaching. So I started teaching in 2010 at UW. And in the years that I've been there, students have been more and more interested in the second wave. So I think it actually it's loosening up. And I think that that's great.
Pernille Ipsen:And I think historians are getting really good at writing about the second wave as well. I think it's a generational thing too. Our generation, when we were younger, had a very stark need to separate ourselves from our parents' generation, right? And the grandchildren do not have the same need, it turns out, which is often the case. And so it has shaped how I think of the story.
Pernille Ipsen:I am really excited to get to talk to people about it in English because all of these years I have told versions of the story and participated in things academically that had something to do with it. And my colleagues, my friends, my family, you know, they know bits of the story just like you did, right? But that you now can read the whole thing and we can talk about it in-depth is just so wonderful for me and meaningful.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Thank you so much for writing it. It was a joy. It was a pleasure to read. I learned so much and then went around, as is my want, telling other people I became very pedantic within about the span of twenty four hours about the Danish women's movement. I'm like, southern historian.
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Why don't you dial it back a little bit? Also, as a final note, say I think this would be a really neat book to teach alongside Octavia Butler's parable trilogy. Just thinking about this, you said all of the many movements that are happening in the seventies, but also all of the many things that are on the mind of these women who are working for women's liberation, but are also thinking about the ways in which the world might be changed. So
Pernille Ipsen:that's a good idea. Yeah. Hey. Thank you so much. I've so enjoyed this conversation.
Pernille Ipsen:Thank you,
Adriane Lentz-Smith:Adrienne. Absolutely.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book My Seven Mothers Making a Family in the Danish Women's Movement by Pernil Ibsen is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.