THE Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, has officially dropped her podcast on Spotify, and her best pal, tennis star, Serena Williams is her first feature.
Her podcast opening saw her talk about feeling “furious” as an 11-year-old girl when she saw a Procter & Gamble commercial that advertised its dishwashing soap solely to women. She responded by taking action by writing letters to powerful figures, including then-First Lady Hillary Clinton. Her campaign worked; the company changed the language in the commercial. She referred to the experience as an awakening to the millions of ways, that society tries to box women in, to hold them back, and tell them who and what they should and can be.
Concerning the chat with Serena Williams, their talks evolved around ambition and how it has been referred to as a “dirty, dirty word when it comes to women.”
Meghan says, “I don’t remember ever personally feeling the negative connotation behind the word ‘ambitious’ until I started dating my now husband. And um, apparently ambition is, uh… a terrible, terrible thing, for a woman that is — according to some. So, since I’ve felt the negativity behind it, it’s really hard to un-feel it. I can’t unsee it, either, in the millions of girls and women who make themselves smaller — so much smaller — on a regular basis.”
Back in 2020, the Duchess and her husband, Prince Harry, announced a multi-year partnership between Spotify and their production company, Archewell Audio. She had previewed the types of guests who will appear throughout the debut season in March.
“This is Archetypes — the podcast where we dissect, explore, and subvert the labels that try to hold women back,” she says in the teaser. “I’ll have conversations with women who know all too well how this typecast shapes our narratives. And I’ll talk to historians to understand how we even got here in the first place.”
