Meghan, Duchess of Sussex wants daughter Lilibet to be a 'woman with a voice'
Meghan Markle and Prince Harry have done what they can to keep the lives of their two children - Archie, three, and Lilibet, one - private, with little being revealed about their upbringing.
But the duchess, 41, has begun sharing a little more about them in her new podcast, today revealing some insight into how she's raising her daughter.
During the latest episode of Archetypes, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex explained that while she wants Lilibet to be grow up to be "a full fledged, interesting, curious, kind, strong — all the things — human being," she also hopes her daughter will understand she can be a "woman with a voice".
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The royal added she hopes Lilibet can "understand that [being a woman] is not just a box you have to fit into."
Her comments comes after she has made several public comments about her time in the Royal Family and how her role as a working royal impacted her ability to use her own voice.
During her bombshell interview with Oprah in 2021, Meghan said: "that's the sad irony of the last four years is that I have advocated for so long for women to use their voice and then I was silent."
Oprah famously responded, "Were you silent, or were you silenced?" Meghan replied: "the latter."
More recently, during an interview with the Cut, Meghan expanded on this sense of being silenced. "It's interesting," the Duchess of Sussex said, "I never had to sign anything that restricts me from talking. I can talk about my whole experience and choose not to."
When probed about why she chooses to be silent, Meghan said: "Still healing [...] it takes a lot of effort to forgive. I've really made an active effort, especially knowing I can say anything."
Meghan concluded the topic by saying, "I have a lot to say until I don't [...] sometimes, as they say, the silent part is still part of the song."
The duchess' most recent comments were made during a conversation with actress and director Pamela Adlon, the creator of Better Things.
The latest episode of Archetypes explored the stereotypes of "Bad mom [sic]" or "Bad wife" versus what is deemed to be a "good" one. "The pressures imposed" on women of these stereotypes, Meghan argues, "are pretty trapping and in many ways a fallacy."
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Other guests included comedian Sam Jay, Sophie Trudeau — activist and wife of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — and author Angela Garbes.
Garbes argued that "the expectations" which Meghan is concerned her daughter will one day have to face, "are actually very recent historical inventions."
She added: "when capitalism started happening, where people went out working for an individual wage [and] trying to build individual wealth, we really started to see these expectations coming down on women [...] so women were really confined to the domestic sphere."
Alongside her weekly podcast Archetypes, during which Meghan aims to tackle different tropes surrounding women and "subvert the labels holding women back," the Sussexes have two major upcoming projects.
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Meghan and Harry have created a docu-series with Netflix — the release date of which has not been confirmed — which, Meghan said during her interview with the Cut, is about "a piece of my life that I haven't been able to share, that people haven't been able to see [...] our love story."
More recently speaking to Variety, Meghan said about the project, directed by Liz Garbus, "it's nice to be able to trust someone with our story [...] even if it means it's not the way we would have told it."
Prince Harry's upcoming memoir Spare is due to be published on January 10 2023. According to Penguin Random House — the publisher of the memoir — it is "a landmark publication full of insight, revelation, self-examination and hard-won wisdom."
