Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Victorian Sex

Episode Date: November 2, 2023

They’re famously thought of as a buttoned up prudish bunch, but we all know they loved to bump uglies as much as anyone today. Were the spanking punishments of boarding schools really the origins of flagellation brothels? Who were the pin-ups of Victorian women? And what did the saucy portrait Queen Victoria gave to Prince Albert look like? Today we go Betwixt the Victorian Sheets with Dan Snow, from History Hit sister podcast Dan Snow’s History Hit, to find out all about Victorian Sex. This podcast was edited by Tom Delargy. The producers were Charlotte Long and Freddy Chick. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Kate Lister, Dan Snow, Suzannah Lipscomb, Lucy Worsley, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code BETWIXT. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe.You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Welcome to Tricksters, it's me, Kate Lister. It's so nice to see you here. What are you doing here? What is a nice person like you doing in a podcast like this? I reckon that you are hanging around waiting for your fair do's warning. Good, because here it is.

This is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about a range of adult things in an adult way, and you should be an adult too. Today we are talking about Victorian sex, so we're going to get mucky, baby. That's just how it is. And if that's not all right with you, give this one a skip because fair do's, you were warned. Victorians, what first leaps to your mind when you think about the 19th century? Dresses that cover women's ankles, Charles Dickens, Queen Victoria in full frump mode.

Flagellation? Yep, yep, you heard me right, betwixters. All right, maybe not so much the last one, but it should be, because the Victorians were a notoriously kinky group of people. They loved erotic fiction, they invented photographic porn, and they were definitely partial to a bit of slap and tickle in the bedroom. Well, some of them were anyway, including some pretty big names in the 19th century. So today, betwixtors, we are going to be busting some sex myths around the Victorians.

Why have they ended up with a really prudish reputation when they were proper mucky pups? What did they use as contraceptives? And did Queen Victoria really say lie back and think of England? What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs

by just turning it up and pushing the funny. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I'm beautiful damn. Goodness had nothing to do with it, Terry. And welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. Humans have been having sex

as long as there have been humans with holes to put things in. We know that. And the Victorians were no different. We like to think of them as very buttoned down and very much thou shalt not, but I am here to tell you

that they were very, very naughty people. indeed. So how did they end up with a reputation of a group of people that couldn't stand looking at a table leg? That wasn't true, by the way. What was considered sexy at the time? And why did they have a fascination with spanking? We are going to find out all of that more in today's episode with the one, the only, the lovely Dan Snow, from our sister podcast, Dan Snow's history hit. Not only is he fantastically knowledgeable about history, but it is my life's mission to embarrass him and make him blush. Mission succeeded in this one.

Wept, are there ready, betwixters? Let's do it. Hey Kate, thanks coming back on the show. Anytime, thanks for asking me. I do you know I sometimes feel sorry with the Victorians, because I think we have these weird views on them, almost uniquely in our history. We think of this group of people who are either so prudent and so conservative, they never even seen their partner naked,

and we're surprised they could even find where to put it and have kids. Or we think of them as unbelievably deviant and having like wild sex parties in the slums of Victorian England. Like what's the reality? Are they so different from any other period? I think the first thing you need to think of

when you talk about the Victorians is that all of these things can be true at the same time. Okay. They are a very, very complex, strange, maybe not that strange, but they're a very complex group of people. I'm not sure if there any stranger

than any point in history, but perhaps what makes them unique is it's the industrial revolution. And it's the time of photography. It's the time when film is born. It's the time of the mass printing media. The newspapers are taken off. Literacy rates are going through the roof. So there's more remaining sources with which to document their strangeness. So you look at Hogarth print from the 18th century and you're like, oh, you know, that just feels fun. Whereas you look at early photography of like naked people in Victorian's doing weird things like, oh my God, so deviant.

They were a uniquely strained bunch of people in the fact that they did have this outer facing public persona of let's not talk about sex. Sex is something that's just for making babies and we're not going to be deviant. Everyone's just going to behave themselves. That's not the whole picture. They're really, really conflicted because you can't actually maintain that because people are going to have sex and they like having sex. So you get a real state of cognitive dissident.

developing. When I'm like reading Victorian novels, you're so struck by that. One of the strongest elements of those is they could be in the middle of a war zone or being attacked by a mythical beast or in a Conan Dorn novel, like a dinosaur. But any suggestion that you have an inappropriate

conversation with the member of the opposite sex is like, no. They were very different from us, whereas we talk about sex all the time, but don't talk about something like death. The Victorians talked endlessly about death and wouldn't talk about sex. So it's just changing at a time.

I thought you might be able to say that we talk about sex at the time and are having historically less sex than before. And they never talks about it, but they might have been shagging away happily. They might have been, what they were. I mean, were all the living, walking, breathing proof that people in the Victorian period, someone was having sex. There's no wireless, not much else to do. Right. And you've got to think as well. If this is a group of people, they were not not obsessed with sex by sheer virtue of the fact that there is so much upset and anger and attempts at repression.

If you're running around going, I'm not thinking of sex. Are you thinking of sex? Who's thinking of sex? Why are you thinking of sex? I'm going to punish anyone who's thinking of sex. Are you thinking a sex? That's not a group of people who don't think about sex. That's a group of people who can't stop thinking about sex. Let's talk about Queen Victoria, the one who gives the period his name. Again, she has a sort of bad rep. She actually had a very happy. In fact, it's odd that we think of her as this kind of cold lie back and think of England person because she seemed to have an unusually happy marriage and sex. relationship with her partner, even though it was an arranged marriage and everything, they got like a house on fire. They really did. We think of Victoria often in like her Frump era, which is when she was mourning for her husband and she was dressed in black and she was just walking around being cranky and sad. That's what we tend to think of her.

But she was so in love with this guy and not just, you look, she fancied the pants off him. Like she writes in her diary after the wedding night that she can't stop staring at his chest and his neck and he's perfectly formed and he's beautiful. Like she wanted to jump on Albert's bones all of the time. She was not a prudish front. And that phrase, lie back and think of England, that's a bit of an urban myth. It's come to represent what we think of as Victorian women.

But the earliest recorded use of that phrase, I think it's in like the 1980s. It's one of the many myths that we attribute to the Victorian period that they weren't enjoying sex. And her daughter went through and blacked out lots of her diaries, didn't they were? they were racy. They were racy for the time. One of the things that she had done is she had a portrait painted of her, Queen Victoria did, and given to Albert that was only for his private viewing.

And you can see it. It's not exactly only fan. She's got a hair loose and she's got bare shoulders and a dress that kind of like drapes and she's sort of staring off. But for the time, that was racy as hell. That was like the 19th century equivalent of send nudes. Let's come on to other people in society.

Was it different for different, was there different sexual mores in this new middle class, so hardworking bourgeoisie compared to the working class or the aristocracy? Yeah, a lot of what we think about the Victorian period comes from the emergence and the expansion of what we'd now call the middle class. Arguably, there's always been a middle class, but what happened in the 19th century is this idea really starts to expand and social mobility starts to come in like it had never. done before, really. I mean, you could, I guess, be born in the gutter and make your way to the top,

but that was really difficult. What you see in the Victorian period is an expansion of industry, an expansion of wealth, new money starts to emerge. And right in the middle of that is what's called the middle class. And they seem to be the guardians of this very Victorian morality. If you read through the medical advice, the legal advice, the general conduct codes, pamphlets, that are really strict about what you can and you can't do. One of the things that becomes apparent pretty quickly is that you haven't got time for that if you're working in a factory. You don't like the idea that, you know, you should never expose your ankles to anyone.

Actually, they weren't that fussed about ankles, but you know, that you should never see anybody naked or anything like that. That's not going to work if you're a whole family living in one room in a slum. There were different expectations for where you were on the social realm. And there was a way of expressing your newfound sort of place in society to just be... Yeah, you might not have as much money as the aristocrats, but God damn it, you're going to be better behaved than they were. Because if you're an aristocrat, you're kind of off the hook immediately, because you've got the money to be able to do whatever the hell you want. Sex work, I think, possibly from stories of the Whitechapel murders, you know, Jack the Ripper from Sherlock Holmes, or whatever it might be.

We have this sense of the streets of London teaming with sex workers. Was there any evidence that was sort of more or less than other periods? You've definitely got evidence that the Victorians were really worried that it was. Gladstone was worried, wasn't he? Well, he, yeah, he was desperately worried. He was so worried that he would go roaming the streets of London in the evening, looking for fallen women to save. He was that worried.

That's very worried. Thanks, Gladstone. That's really helping stuff. But you've got evidence of Victorian moralizers and doctors making estimates of how many people were selling sex in London, for example. and one of the estimates that gets bandied around a lot is 80,000. There were 80,000 women selling sex on the streets to London in the 19th century. That's just bullocks.

We don't know how many people are selling sex today. We don't have those accurate statistics. It's a very, very difficult group of people to survey properly with it being stigmatized, illegal, and people not wanting to say much about it. How they would have had accurate records in the 19th century, it's ridiculous. But the best estimates that we've got today, according to the government report into sex work in the UK of 2016 is they estimate there's about 80,000 people selling sex in the country. So the idea that in the 19th century, there was 80,000 selling sex in the capital on their own.

And when you break that down, it would mean like one in five women, regardless of age or marital status or anything else. So it's nonsense. It couldn't possibly be that. But people believed it and that's useful as well because that tells us that if they thought that it's feasible that there's 80,000 people selling sex. They thought this was a really, really big problem. So it's almost like it would have been medieval London, Georgian London, there would have been sex work going on, but the Victorian started to run notice it, write it down, make lots noise about it. And then we've just absorbed that and be like, oh, there must have been an explosion in this. Yeah. There would have been an increase because of urbanisation as the

cities double, tripled in size within a very short space of time, within a few decades. The rule of thumb is wherever you've got poverty, you've got someone selling sex. That's how it works. People sell sex because they want to make money. They don't sell sex because they're innately horny or they just, this is a useful hobby to do in their spare time. It's about making money. And when the slums hit, an expansion hit, poverty was rife. So I imagine that you did get an increase in people turning to sex work because of the circumstances surrounding them. And you have made a career for yourself publishing words for prostitutes from the 19th century on the internet.

Yeah. Is there a share any? Let me see. I think one of my favorite words for someone selling sex is a dolly mop. That's not 19th century, it's a bit earlier, but a dolly mop is somebody who works, who has a job but tops up their income by selling sex sometimes. So you'd say that you would dolly mopping if you were on a low income.

I've always liked that, a dolly mop. What about the more extreme forms of sexual activity that, again, for some reason, we keep labelling the Victorians as being into, flagellation. love that though. Did they? They did. Was that a boarding school? Was that a sort of... That's the theory. That's what a lot of people say is because lots of English boys were beaten in boarding schools. They got used to a love of the lash. I don't know if that's actually

true if anyone's looked into that as an actual research project, but that's certainly something that I have heard people suggesting. They might have been interested in that long before that. They probably were. We just don't have the records for it, but flagellation brothels and those kind of services was so popular that flagellation became known as the English vice. Really? Yeah, it was like there's some really big Victorian players who were really into it. Charles Argonne and Swineburn, for example, he was a bit of a spank fetish. Yeah.

In terms of fetish, there's also Penguin have published all those amazing, like Victorian sexual fantasy books, which are amazing. You get the pressure because it's a global empire at this stage. There's a lot of stuff about inter-ethnic sex, like, um, sex. on the Imperial Frontier. Yeah. People are fascinated by it. When you read Victorian porn, and I suggest everyone listening does, and you can access it online because obviously the print industry was booming, people are going to write pornographic

stories, photographs are expensive. I often caution my students when I tell them to go and read it. They sort of approach it with this idea of like, oh, go on then Victorian person, go and show me what you've got. We've got Pornhub. What have you got? And it really is quite. graphic. It's not quite graphic. It's extremely graphic. It's like whatever it is that you can think

of, they have written it down. But it's, I enjoy reading it because it's written in Victorian prose. And it sounds like Jane Austen just like writing the most weird smut. And at the time, the standard of writing would have been really trashy. But because it's got that Victorian flourish to the expression. To me, it sounds really funny. I really like reading it. And you get a lot of flagellate, you get spanking, flagellation. Oh, God, you get so much of it. A lot of massacism. So much.

The Whippington Papers, that was quite a popular publication. There is so much spanking that goes on pissing on each other all the time. They seem to do that a lot. They really love a good bush. Bush is lush. There's no Brazilians to be had. But there's just like threesomes, foursums, oh, gee, same-sex relationships, dildos.

It's actually really useful for historians because it answers questions for us. like, what did they make doldos out of? Leather. That's what they made doldos out of. So it's good for us that we can know this stuff. But no, it's no holds a baron and whatever you can think of doing. They were doing. I'll be back with Dan after this short break. Tell me about Theresa Barkley.

Oh, Mama Teresa. She owned a brothel, a hugely successful brothel on Charlotte Street, as was in London. And we know about her because her name and her establishment is recorded. by, I think it's Henry Ashby, who wrote annual reviews of basically all the pornography, that it was like his Libram Prohibitorial or something like that.

And we only know about her because of what he wrote about her, but he writes about her brothel and the services that she offered. And that was whippings and frustications and that she tells us about the people she had working for. And one of the things that I love about Teresa

is we're told that she keeps nettles in long vases of water to keep them playing. and then she'd whip customers with those. I don't know why you'd want to be ripped a little. Well, I think you'd work your way up to it. Oh, do you think so? I would imagine, like you start with a bit of like slap and tickle,

maybe throw in some greenery, and then eventually work your way up to a hollybush. Wow. You just get pushed to extremism. She's going to keep going more and more and more and more, but she was the woman to go to. We're making an assumption that these services and this kind of sex industry is for men.

Yeah. What about women? Were they just locks at home reading this porn and dreaming of a different life? Or did they get a chance to go out? I hope that they were reading this porn. If you wanted to buy porn in the 19th century, you would go to Hollywell Street in London. Then it became the epicenter of journalism.

But it was notorious in the 19th century as being the place that you would go to buy porn, the Whippington papers and memoirs of a flea and all that stuff in the Pearl. But of course, what it necessitates that we don't have to do now is you have to physically go there. You have to physically go there. And everybody knew what those shops were. There was no, I'm just buying it for the articles.

Everybody knew. So I don't know how many women, respectable women, would have done it, that they would have gone and actually, because everyone would know, you're buying porn, you're buying porn. But I imagine that it wouldn't be that hard to get hold of it if they really, really wanted to. Maybe their husband shared it with them. But I think it's a bit of a fantasy, a bit of a myth that every single Victorian woman

was just sat at home waiting for her husband. to come back and thinking, what is this sex that you speak of? Maybe for some people, that's true. We've certainly got accounts of that. But they were having sex and they were having plenty of sex and we've got a lot of evidence of that. They're popping out babies. Certainly are.

Left-right and centre. And one usually requires the other. It does, doesn't it? But there were male in the pornography that you have shared on the interweb. Yes. In your excellent social media accounts. There's a lot of male nudities, a lot of male pornography as well. Is that for men or is that for women or do we know?

The biggest market has always historically been men, but that certainly doesn't mean that women were not part of that. Just by virtue of the fact that they didn't own their own money, that they couldn't have had access to it, that they would have been stigmatized in a way that perhaps men weren't, even though they were stigmatized. But that doesn't mean that they weren't enjoying sex. It doesn't mean that you wouldn't have got jiggilows, for example,

kept men. Catherine the Great certainly had a harim of young lovers. She could afford to do that. I love looking at those old daguerre types and the old photographs showing the Victorian porn and just wondering who are these people. I know that's not the point. I know you're not supposed to like want to do a deep dive family history of them

but like it's all that we've got left of them is just this snapshot of what are you doing? Like did you know each other? Are you, were they porn stars of the day? And sometimes you see them in different shoots and you're like, I know you. You're the one from there. And then you kind of think,

I wonder if that's how they made their living or if it's just something that they did on the side. And you never think, am I watching too much Victorian porn? I think you are watching too much Victorian porn when you start thinking things like that. We start recognizing them when you start being like, oh, it's you. That pert little bottom. Yeah.

Recognise that. So what did Victorians think was hot? Let's start with women. What do they think was a beautiful female body? Well, it changes a lot throughout the century. We're talking about 100 years. The fashion in the mid-19th century was sort of very plain, the no makeup makeup.

look, a hair kind of all piled up and just very kind of natural. And by the time you get toward the end of the 19th century, a heavier makeup look is coming through. But there are certain things that have been consistent throughout, healthy skin, glowing face. It was all about being pale, pale, pale, there were no tans. The white or the better. So that was considered beautiful. But yeah, changes.

What about body shape? Body shape. It's interesting because that that again changed throughout the 19th century. For women, it tended to be petite. It tended to be very slender. There was at one point in the 19th century where it was like TB chic. It was like it was the fashion to look as pale and frail as you possibly could. But there were people that booked that trend.

And speaking of things that women found attractive. So like someone like Eugene Sando, the bodybuilder, he probably wasn't the first bodybuilder, not by a long shot, but he was definitely one of the first that got celebrity status. And he would go on tour flexing his muscles. And he attracted huge crowds of people. apparently women would pay to go backstage and finger his muscles. I'm glad he said muscles. This was also the era of the music hall and entertainment.

So he was part of that. He's huge, yeah. But you do see the strong man is like a figure in circus and stuff like that. So that was presumably... And strong women. They often get overlooked in Victorian history. But there were very, very successful Victorian strong women. There was a female Eugene Sando who apparently beat him in a wrestling match once.

Wow. Yeah. And Eugene Sando, didn't they sort of studied him? They thought he was a proper specimen. He got studied a lot. People like him became a safer repository for the female gays. You couldn't go down Hollywell Street and buy yourself some porn. But you could go and look at Eugene Sando and admire his physique.

But certainly science took an interest. I think that the Welcome Trust still have pictures of him flexing his muscles and his physique. And various casts and things were taken of him to try and preserve this absolute specimen. When you look at it now, because this is all pre-steroid. and pre-protein shakes. You look at him now and you think, he's ripped, but it's not like what you'd think, this huge pumped-up thing.

But for the time, yeah, he was an absolute, absolute specimen of manhood. Why have I heard of Lily Langtree? What's the deal with her? Oh, Lily Langtree. She was one of the last great cortisans. She was an actress as well. The 19th century was really the kind of,

it was the final curtain for the cortisans as a profession. I say that, Camilla's managed to become queen. Yeah. So maybe it's still an aspiration. Keep dreaming, side chicks. But the 19th century, certainly, that was the last great era of the cortisand. And Lily Langtree was one of the great.

She was one of the many, many, many lovers of Dirty Bertie. Edward the seventh as he became. Edwold the seventh, yeah. Absolute shagher. Absolute. Like, couldn't, if it stayed still long enough, he would have a go at it. And there's one immortal line by Liz.

Langthew when she was having dinner with Edward and he said, damn it, woman, I've spent enough on you to build a battleship and she retorted and you've spent enough in me to float one. Oh, crikey. And speaking of that, what about STDs? Because that's the sort of dark side of, again, the 9th century and alia is that these people

had despair off to go and get treated for syphilis and take my... Yeah. It was... All of the sexual freedom and the, you know, the porn and all this stuff, it doesn't capture what was a very real physical threat to people's health. We live in a world now where we, it's not that we're not aware of STDs,

but it's that we know that probably what we'll need is a course of antibiotics or medication, some awkward phone calls, and you'll probably be okay. And you can wear a condom and not get them in the first place, and that's great. The 19th century and earlier, that was just a fanciful dream, is STIs were absolutely rife, as you can imagine. And if it's something like syphilis, which is on the rise, again, by the way, so everyone needs to watch out for that one. But syphilis is such a mean, horrible illness, because it destroys your face.

When you first get it, you'll get really intense flu-like symptoms as it takes hold and you will get ugly lesions at the point of infection. So, yeah. And it'll be really, really nasty. And then it'll go dormant again and you'll think that you've cured yourself, which is probably why when people were taking mercury, they thought, oh, I'm cured because it went into its tertiary phase, but it hasn't gone away. It's there in the background, and it's destroying nervous tissue, and it's destroying bone, and then it can emerge years later, and the typical saddle nose of the nose that's collapsed can cause lesions on the head. It causes ulcers to open up.

It can cause dementia. It was an awful, awful disease. And there's no hiding. If your nose has fallen off, there's no hiding that. and there's no other reason for your nose to have fallen off. It's really difficult to explain that one away. So it was rightly feared. It was terrifying.

They would do almost anything to avoid it apart from not having sex. Yeah, so... We never did that, but... Yeah. So what can you do to avoid it other than not having sex? Right. So there was all kinds of back crap cures and things. Some of them...

Well, none of them were great. If you were rich and if you had the money and after you'd been infected, Mercury was you go to. And that works. I've never actually known. I want to ask a physician this question for years and years, and none of them have actually been able to give me an answer to it of like what did it do?

Because it wasn't just the Victorians that used it. They've used it since the 14th century. What did it do that made people think it was helping? The best answer that I've got is that it would help burn off lesions. So you could put it on the lesions and it would sort of help with the appearance. But there were mercury fumigation. places that you could go to around London that you'd sit in like a sauna and be steamed with mercury.

You could have mercury injected. You could eat mercury. You could rub it on your skin. And one of my favorites, and they recovered one of these from the, is it the Mary Rose, the ship, is you could have it injected directly into the urethra. Oh, yes. They, yeah, that fabulous, the urethral syringe

that they would fill up with mercury and then inject it directly into your John Thomas. And none of that would actually get rid of it. but they thought that it did. Other things that you got that was less horrific is you would have like various medicinal compounds. You know, like Lily the Pink, the song Lily the Pink, the Pink. She was really an American businesswoman called Lydia Pinkham

and she developed something called Pinkham's Tonic. It was just vegetable compounds really. But it was said to be able to cure absolutely everything like syphilis and veneria infection was one of the things it said that it could cure. So people would be swigging things like that. Oh my goodness. Yeah. Every time you were taking your life in your hands.

They still are done. Like, AIDS has been around for like 20, 30 years and people still won't wear condoms. It's like, it's not that we look at it and go, oh my God, how could you take that risk? People are still doing it. There were Victorian condoms, right? There were Victorian condoms. You're promising slightly. There were Victorian condoms shops as well.

There was one in Half Moon Street in New West Soho is today. And you would go, and they were called armor. You'd refer to them as an armor or a machine. A Casanova called them English raincoats. you could buy them in a shop, but you might also buy them in a pub or in a brothel or perhaps from a waiter. They were made of animal guts.

Yeah. So normally pig guts, but sometimes fish skins were used as well. The membrane would be scraped out. So it would be like a sausage casing, basically, right? And then that would be left to dry. And then when you wanted to, so it would go crispy,

dried out skin. You have to soak it to rehydrate it before use. So it's very sexy already. And then you put it onto the penis and you'd probably have to tie it on. with a ribbon or a piece of string and it was reusable. And it worked? No.

Okay. No. No. Well, I mean, it might have worked a bit. You can still buy animal gut condoms, but they don't protect against STIs. They protect against pregnancy because the skin is a porous.

They were interested in stopping pregnancies. Yeah. Yeah, but they were interesting. That was important to them. But they weren't, I guess they'd have been better than nothing at all, but not by much. It'd be more like you're safe

and jumping out of a five. story building than a seven-story building. It's that kind of safety thing. And they might have actually contributed to spread an STIs more because people thought they were safe and they weren't. So actually, we like to laugh about the Victorians and think it's all quite funny. But that, the prevalence of syphilis, the danger of those STIs, it made it all, it gives it a much, much darker size. Incredibly dark. Incredibly dark. There was a lot, it's not a nice history a lot other time. It's fun because sex can be fun, but it's also really grim. And speaking in dark sides, of course, also the issue around sex work and abuse and like the age of consent

for children was introduced in this period, right? It was 12 at the start of the 19th century, and by the end it was 16 for girls and 18 for boys. But you could still get married at 12 with your parents' permission. Okay. Yeah. Well, I won't be given my daughter. No, I wouldn't. No, I don't know how often that happened but the fact it's on the books is if you remember the real family and it was important if you were rich enough yeah thank you very much coming

the podcast anytime thank you for listening betwixters and if you like what you heard please don't forget to like review and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts we have got episodes on ancient goddesses of sex and war and a special mini-series on the women in JFK's family, all coming your way.

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