Bookshelfie: Women’s Prize Podcast - S1 Ep3: Unsung Heroines

Episode Date: May 24, 2019

Fiction + (Her)story. Zing Tsjeng is in the front row at the Baileys Book Bar this week to hear a panel of brilliant female historians as they discuss inspirational women from history, including those who have been unjustly written out of the narrative. The interplay between fact and fiction has produced some of the most engaging stories ever written, and this episode is all about celebrating this union. Bestselling author and Women’s Prize for Fiction Founder Director Kate Mosse is joined by 2019 Women's Prize for Fiction Chair of Judges, author and broadcaster Professor Kate Williams, specialist in European colonial and post-colonial History Professor Olivette Otele, and author, broadcaster and Classicist Bettany Hughes. Books covered include: No Surrender by Constance Maud Anything written by Ancient Greek poet Sappho Pao by Kerry Young For more details head over to www.womensprizeforfiction.co.uk or check out #WomensPrize and @WomensPrize on Twitter and Instagram. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hi, it's Benjamin from They Walk Among us, the podcast about UK True Crime, and we are currently being sponsored by Revolut, the one app for all things money. Money can seem a bit complicated and confusing, but Revolut are here to change that. The financial super app already has over 20 million people using it. You can send, spend and save money hassle free, even spend abroad like a local with great rates. Download the app and sign up in just a few taps. Get three months of Revolut premium for free if you use the link get. com forward slash walk among us.

Available in the UK, T&C Supply. With thanks to Bayleys, this is the Women's Prize for Fiction podcast produced by Fremantle. Celebrating women's writing, sharing our creativity, our voices and perspectives, all while championing the very best fiction written by women around the world. I'm Zing Singh, at the Bailey's Book Bar, Wardstone's Tottenham Court Road, London. The interplay between fact and fiction has always fascinated writers, drawing inspiration from grand events, big historical personalities, or hidden stories from the past that can resonate with our lives.

In this spirit, the Women's Prize team have brought together a panel of brilliant female historian. to discuss inspirational women from history, including those who have unjustly been written out of the narrative. With Bailey's cocktails in hand, the excited crowd is getting ready to hear this year's Women Prize Chair of Judges, author and broadcaster, Professor Kate Williams, specialist in European colonial and post-colonial history, Professor Olivet Othelli,

and author, broadcaster and classicist, Bettany Hughes. And the great Kate Moss, best-selling author, Women's Prize for Fiction Founder Director and all around inspiring women is about to kick things off. So I'm going to just ask each of our panellists to say a few words about themselves how they got to be interested in both history

but also women within history. And then we're going to have a general discussion about how women vanish from our history books and why we think that might be. So, Olivet, I'm going to start with you because you're right next to me. Okay. How I get into history.

I chose history because it was something to do with social justice, something to do with understanding how we could be so mean to each other and actually be able to create some marvelous things and see how we, as communities, we can interact and we have been interacting. I was born in Cameroon, in Africa, and grew up in Paris, and how these journeys have been done by, other people before me.

So that's how I got into history. That's amazing. And did you straight away find that you were drawn to a particular period of history, or was it the idea of particular stories all the way through different periods that you were trying to tease out? A bit of both,

because I wanted to study the French Revolution, and I was told by the French that it wasn't something that was related to my history, apparently. But it is actually, because Napoleon was re-established slavery in French colonies. But anyway, so I kind of changed tack and started looking at,

because Cameroon is both Francophone and Anglophone, so I started looking at the competition, and I was fascinated. And I'm still fascinated by the competition between the French and the British at all levels. And so I wanted to look at that history. What happened and how it started and woven into that the colonial bits, because it's part of my heritage and identity. So I found what I needed in there.

And did you feel a kind of double responsibility? On the one hand, your own history, which you were investigating through that French and British colonial, well, aggression, really. But did you also feel that you were particularly attracted to women's voices within the record? And were they more visible or less visible? Or was it actually, that wasn't really how it showed itself at that moment?

Oh, they're really invisible when it comes. comes a colonial history. It's a very male-dominated kind of, shall we say, discipline or area of research, but women were invisible, and when they were visible, they were somebody's wife or somebody's daughter. So I got really frustrated, and as I was researching, these were about women's stories and personal journeys. So, for example, in the Caribbean, I came across Nanny Maroon, for example, a fighter, and I love that. Well, okay, she got killed, but I love the fact that I love the fact that she was able to represent whole communities normally dominated by men. I found other people.

So I wanted to look closely into that, and I'm still doing it. So this is really the bit that interests me, women's history. Well, we'll pull all these throats together when everybody's said their bit. Bettany, you want to say a little bit about your story? Journey into history. No, I managed to avoid the word journey. Your story. Okay, my story.

So I think I was actually drawn to history probably through the historical novel, in fact. So my mum and dad were actors, which as Kate knows, always sounds glamorous, but actually means they're just out of work. So we spent, my entire childhood was beautiful. Everybody was just always around the kitchen table with lots of cups of tea and chatting. Everybody was very present. So we didn't go on foreign holidays. We went down to the Kent Coast to a place called hives for day trips.

So my holiday, again, beautifully, it was an amazing thing. I used to sit on this freezing, Kent Coast, with a lot of army widows in kind of wrinkly, still-knitted swimsuits. I'm that old. They used to make swimsuits out of wall. And of course, because it was freezing, we'd pack a blanket and a thermos flask. But I took with me the novels of Mary Renaud. And suddenly I was transported age 12 into this hot environment, hot in every way, sexually. politically, culturally hot

and was just lost in it. She was an amazing, I don't know if you know about her, she was an amazing woman, a real pioneer, a brilliant mind. She was a nurse in the Second World War, so she watched unbelievable suffering. So she was one of those women who physically kind of packed men's innards back in and stitched them up.

So she had a real sort of delight in humankind. And then had to move to South Africa with her female partner because they just couldn't really live in England as two women together. So she was brilliantly, brilliantly open-minded. And I love the description of herself. Somebody said, what are you like? And she said, I'm a party person, which I just think, you know, bring it on. We need party people. So that was, it's actually through novels. I think if I'm really, really honest,

that just made me think there was this other world where other things happened and I wanted to investigate it. And it was very unfashionable then. So I don't know if you, remember, this was in the kind of 80s. And people, there was this weird notion that the year 2000 was going to come and there was a massive reset button was going to be hit and all the answers were in the future and the past was irrelevant and so you know history courses were being shut down classics was incredibly unpopular so it was a sort of bloody-minded thing as well i thought screw you you know you're telling me it's not interesting so i'm going to try and prove that it is and one of i mean you have obviously you're very intrepid so i love the idea that you never went further than hide

So you spend most of your time up mountains and down gorges and extraordinary parts of the world. But you have also often written the real stories or the unheard stories of characters from antiquity, haven't you? Helen of Troy, for example, and other things. So can you say a little bit about what it was that made you decide to focus? Is it Mary Renaud, you know, in a way it's that you've started to write in that thing because you feel the stories are not told? or just... Definitely partly. Definitely she was there on my shoulder. It was also, I just thought when I read anything from the ancient world, I knew that women had potency and agency, particularly in the Bronze Age. So particularly we're talking about 3,000 years ago. And I just wasn't seeing that in anything that I read. So I really consciously thought this is a story. You know, I think the historian's job is to tell stories that aren't told. And even if that's tricky sometimes. So it was something I really wanted to. to do. And also, to be really honest, I always wanted

to share that with the wide audience. So I thought I just wasn't seeing any female historians on telly, for instance, at all. They just weren't there. And I remember going, I remember going to, I had a brilliant meeting with a BBC producer, and I went up and did this sort of full of enthusiasm. I was talking about

the women of Sparta, and the women of Sparta were amazing. You know, they were given the same rations as men, shot horror, whereas elsewhere in the ancient world, women were given half-ratons. and they were allowed to ride in chariots and they were occasionally allowed to go to council and I did this whole sort of spiel

thinking how can he resist this story and you know that moment when you're in a meeting when you realise you're doing all of the talking kind of tumbleweed blowing through the office and he said to me I will never forget it he said okay let me tell you something

one nobody is interested in history anymore two no one watches wants to watch history on television. And this was, it was really interesting. This was this sort of, in the mid-90s. So it was before that revolution, before Simon Sharma did his thing.

And then he said, and my dear, and his hands went out, not on my knee, but towards my age, he said, nobody wants to be lectured at by a woman. And this was the 1990s. You know, it wasn't the 1890s. So, of course, that generated a certain degree of fire, I would say, in my belly. And I just thought, you know, I'm going to prove you wrong.

So anyway, so it was, it was, it was an act of righteous rage, I'd say. An act of righteous rage. You could all tweet that. Yeah. Yeah. So that was, so it was very, you know, it really mattered to me and trying to do that. And it wasn't easy, but. And, you know, and for both of you already, look at you go. So there we are. So there is, there is that element of proving people wrong and redressing the balance. That's brilliant. Kate, just say a little bit about you because you know, you do do both and, you know, we're both historical novelists, but it's just wonderful to hear Bethany kind of came in through our route as well. Marvelous. Well, yes, I mean, too, you know, those are incredible stories. I don't know how I can really follow it. I became a lover of history. I grew up in a dormitory village just outside

Wolverhampton. As anyone else here is from Wolverhampton or the Midlands here. Oh, we've got one. And it wasn't very historic. And I was obsessed with history. And I, yes, I was determined to find out more about the past. And so I built a time machine. And we had this great big box that the washing machine came in. And I covered it in a really, everything from my craft box.

So some scratch and sniff stickers, some cellophane, some. pipe cleaners and I wrote time machine on the front just to be sure and then I think I was about seven and then I put my brother into it and he's about five and I'm about seven and might get up to demonstrate this like so so I put Jeff into it that's my brother's name and and then I put it on the stairs and I then I kind of rocked it and I kind of rocked it and I said to Jeff I said oh look Jeff we're going flying we're going flying and oh my goodness here we are in ancient Egypt and and wow and then we're going to go to

Henry the 8th Court and then we're going to go to Victoria in London and I took Jeff on this amazing mystery tour and of course Jeff kept saying let me out I want to get out

and I say no Jeff no you can't get out because then you will break the spell and you'll get stuck in ancient Egypt and you'll never get back to 1980s Wolverhampton which obviously is a terrible thing so

and that was a brilliant game and now I feel like I have my own time machine because I get to read these incredible documents and diaries and letters every day and you are back in the past and then of course I grew up and you start to learn history and school and move onwards and then you realise that that your essay on Tudor Women is the one option that you do after eight of the essays on the economy and the parliament and the star chamber and then you get one essay on Tudor Women and not just that but also how how frequently it was seen as the easy option.

And I'm afraid to say that we were often told, not by anyone academic, but it went around like wildfire. And of course, what you want is a good grade, that if you write too much on women's history in any exam, whether it was GCSE or A-level or finals, if you write too much on them, you will get marked down. That was what we were all told each other, that you will get a better mark if you write on nothing but, you know,

what hardcore top-down male history and that was very upsetting to me. You know, very upsetting. And I really felt that this has to change. And I have to say I have been this revolution

in history, that the women's history has so much more of coverage of a marketplace, it's from everywhere from books to TV to even in the cinema increasingly. I mean, even recently we were told that a female-led film can't be box office. And increasingly now it is a history.

female-led historical film. Students will never be told again that, oh, don't write an essay on women's history, because then you probably won't get a good mark for it. So, you know, because then they'll mark you down. So stick to writing about pit. Just write about pit. Yeah, you know, you're good odd pitch. Just do the pit and the corn laws and you'll get, I mean, so. History, at least to me, is political. You know, who writes it, the society in which it was documented, who features mainly in it. And it seems like there are many people nowadays who get really agitated when historians reassess who and what was important in the past. So how do you address these voices who go around saying,

you can't rewrite history? That wasn't in the history books before. I think there is that. There is a protectiveness. People saying this is what history is. And there can be some pushback against women's historians, against historians of race, against historians of slavery. There obviously is this big project in Cambridge to re-evalue and question how much the university

benefited from slavery and there has been a lot of anger. that people saying well what's the point of this and bringing up sort of myths saying people were well they were freely sold so well that's not that's not anyone's fault so but I think we just have to keep fighting and in the end we have to keep fighting we have to keep saying no women belong in the narrative people of color belong in the narrative we can't keep excluding people of color from the narrative there's a brilliant book by miranda Kaufman black tutors reminding us how many people in the tutor period lived ordinary lives and that just hasn't been acknowledged it just isn't acknowledged. Even in the movies you see a crowd seen from the

due to the times, it's all white people, there's no people of colour. And we just have to keep fighting and saying no women belong in these scenes, in these lives, in these histories. People of colour belong in these scenes and these lives in these histories. Children, differently able people, all kinds of different people belong there. It is not just the history that we've been told it is. And I think that the women's price is really vital for that in fiction. It is rewriting some of the big stories.

in a feminist way putting the women back in. I think what I think is so great is really very little women's history when I was a child, whereas now I see children when I go to speak to school. So, but where are the women? What were women doing? And I just think that the next generation are going to expect to see women, people of colour, differently abled, all kinds of different groupings, working class history. They're not going to take the old, well, one lord talks to another,

and that's all the history is anymore. I think there are going to be a lot of women or men listening to us, podcast right now who really fancy drawing from intriguing historical records and intriguing historical women from their own novels. So what's the process of your research as a fiction author? How do you find compelling historical narratives that you want to adapt for fiction? Well, I have too. Obviously, I research nonfiction books and I research fiction books and it's two different, sometimes they're links, sometimes they're not. I research is the most wonderful thing and it's the most frustrating thing because you can spend weeks and find nothing of interest, absolutely nothing, or you find this document

you think it's going to be great, and it's pointless. So you just have to keep sifting through the documents, sifting through the archives, sifting, a lot of online, sifting through the online archives, court records, diaries, letters, parliamentary archives, parliamentary acts, until you find what you want. And some of the letters and diaries will constantly surprise you. You will think it's a modern how they speak. And did they really do this? I mean, this is incredible. So I think research is the greatest gift. And whenever I'm stuck in either nonfiction or in fiction, when I'm stuck in fiction and can't think of a story,

I just look at some of the archives and look at some of the sources. And the stories just spring out at me of all these amazing, rich lives. Have you ever had that moment when you came across a historical detail you had no idea about before that really just captivated you and I guess maybe even changed the course of your research? Well, my first book was on Emma Hamilton and it was a gem. was a discovery gem that drove me to the book. I was researching my PhD on seduction in the 18th century, and actually a lot of the seductive letters weren't very seductive at all.

They were actually totally dull, and the same thing over and over again, the same sentiments. And then I came across one by Emma that she'd written to Nelson, and it was amazing for the emotion, for the strength, for the forcefulness, for the determination, everything bounced off the page. And this letter blew my mind, and I had to find out about her. and how she got to that position.

I had to discover her rise to that position. But sometimes you have to accept that your subjects just aren't going to tell you what you want. Emma Hamilton, rather painfully for me, she met Marianne Antoinette before Mary Antoinette was executed. She was one of the last people to meet her before she was put under extreme house arrest and then executed. And this is such a vital meeting. But Emma Hamilton just says in her letter, I met Mary Antoinette and we had a conversation. that's it. That's all you get. And it was so painful. Then, even more frustratingly, Emma Hamilton goes back to Italy and goes on and on all the way home about the wonderful mountains

and the sublime this and the sublime that. I don't want to hear about the sublime mountains. I've heard about them from every other 18th century traveller in the same way. I want to hear about Mario Antoinette. But subjects don't always tell you what you want. And that's, I think, is a key part of a historian. accepting that you're not going to sometimes find out everything. You can't know everything and you must not make it up. You might feel, I think I know what they talked about. But that will be for a novel, not for a history book. The thing is, for me as a historical novelist,

listening to all of you, that it's almost about common sense. So I write about periods of history and I am telling untold women's stories. That's my purpose in the burning chambers, say, or, you know, labyrinth, whatever. But it was more realizing that the women were there too, but you would not know. So when you read the books that the only women, as I think you said right at the beginning, that appeared were queens, princesses, wives every now and again because it was a military history,

because it was a building history, it was an ownership history, it was a religious history, in rigidist history is my interest. But then you realise that all the men are away at war for 30 years. So who do we think was running Kakasson in 1562? The men weren't there. So everything that you realise you're told about history, which is very male, the minute you put common sense into it,

you think, well, that can't be right because otherwise no wood would ever have been chopped. No houses would ever have been built, no shops would ever have been opened. Couldn't you all just say a little bit about that sort of thing, about the idea that it's not that women weren't there, but maybe the business of history is deliberately partial, so has told certain stories over other stories. Because women, we have always been everywhere, frankly, because that's where babies come from. It turns out, you know, it's apart from anything else. So, you know, what do you all think about that, you know, in, you know?

I think it's still there in some ways. when I teach, we go through Marxist history, we go through the French, the Anals School, and every single time, every one of them, you don't see women. And then you have one part of the module where it says gender history. That's where women are. And I'm always annoyed by that, because when we start talking about Marxism, for example, we focus on those men every single bit of it. So I think we're still reproducing it. So if you're teaching gender history, we're expected to talk about women. So I think we should kind of ship things around and teach those big historical thoughts and historical methods by including women.

And it's very easy to do, as you said, you focus on lived experiences, testimonies, particular people. And it makes sense for most students to do it that way. But it's up to us to actually do that. Yeah. And there's a lot. I mean, I kind of take the long view because obviously the antiquity and beyond that, so back into the Bronze Age is my period of expertise. And we've got a lot of catching up to do. So the last time I see a kind of genuine parity between men and women in society is around 3,000000 years ago. And as you said, we're not there yet. So that is a long time for prejudice to build and for bad habits to be installed. And there's a, you know, it's really fascinating exactly as you say, okay, obviously. Obviously, women have been there. Obviously, we've been actually generally, mathematically, more than 50% of the population. And you do see women there in the kind of DNA of civilization.

So women are there, absolutely, they're represented. There's this brilliant statistic that of all the human figurines all around the world made between 45,000 BCE and 4,000 BCE, 97% of them are of the female form. So women were incredibly visual. for whatever reason that's happening, that was the version of humanity that humans were choosing to create. And commemorate. And that is absolutely across the globe. So that's really interesting. So that tells me archaeologically they're there. But then something happens. And we were talking about this actually. I was having a chat with some of the audience members before.

This is like massive broad brushstrokes. But it seems to be that we get greedy as a species. So the thing that makes us up, us is our ambition and our desire for what we don't have. That's what means why we're all sitting here doing what we do today. So we crave disruption as a species. But what that also means is that, as I said, we're a very greedy species, that we want what we haven't got. And what you see happening in the Bronze Age, you've got these beautiful, stable, highly functioning societies, making beautiful things, trading with one another, exchanging even philosophies and jokes on QNA-form tablets. But then we think, okay, so I'm sitting here in Mycini, but wouldn't it be great to have Tyrians too? And in order to do that, you need male muscle.

So you need a proper, an army that is big enough to go and invade another's territory. And that is the moment, I think, when there's just because, and it's not because we become a militaristic society, because absolutely we're fighting and killing one another before then, but it's the scale of male military influence that's needed. Acquisition. an acquisition that just shifts the balance in terms of what is valued in society. And it's from that moment that you see a single male smiting god in a huge number of cultures, becoming the premier god, whereas before, it's a rather brilliant thing. The first time Zeus ever appears in the archaeological records is these tiny sort of pipsqueak little guy like this,

you know, about two inches high. There's no sense that he's dominant in any way. But then that over a short period of time, over about 250 years, years that changes. So I, that's why we've all got a job of work to do because genuinely there wasn't a matriarchy, there wasn't a mother goddess, it wasn't all sort of, you know, we mustn't have roasted into spectacles about, not that would have been a good thing anyway, you know, but it, but definitely women had agency and then that changes. So they're there, as I said, kind of in the DNA of civilisation, but then in the stem cell of what civilization is, something shifts and that's

what we've all grown from from that moment. That's very apt, Bethany, because of course we've got three books on the shortlist that deal with those questions. We've got signs for the girls that talks about, you know, I read the, all of the stories of Achilles when I was a young girl. And of course, Briseis is just handed over to him, and she's beautiful. And I, oh, that sounds quite, she's beautiful. That's great. And then you read her real life. Pat Barker writes about what it must have been like for in saying, you know, they'll never say that we were living in a rape camp, which is what is happening.

And then same is happening in at Circe, who's always demonised as a witch. And also in Milkman, what it's like for women drawing the troubles in this intensely militaristic zone. So they have. But, yeah, no, it's so fascinating. Because, I mean, I think of one of my favorite women's history books, which I do think had a cataclysmic effect on both women's history and the publishing industry, which was Amanda Foreman's, Georgiana and the Duchess of Devonshire, in 1997. And before that, it really was really quite difficult to get a biography.

woman published. It was really only Antonia Fraser, wasn't it? She did marry Antoinette and seven. And it's very interesting because Georgiana was obviously such a crucial figure in 18th century political life. And Randolph-Forman really shows that very effectively, her political interactions, how she was vital to politics. But, you know, you raise some of the dismissive ways in which she was written about beforehand.

I think I'd seen just another 18th century broodmare. and an 18th century super tramp. This is how a woman with huge amounts of political agency was written about. Amanda Foreman, I don't believe she got a gigantic advance, but obviously then sold huge amounts of copies. And I really think that that has been such a long time coming. Even in 1997, a vital 18th century woman who crafted the politics at the time and it was interacting with the highest levels,

and her influence was crucial, could be dismissed in that way. There are two classical retellings on this year's shortlist. Why do you think this form continues to have the power that it does? I mean, it's great for me, so I'm what's called an ancient historian, so I'm a historian of the ancient world, so how fantastic to see that these myths and legends and stories are re-inspiring people in the 21st century. I think they're possibly and probably a couple of reasons why.

One is that these are by definition evergreen tales, so they were put down as myths. so they could reach people beyond borders and boundaries and across time. So they were chosen specifically to travel. Also, there's this incredible irony with the classical worlds. Women have always been 50% of the population, often slightly more than 50%. We have not occupied 50% of recorded history or influence. And the ancient world just didn't know what to do with women.

If you look at the kind of DNA of civilization, so back in the bronzes, and earlier women are there. They're really powerful and potent. It's not a matriarchy. It's not run by women, but women have influence. And that slowly gets winnowed away until you get to the point in classical Greece, for instance, where women are described as Calon-Caccon,

the beautiful evil thing, evil because they're beautiful, beautiful because they're evil. But they are there as characters. So they're very conflicted characters within the Greek myths. And I think that's one of the reasons that people are so drawn to them to try to unpick that and to restore their place back into the narrative. Can you talk a bit about the wider social importance of reframing these classic tales from women's perspectives? It's very important to do this because, you know, women have always been there.

They've always lived the experience of history, but their stories just haven't been told. So it's absolutely fascinating, actually, because of course it throws the male characters in the story into sharp, focus as well. It doesn't mean that women are taking all of the limelight, it means that we're just allowed to understand how as a species we're operating together. And it feels to me that it's a beautiful way both to begin

to have an interest in the past and to understand the past, and I think that fiction can do that. It's not history, but it can open the door to history. But also, of course, it helps us understand our lives in the 21st century because you've got this filter of time

to look at the big issues of the world through, so the issues of equality, parity, opportunity and fulfilment. So I think that they, you know, I kind of really believe that writing is a kind of moral agent. I think it's there to have impact on the world, so writing with both fiction and nonfiction. This podcast is made in partnership with Bailey's Irish cream. Bailey's is proud to shine in light on women and their achievements

by getting more books written by truly remarkable women into the hands of more people. Bailey's is the perfect adult treat, whether in coffee, over ice cream, or paired with your favourite shortlisted book. And now, back by popular demand, discover somewhere in a bottle with Bailey's strawberries and cream. Just kind of bringing it back to the sense of how women get recorded.

So listening to you all and the extraordinary things that you're sharing with us, Is there an issue about who has the access to writing, therefore? So the point of Georgiana and all of that, you know, so who gets to write the history? So whole cultures, nations, and many women are just written out because the men have got the pen. It's irrelevant. Do you think that's irrelevant, yes. Right?

Yes, if you look at history in the kind of traditional, perhaps European way, but history is also told and transmitted. So in that sense, women will have been instrumental through the education in some cultures, through the education of their children. And then even when boys later on get closer to their fathers, they've already had that kind of basis that have been given the family history or the community history that has been translated

or transmitted by the mother. So, yes, who gets the pen is something that is really important for me because it means that who gets the pen is a way to do history, which is usually Western. And who gets the pen is the men, the Western man. So it's two layers of kind of discrimination, if you would. Yeah, yeah, interesting. And there's often, what's really interesting is when that becomes recorded in a written history.

As we know, the story of the women who are being recorded is more often than not highly sexualized. So a woman who has power has to become a creature who is a creature who is a story. sexual object. And so when we hear about, you're asking about who's been written out of history. So there are two amazing women who you're like a super bright audience and I'm sure, I'm very open mind. So you've probably heard of these. But there's a Chinese empress called Wissetienne. I don't know if you've, okay, so Wissetian should be a household name. So she should be up there with Marx and Clinton and whoever, you know, however many men we want to enumerate because she was one of the most powerful woman in the world. She ruled China as an

empire. She was in power for 45 years. She really is the woman who salvaged Buddhism. So she was a Buddhist and it was her promotion of Buddhism actually interestingly as a kind of thought process that allows women to have equity as well as men that probably means it's why Buddhism survived. So she's absolutely incredible. But what was written about her was her enormous, voracious sexual appetite. And I have to say, like Catherine the great, all of them. He had a Cleopatra, you know, obviously... It's fine for Henry the Eighth to get to as many women as he can.

Exactly, but it's kind of sold as this issue. So, you know, the thing that people remember about was Etienne, if they've ever heard of her, is that we're told that she took so many aphrodisiacs that towards the end of her life, which obviously had some kind of form of testosterone in, that she grew three pairs of eyebrows because she had a lot of facial hair,

which actually, I suspect is possibly true and good for her if she was wanting to kind of, you know, shag the eunuchs in her course, But that is what history chose to remember about her. And the same with this other amazing empress called Theodora, Empress Theodora, from the 6th century in Constantinople, who started out life right at the bottom of the pile. So she was an erotic dancer. She was probably a prostitute as well.

But Procopius, who wrote her history, describes her as a brothel whore. And she ends up again being the Empress of the Byzantine Empire, so in charge of a million square miles, the most powerful woman in the... Eastern Mediterranean and Western world. But he writes about her and says that her greatest regret in life was that she only had three orifices with which she could satisfy men. And that was... But what's amazing about her, and again, maybe she...

You know, good for her, whatever kind of, you know, rocked her world is... But the amazing thing is that as soon as she has power, she enacts social justice, exactly what you were talking about before. So she sets up a safe house for prostitutes. She writes a paper on pimps about the fact that pimps are making huge amounts of money from prostitution. She makes infanticide illegal. She sets up another safe house for single mothers. And this is in the 6th century AD.

So these are women that we should all have been brought up on their stories. So I think you're absolutely right. You know, there are many ways to tell history. And there is, but there is no doubt, actually in the kind of Western tradition, but also in some Eastern traditions, that actually it is, the penholders physically are male clerics. And so what they're choosing to say is a very lascivious version and a denigrating version of those incredible women.

And it's fascinating, isn't it? Because for the many male rulers used their huge sexual appetite as a way of forming power. I mean, that's exactly what Napoleon does. And so many kings, I mean, obviously there was some disappointment. when Louie was married to marrying Antoinette, he didn't have a mistress because it's seen as a power channel through them. So it's fine for a man. And it always fascinates me how so many women in history,

even more recent history, are characterised by their looks. The Queen Anne, fabulous Queen Anne film, that Anne herself was actually rather a successful queen. She decided over to the active union. She dealt with factional politics. And yet history dams her as a failure because of two things, because she failed to have a living child, and that's seen as a failure.

Whereas there are plenty of male monarchs who didn't have an heir, but Charles is a second, but he's just the merry monarch, whereas she is, if a woman's body does not do what it is meant to do as in bearing children, then she is seen as a failure, certainly, and obviously that she became very great in terms of size, but not, I mean, not wildly any fatter than lots of other male monarchs, but yet it's her size and her failure to have children and it becomes so key to the characterisation of her as a failure.

And, you know, we have endless about how Fat Queen Victoria was when it really wasn't until the end of her reign. And who cares, you know, who cares, how fat she was or how fat she wasn't. But it really comes to matter. And that absolutely is a problem. And the women's reputations are so characterised by how their sexuality is perceived,

the obsession with reputation, how their looks are perceived. And that's the problem for women in history as well. Talk to you a bit more about oral history. How does your work? intersect with oral history? Well, I work on memory. So I do history and memory and politics. And when it comes to memory, it really is about what people remember from their past, reconstructions of the past, not necessarily accurate, but quite important for them. So there's an emotional side to it. That is relevant when you're trying to construct a narrative of a community or a nation. Decolonization is a term

that I see quite a lot nowadays. You know, people talk about decolonizing the syllabus, decolonizing their university. What does that word mean to you? What does it mean to you in practice? In practice, it means having a curriculum that is inclusive, not just Western canon, but there are fantastic, fantastic researchers from the global, what they call the global south, people who are born here or born abroad, who have different perspective, and therefore different backgrounds and a way to approach the historical text. And it's very important to include those if we want to have a broader perspective of history. Do you feel like universities and historians are coming around to the idea of that,

or do you think it's been a kind of, you're still encountering some resistance to that? Well, it feels like there's a lot of resistance, but actually the fact that we're having a dialogue right now, things are moving faster than over the last 20 years or so. So in the last maybe five years, things have been moving a lot. What do you think has changed in those last five years that have made the process speed up? Speed up is students. The students?

Yeah, student movement, student activism, engagement, and they are the ones who are pushing things forward. So, yeah. It sounds like a really exciting time to be a university student. I kind of wish I could go back and have a redo. I'm having great fun. So how do we stop this endless channel of women's history being lost? Are we doing that, or is it just more of the same?

Actually, I think that there is another layer. Some women, we know them. We've heard of them, but we don't really know them. And I want to talk about them because I don't want to finish to end this evening without mentioning the women who really, really had an influence on my life as a historically. All dead, of course, but it still doesn't matter. So probably studying history, I think. It's a lot about that.

So I wanted to talk about Huindinger, and I want to talk about. wanted to talk about very briefly about Anna Julia Cooper. Quinzing of Matamba and Dongo. She was born in the 17th century, and she was the daughter of a king. Her dad died. The brother came into power. He died very shortly. She was supposed to inherit the throne.

No, the male people from the court said that she couldn't do that because she was a woman. And what she did, instead of fighting directly, she was an incredible deal. diplomat. So she one by one won them over very quickly. Diplomacy, making alliances, manipulating whatever she needed to do, bringing outsiders to kind of counsel these people, bribing if needed. Why is she important? Because she fought against Portuguese invasion in what is known nowadays in Angola. And at the time, the Portuguese were conquering West coast of Africa and starting really, you know, this deporting. African captives. Of course, slavery existed before the arrival of Europeans, but it's chattel slavery

and across the Atlantic, and she fought against them. So what she would do is do this, and she found that the best way to do that perhaps have intel. So she created her own army mercenaries and intelligence services, launched them into the Portuguese and the Dutch, and then it wasn't enough. She needed an army, so she set up her own army, recruited people. She wants to be. She wants to on battle lost others. Eventually she capitulated. She had to because she wasn't strong enough. The Dutch and the Portuguese made in the alliance

and she got defeated. But just picture something. You have a 60-year woman on the battlefield fighting the Portuguese. I think that is badass, really? That is properly. Yeah, I love that. The last one, quickly,

is Anna Julia Cooper, and that's why I did my PhD at La Sorbonne just because of her. This is a woman who's born in 1858. Just that date is slavery was still in the US, the Emancipation Proclamation,

1865. So she was born from a slave and a father, white, and an enslaved mother, black. And her idea was that emancipation was through education. So what she did is find ways to educate herself, get enrolled into all sort of courses.

It started like manual sewing, and things like that, started getting closer to the male, having access to books. I'm going to go really quickly and explain what happened. She would arrive at Oberlin school, and you had ladies' classes and gentleman classes, and she refused to do the ladies' classes. She was so vocal and annoying. They put her into the gentlemen classes. The next thing you know, she has her BA.

Three years later, at the age of 29, she had her master's degree in mathematics. She didn't stop there. Activists, educating women, specifically black women in the most impoverished places in the state. She thought, okay, I need to expand my horizon. What if I went to Paris? Went to Paris. Age 56, she started a PhD. Ten years later, at the age of 66, she got her PhD from La Sorbonne, and the title was something to deal with how the French view, the French views on the slave trade and slavery. And I had to get into that institution. I just wanted to do like her. So yeah, three women who... I think, I mean, you've both already shared some names. And I think that's fantastic because it's not just remembering, it's speaking these names and making

them commonplace so that everybody knows them. So one of the points of the Women's Prize for fiction is precisely that, to build up a library of extraordinary books by women, but also extraordinary comments about other women. Kate, is there one unsung heroine that you'd like to do? You've obviously mentioned Georgiana and you have done great work with your... I am a huge fan of Christina DePizan, who was the first woman ever to earn a living by her pen to support... She was actually made a terribly good marriage,

but he died, and so she had to support her mother and her children who did through her pen. and she wrote this marvelous book, the book of the City of Ladies, in which she counters misogyny. She says, she just takes a misogyny and says, okay, so we're meant to be very stupid, very awful, absolutely dreadful, but how strange it is that we have

all these great examples of women from history. Some of them were mythical, and some of them were religious, and some of them were goddesses, and we have the Virgin Mary in there. But there are some, you know, think of Theodora's in there. Why is it that these women are so,

why is that we've suffered so much misogyny when there are these, So she gives us all these examples. It's this onslaught of examples. So I think it's one of the most incredible counters to misogyny, even in the early medieval period. And I think that is, you know, just as you've been showing, this is a key way of countering by saying,

look at these women and what they can do. And this is, tell us again that we're, that we're lesser, that we should be excluded, that we don't understand, that we are, that women are, you know, trivial-minded. Because there are, she just gives so many brilliant examples. And one of the things... Let's have to an update one day. Exactly.

The themes that has come out from the book bar all week, from all the women who have been kind enough to come on the panels, is data. No things. So when someone says, a woman's never done that, you go, well, actually, you'll find. And that has come out in every part, from every piece of history. So we're going to do a few questions before the panellists give their, you know, one book that they'd like to recommend. So if you've got a question, put your hand up, and don't. be shy. Hello. I think your view on that history has been viewed

by whoever has the pen is so interesting, amazing. I think in this day of social media and digital, I think social media in its own right is a pen of history. So do you think with social media women in history will be more recorded in a positive light or do you think

what effect do you think will social media have on history now? That's interesting. That's a really good question. What effect will social media have on history? The veracity of history. I think, well, I think, I mean, obviously social media is an incredibly effective tool and has certainly been for feminism. I mean, I think I don't know how if Me Too would have spread so effectively and with so much strength without social media and, you know, that it became an avalanche that no one could deny. So, and obviously there were lots of historians writing about women's history on there. And, you know, but obviously social media has a double-edged sword.

It can be very hard for women. It can be very hard place for women. because there are so many sort of ideal lives being put out there. But I think that there is a sort of double layer, isn't there? There's social media which is all incredible and gives you a huge platform in a voice. And yet there are still the platforms and the voices that are colonised, that are paid for, that are given power within our society

and given influence. So I think that the more, perhaps the traditional ones, whether or not it's lecturing parliament or having an effect on public policy, the historians who were picked out to advise, various politicians or, you know, the TV, which Bethany is breaking moles on every day. So I think it's definitely both because, but obviously, you know, we can, you know, we can say whatever we want on social media, but still a lot of the policy is up to government, and that's,

that's where we need to get our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, stiff fingers on. And it's a real, and it's a brilliant, brilliant question. And as you said, you know, there's a potential that the kind of weapon for change is in all of our pockets so that we can be there. I think it's actually relating to your question about, well, your anxiety about the name heroin and heroes. And it's really, it's so interesting because if you think of a heroine, quite often you think of somebody who either needs saving for some reason or who dies. There's a sort of martyr aspect. That is exactly what it is for me, yes, as a right, a historical fiction.

You know, which is extraordinary, whereas the hero, and really interestingly, I always think that etymology helps and the etymology of hero and the last. Latin word for man, veer are exactly the same. So they're totally the same route. And what it meant, the very kind of early proto-Indo-European word hero meant someone who saved society. And that was by definition a savior of society. Women made society. And men were there, again, just as a kind of muscle thing, to save it. So if we can invert that and if we can all become the heroes of the digital media.

So we are doing the saving rather than being saved, then that, that, that's. it becomes a very powerful tool. Another question. I guess there's more of an opinion and I just want to hear what you'd say to respond. You were saying how in history women is easy to make sort of idols out of them

and I think that's part of the problem. I think the fact is that people hold women, they either don't hold them in any regard whatsoever or they idolize them to the point that there's something that has to be kept sacred and safe and the idea of being pure comes into it. I think if you're looking really,

religion, for example, Hinduism is one of the, I guess you could say a transgressor of that. For example, we have huge amounts of goddesses who men are so willing to pray to, ask for favors, do all of this stuff. But when it comes to the state of women in India, arguably, they're incredibly suppressed. And it's the idea that when it's dealing with something that is mythical and has power to help you, it's fine. but when it comes to actually wanting to value the women who are in front of you and very much so real, it's, again, it's about sexualizing them and seeing them as inferior beings. So what do you think about that, the fact that religion can, it can raise them to regard, but it can also just completely break you down as well.

Well, it's a huge, yeah, that adoration is a huge problem, and people feel, and you're absolutely right, there's been really interesting psychological studies done on that, because in goddess-dominated cultures, you know, you'd think, you'd exactly we'd look back on them or even indeed for Catholic Europe where for the Virgin Mary was adored and if somebody was to look at it for externally they'd think this is an incredibly female loving culture but as you say obviously you give the adoration to something which dare I say doesn't exist and then you feel that you've you've done that and you put them on a pedestal and you can only fall from a pedestal so it's an it's an incredibly acute and opposite opinion I think

there's one, there's a little sort of chink of, sort of a salvational thought that comes from that. If you look at the deities of wisdom through the story of the world, they're almost always female. And I love men, but dare I say, there might be a reason for that. All society have gone, okay, who are the ones that are really, I'm now being sexed, I'm not sexist, so I really, really love. But they just, I just think it's of great interest that. So, you know, so I think we can maybe allow the goddesses of wisdom to remain immortal, but remind everybody that. Actually, it's the women who are alive who are sacred rather than those who are in a divine realm. That's very interesting.

You know, I just thought certainly that, yes, wisdom. Look at the representation of nations. Women are always representing countries and things like that. Yet again, they put up on a pedestal as in the symbol of the nation. I'm thinking about Marianne, a French symbol, and how disturbing. all this is starting to femininity and the perception of what a woman should be. She looks luscious, you know, she looks. There's something, the sexual element is also there.

And at the same time, she looks like a fighter who can't really fight, you know, with her, you know, clothes all over the place. So I think there's something there that is quite disturbing. And I'm thinking about it just right now, because you mentioned that. There's more to, yeah, digging, perhaps making the list. between nationhood and construction of nationhood with women's image and the notion of religion coming into it. Yeah, somebody has probably done a research but I just don't know. Well, I'm not at all surprised that the hour is whipping by or indeed has whipped by it.

And so I'm going to ask you just why you've chosen this book each of you. So Kate, why don't you start? What have you chosen? Okay, I'm going to be concise. I have chosen this book, No Surrender by Constance. Maude from 1911, published by Persephone books. And this, very briefly, this is one of the few suffragette novels that we have. She was a key part of the suffragette movement and wrote a novel about, she wrote lots of novels. But this is the one about being a suffragette.

A young mill girl meets an upper-class girl when she tours the factory, and they become suffragettes together. And there's an incredible scene of force feeding here. And Emily Wilding Davidson, who obviously, it's debated whether she threw herself under the or whether she was just campaigning, but on the track, she reviewed this book. And I chose it. It's a great plot, but I wouldn't say it's matchless prose, everyone. So, yes, this isn't Austin.

But I wanted to really to flag up how much the novel can be an agent for political change. And it can change minds and it can change hearts sometimes more effectively. I feel this book's been rather forgotten, but it did have a huge effect and was very widely read at the time. So obviously the suffragettes, you know, pushed forward so much by themselves. But this is really aiming at the upper class female reader who, the upper class female woman who was resistant to the suffragettes who felt that her life as a pampered upper class woman would change if equality was demanded and she had to go out to work. And it's aimed at them. And I think as such, it really underpins and reminds you of all those great novels that have been political documents and political agents for change. Particularly, you know, the novels about women that have persuaded us that women, that women, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that, that.

The novels about women in the 17th, 18th, in the particular, passages that women had a heart and should be listened to. So that's my book. Brilliant. Brilliant. Brilliant. So I've chosen Sappho in any edition. Not an unsung heroine, but a hero who, or a hero, who should be in all of our lives.

If I had my way, Sappho would be taught in every single school, because I think Sappho genuinely tells us what it is to love. So she is the first author ever in history who describes love as bittersweet. Although she's slightly more realistic and she said it's sweet and then bitter. And, you know, you need to learn that when you're 13 and I think Sappho is the way to do it. So kind of Sappho in all schools, please. Brilliant. Okay, I've chosen Powell because it's a story of race.

It's a story of migration. It's a story of love. It's a story of, it's a social commentary. And it's a story of a Chinese Jamaican. You don't hear much about it, but the Jamaican. society is multicultural and you have the people of Indian descent, you have people

of African descent and you have this, and this novel had made me cry. I laughed a lot and I was so, so enthralled with it that I traced the writer and put her down and I got her on the

phone. Because I wanted to know if there were something else after that and why did she do this in that page and all that. She was lovely. And please do read it because it really is about a country in the making in the eyes of somebody who's of Chinese descent in the Caribbean. Wow. Well, they were brilliant. I mean, that was so brilliant. I would say all three of you are women who are making history. You are making a difference. You are, as are you, Kate. Archaeologists. I can barely speak anymore. But, you know,

And I think that's really, really important. And the aim of the prize is precisely what you've listened to. We haven't really been able to do anything more than scratch the surface of how many amazing women we don't know about. But every time any of us learns about somebody, pass it on. Because that's the way that things change. You've been absolutely incredible. Do go and check out the podcast because it's the same principle. If you are all talking about the podcast and sharing it with other people,

then people who can't be in London, you can't travel, who are not part of this group tonight, will hear these stories as well. And that's very important to us as well. Thank you very much. But ladies and gentlemen, thank you to Kate Williams, to Beth O'Brien. Thank you very much.

I thought what we just heard was fascinating. And to be honest, when they started mentioning the names of various women I'd never heard of, I think it even sent me down a little potential Wikipedia spiral or I just have to find out more about these women. And you know, that's especially great considering

I wrote an entire book series called Forgotten Women, and there's still more women to discover. I just think it goes to show how for most of human history, women were just on the sidelines, not because they weren't doing stuff, but because their achievements were never properly recorded. And I think Alvettes is something amazing during the panel, which was who gets the pen to write our history?

And if nothing else, I think that the women on that panel proved that this time it's the women's turn. It's time to take over. I'm Zing Singh and you've been listening to the Women's Priests of Fiction podcast, produced by Fremantle live from Bailey's Book Bar. Click subscribe so you don't miss any of our episodes. And to help amplify the voices of women, our top priority, please rate and review this podcast. It's an easy way for us to get to the charts so more people can find us. And huge thanks, as always, for listening.