Dan Snow's History Hit - On This Day She

Episode Date: March 8, 2021

To help celebrate International Women's Day I am joined on the podcast by Tania Hershman, Ailsa Holland and Jo Bell founders of On This Day She. Women have often been deliberately written out of history with their accomplishments been credited to men. On This Day She sets out to redress this imbalance and give voice to women, from all different backgrounds, that have been left out of history. It includes the good, the bad and everything in-between with both well-known women as well as those you may never have heard of. It's a fascinating and brilliant project that shines a light on the contribution women have made to history and in this episode, we talk all about their new On This Day book.Find their work @OnThisDayShe

Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, and Stephen Fry, the British comedian and public intellectual, are two people who probably agree on almost nothing. But they share a deep love for science fiction writer Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. My name is Arvind Ethan David, and I'm the author of Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth. In my new audiobook, you'll hear rare recordings from the man who inspired a generation of futurists, technologists, and scientists. You'll hear readings of his visionary work from the voices of those who knew and loved him best, people like Stephen Fry and David

Baddiel. Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks, or wherever audiobooks are sold. Hello everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. It is the 8th of March 2021, it is International Women's Day and on this podcast I have got a lot of international women. A few years ago three poets, writers, intellectuals, Tanya Hirschman, Elsa Holland and Jo Bell were hanging out together and they decided they would launch a digital project on social media to emphasise the role that women have played in history. This is important, folks, because women were deliberately left out of history. I got a little bit of heat on the twitter.com recently for tweeting about Women's History Month. I think it's a positive thing to

be tweeting about. It doesn't mean, everybody, that I am no longer going to be making programs and tweeting and making podcasts about men. One quick glance at our homepage on historyhit.tv, we'll see plenty of male history on there. The excellent documentary on the Japanese strike against Darwin. Mansa Musa, one of the richest people in the history of the world. And our show on the real story behind Robinson Crusoe. There's lots of male history on there, but we're just trying to give a little bit more focus on women's history this month. The reason for that is that women have been deliberately ignored by male historians through history. Two data analysts in 2013 decided to create a list. Just as Google rates websites,

they tried to create a list of significant historical figures and the results are pretty shocking. They found three women in the top 100. And those three women were, you guessed it, Elizabeth I, Victoria and Joan of Arc. Folks, there were people on that list who may not even have existed, like Arthur, and they still end up on a list above nearly every single woman who's ever existed in the history of planet Earth. And the reason we're not talking about women and don't build websites and make progress about women is because women have been deliberately excluded. Sometimes male historians in the 19th century just assumed that accomplishments, achievements, couldn't have been achieved by women and assigned those to relatives or husbands or other colleagues. In 1885, the first Oxford Dictionary of National was published, only 3%, 3% of the entries were women. One editor in the 1920s of the ONDB

famously wrote, if she had been a man, we would have considered including her. So that's deliberate exclusion of women from history. So when we talk about Women's History Month, we're just trying to shine a light. We're trying to put the full beam on the contributions of women to our collective story that have been overlooked or left out. And on this podcast, that's exactly what Tanya Ailsa and Joe are going to do today. We talked about their new project. And on this day book, you'll remember the best-selling book from history on this day in history, while these guys have produced one celebrating the achievements and the terrible mistakes of some of the most remarkable women in history. It's a great idea, long overdue, and surprise, surprise, it is turning out to be a very successful book. And it's been a great pleasure to talk to these guys. If you want to watch history of any description,

please go to historyhit.tv. Lots of new releases coming out. And remember to come on the live tour to see me talking to historians, men, women, non-binary, who knows, at great big cities around Britain. Historyhit.com slash tour. See you all there. In the meantime, here's Tanya Hirschman, Elsa Holland, and Jo Bell. Enjoy. Bushman Elsa Holland and Jo Bell. Enjoy. Well, thanks for coming on the podcast, guys. Thanks for having us. Hello, you're welcome. Thanks for having us. That's brilliant.

So you, like me, have got a bit of an eye get on social media. Everyone loves a bit of On This Day. I find it a very useful way to organise the past, organise information. I love it. It kind of makes me remember things when you do it by day. Yes, exactly that. This is Jo Bale speaking, by the way. And we found that because we began as a Twitter account and we wanted to get more historic women into people's consciousness,

that Twitter was a really good way to do that. It's a bite-sized chunk of information. We only tweet the on this day tweet. And we wanted also to use that format to get away from births and deaths, which are not necessarily the most interesting thing that one does in one's life, being born or dying. Whereas the achievements of these women, the things that they've discovered, the occupations they've had the great things that they've done were usually done on a particular day and surprisingly often we've been able to narrow it down to one day when they did something you know what joe it's funny he said because i

when i wrote that book you just you're like i just this is i've done a mad example of jumping ahead but like i'm desperate to talk about the papal bull that divided up the world between the Spanish and Portuguese, right? I mean, I don't know why I thought of that. Anyway, it's not even in the book. And then you're like, oh no, I can't find the exact bloody day it happened.

You know, it's so annoying. So there's no date on the top. Yeah, exactly. So they're eureka moments, aren't they? We've learned some pretty good research skills of how to use Google to really drill down and different ways of searching and how you, you know,

in searching within Google Books and that kind of thing, because I've become quite obsessed with trying to find the day. But when we can't, at least the month. And of course, the further you go back, it's sometimes just the year, isn't it? But I do think that the on this day thing,

it's so specific that I think it enables you to see those people in the past as like real people you know and actually have a kind of connection to them because you think well on this day I you know wrote a couple of emails hung out the laundry or whatever and on this day that person and there's a kind of weird a direct link into history to something that actually could just seem quite a bit vague and far away listen I was like yeah we're among friends here I completely agree I mean I know it's so funny tanya hearing you say that because yeah the amount like i need women's suffrage to be in this book what is the bloody day that and it's like you're

right you drill down and it's just a useful little lens it's just a way in isn't it and because there's a weird obsession with anniversary like people are obsessed anniversary and the biggest anniversary people are obsessed by for some reason is your birthday i mean i just you know i find birthdays very peculiar like people find it more interesting to talk about the battle of trafalgar on the 21st of october like there's no real it's madness but it's just a way in yeah so well done guys for seeing that what are some of your for elsa let's start with you because actually i say 21st october i noticed in the book 18th october it's it, it's a day that is seared in my head because it's an ex-girlfriend's birthday.

So Elsa, give me some of your favourite examples. Oh, blimey. Well, my birthday is the execution of Sophie Scholl, which is a sad one to have, but she's a bit of a heroine of mine. So I'm also proud to share my birthday with her death day because she was a resistor against the Nazi regime and she and her brother and their friends very bravely produced leaflets and distributed them at Munich University and actually throughout South Germany you know she used to take the train and pop these things through people's letterboxes

in Stuttgart or wherever first thing in the morning and she often did the traveling because she was the girl and less suspicious maybe so yeah she was an amazing person and I'm glad to have her on my birthday amazing did she make it into the book yes she's in the book okay good that by the way you guys are at the start of this book publicity thing let me tell you the only thing that people ask you about when you go to these big theaters and these bookshops and Waterstones everything they just go also my birthday what's on my birthday? It's an extraordinary fact. That's okay. We have an answer for that, which is buy the book. Exactly. People have been doing that on Twitter in the last 10 days since the book came out.

They've been tweeting about the book and saying, this is who's on my birthday. So we've come up with a hashtag on this day she twin which is quite good i think very good and we should say that we are the twitter account continues the book is not a substitute for the twitter account so if you're on twitter and you want to see the kind of thing that we do in a much more minimal way of course have a look at twitter on this day she and that's where people are sharing pictures of the book and and talking about about the discoveries they've made in the book as well. Elsa, let's not put the cart before the horse. Jo mentioned the Twitter account there.

Tell me how this project started and what was its aim? So it began because my family was given a calendar for Christmas in 2016, so a calendar for 2017, and it was on this day in history calendar with a tear-off sheet for each day and I popped it in the kitchen and it reminded me that it was a Tuesday and swimming day at school or whatever it was it was quite handy and every day I read the thing you know the battle of this and the whatever and I got to the end of February before a Mormon was mentioned and then I carried

on and so few women and every day I'd tear off the thing and I'd be like, it's another bloody bloke. It's another battle. And so it just made me really cross through the year, but I'm far too mean to throw it away. So then I got to about October and saw Joe and Tanya. We were having a day out together at a local farmer's market and we were sitting over a cup of tea and I said said I've just got to share with you how cross I am about this calendar it's been driving me mad all year so they said oh that's terrible that's terrible you know it's 20 whatever it was by then 17 why is this still a thing we've got to do something about it what should we do and as we're all on Twitter and kind of familiar with Twitter and that's kind of free and we could do it kind of in our spare time that was what we plumped on as a way to get started.

And we have form in this regard because I'm an archaeologist by profession originally and Ailsa was a literary historian and Tanya's a science journalist in her former life so we all have the skills for research, the skills for analysing texts and putting it in front of people. And we were all very conscious that, you know, you don't need a role model to look exactly like you. But when all the role models you're offered look exactly like somebody else, that begins to feel very biased. And so it was a question of the women that we knew of to start with why why do not more people know about these women why do not more people know about Queen Christina of Sweden or whatever but also the really obscure women the voices of history that one does not hear very

often so so the one that I particularly favor and we all agitated, of course, for some women to go into this book, the one that springs to my mind is Grazied Lysier, who was a medieval heretic. We don't hear the voices of women in history generally. We don't hear the voices of the illiterate or the peasantry in history, because history, of course, has mostly been written by the educated, which has meant men. And Grazied Lysier was a heretic who in 1320 spoke to the Inquisition in the south of France and testified about her beliefs and her life. And she talked to, under interrogation, she talked about having sex with the priest. And the Inquisitor said, so did you have sex with this priest?

And she said, yes, I did have sex with the priest many times, but only when my husband was out and with my husband's consent. And I didn't believe it could be a sin because we both enjoyed it. So she's a peasant woman of the early 14th century speaking about her sex life and her personal life and the arrangements of her household in a way that we do not hear. And most people in history have resembled Grazie Lisier far more than they resemble, you know, Catherine the Great or Nelson. So it was great to be able to include some of those voices. I wanted to say as well that I think we all secretly thought when we started the Twitter

account that we'd do it for like a year and then we'd, you know, we'd be done. We'd run out of women and maybe we'd start repeating the ones that we'd done at the beginning. And we've just been utterly overwhelmed, delighted by how many women we found and how many women we're still finding. And we have a calendar now, a joint calendar that we keep where we add women for the Twitter account. And we've got lists of women to add to the calendar because we haven't even got to them yet. And it's inspiring, but also incredibly frustrating of like, why hadn't we heard of all these women? And that's the response we get on Twitter again and again. Why haven't we heard of all these women? And that's the response we get on Twitter again and again. Why haven't I heard of her? We've had so many scholars coming on the

podcast in the last couple of years talking about rescuing these remarkable women from undeserved obscurity. I mean, Flora Murray and Louise Garrett Anderson, the two women who set up the best hospital in Britain during the First World War, Endell Street, was an extraordinary story I hadn't really been aware of. They're in the book. I'm glad to hear. But here's a big question. Now that you're looking into it, are you convinced, are there less women in the history books? Because women were in a state of subjugation, denied education, denied rights, property, to have careers, kept in a state almost of slavery in many societies through much of history? Or, and or, have there just been misogynist storytellers that haven't really bothered

talking about women and have given credit to, for example, Henry II, when his wife, Eleanor Aquitaine, was probably just as important? Like, what is your, Jo, you've got your hand up, what's your kind of feeling on that balance? Both is the answer. And I'm sure Ailsa and Tanya might want to say more on that too. But the feeling is it's not been a giant deliberate conspiracy that, oh, damn, here's a woman, we must suppress her history. It's that we naturally look in history or in storytelling for people like ourselves, people whose stories resonate. And if all stories are written by the same sort of person, then naturally history ends up reflecting

that kind of person. So it is a mix of both. Sometimes it is that, for instance, the early filmmaker Alice Guy Blaché, fantastically important early filmmaker, the second person to make a film with a narrative storyline and we'd never heard of her. She never appears in the history books. Now that is I think an act of almost deliberate suppression that she can't be important because she's a woman but very much often, it's that the terms in which women are written of, they are muses, they are lovers, they are associates of, they are not themselves scientists. You know, Emily de Châtelet was not just Voltaire's girlfriend. She was an amazingly important intellectual light in the whole of Europe. And it's on her work that Einstein's E equals MC squared theory is based.

So the answer, in short, is both deliberate suppression and accidental, habitual minimising. And I don't know if Ailsa or Tanya want to say more about that. Yeah. Hi, this is Ailsa. I think when we've looked through this stuff and I've read things about what these women have done and then they've not been included and et cetera, I think we have a general problem. And I think this applies to women as well. Sometimes we have a problem with seeing women as human beings. There's a wonderful quote, isn't there, by someone whose name, I'm sorry, whoever said it, I can't remember. Femin feminism is the radical notion that women are human beings and so I think we tend to sort of we put women into boxes much more than men and I think we still do it now so you know if we know

that in previous centuries a woman for example couldn't own property and that women were largely responsible for child care and etc we then assume oh, that was all she did. She was a mother. We assume that women maybe haven't battled against this. Whereas, you know, if we look around the women that we know, the women that I know, if they existed in the Middle Ages, they would be raging about all of this stuff. Why can't I, you know, why can't, you know, we assume that women put up with it. Well, why do we assume that? So there are bound to be these women. There are women now who go against what they're allowed to do and the limits in which assume that women put up with it well why do we assume that so there are bound to be these women there are women now who go against what they're allowed to do and the limits in which they're allowed to live their lives they fight against it all the time whether they're allowed to drive in

Saudi Arabia or or whatever it is they're fighting for their rights all the time so I've almost switched it around in my head like Tanya said initially there was this kind of are we going to find enough women and now I've got to this point where I think we are scratching the surface of how many women there were who were doing stuff nevertheless who found a way to be a full human being and use their brains whether as an activist or a scientist or a writer or an artist despite being also the person who was responsible for making sure the chicken got killed for dinner and the children, but because loads of us do it now. We do both. I do both. And Joe and Tanya are doing this history work as well as doing their writing work,

as well as they're doing their teaching work. You know, we all do all of these things. So why have we assumed that women in the past didn't do that? You're listening to Dan Snow's History on International Women's Day. We're talking about some of the most famous, the most infamous, the most remarkable, most important women in history. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores scramble over the dunes of ancient egypt and avoid the poisoner's cup in renaissance florence each week on echoes of history we uncover the epic stories that inspire assassin's creed we're stepping into feudal japan in our special series chasing shadows

where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, and Stephen Fry, the British comedian and public intellectual, are two people who probably agree on almost nothing. But they share a deep love for science fiction writer Douglas Adams, the genius behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. My name is Arvind Ethan David, and I'm the author of Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth. In my new audiobook, you'll hear rare recordings from the man who inspired a generation of futurists, technologists and scientists. You'll hear readings of his visionary work from the voices of those who knew and loved him best, people like Stephen Fry and David Baddiel.

Get Douglas Adams' The Ends of the Earth now at pushkin.fm slash audiobooks or wherever audiobooks are sold. I think there's actually a very deep structural thing in the way that we look at society, which naturally doesn't favour the inclusion of women. So we look for instance at job descriptions of whether a person is a scientist or is a mathematician or whatever and very often the jobs were only available to men and so women who have been described as

a maîtresse en titre for instance which they may well have been were actually functioning as lobbyists as politicians of the first degree people who were influencing the policy of a nation but happened to be the wife of the prime minister or whatever possibly the reason they were the wife of is that that man married a woman who he knew could help him and lobby with him and campaign with him and exercise influence in aristocratic circles for instance so in some cases it's our retrospective job descriptions that are the problem that women were doing the work, but in a sphere which we don't recognise as influential. Yeah, I think that's a huge issue. I look at it in my own

personal life. I mean, I think I wouldn't be able to do anything without my wife's advice and support and active, you know, active support, not just kind of telling me I'm doing okay at night. And I look at David Lloyd George, for example, his wife was essential in getting him elected to parliament and the work she didn't trouble is part of that is it's so difficult at a centuries removed let alone 10 centuries removed to get a sense of what those intimate and often domestic relationships are like but there's just no question when you start to interrogate sometimes it's a team effort but we historians have obviously it's been far more convenient for male historians but ah you know augustus what a legend and and not talk about his wife for example in or if there's or if there's a workshop in the middle ages you know of course and and the person who's in charge of the workshop is a guy

because legally a woman couldn't be in charge of those people unless she was a widow and she'd inherited it and blah blah and the laws are different in different cities and etc but so we assumed that everybody who worked there was a man. Well, why do we assume that? You know, and we know that women were scribes, we know that women did illuminations for manuscripts and whatever, because we know a woman, Christine de Pisa, who employed them. So yes, there's a lot of assumptions about who gets written down against who was actually there. It's an interesting thing that something that we found as well

when we started researching that very often one woman is mentioned as if she is the one, like Marie Curie, she's the female physicist. And it's as if there was only one and she was an anomaly. And so it's not just about the first woman to do something or the only woman to do something. We've got women in our book, we've got a woman who was the second woman to circumnavigate the globe in a car, because this is what we're realising, there's so many more. And these women were not anomalies. We've just never heard of the second or the third or the fourth woman to do something. And I wanted to mention as well, this seems like

a good point to mention, in terms of women being human beings, that it's been really important for us from the beginning of the Twitter project not just to include the awesome, badass, inspiring women because that's not our mission. And we think it's fantastic that there are all these books around now with awesome, badass, inspiring women, especially for young people. It's fantastic. But for us, our mission is history. Our mission is filling in the gaps of history.

And we believe that women deserve to be put back into history on an equal footing with men. And not all the men throughout history were awesome and inspiring. Newsflash. Yes, newsflash. And so it was very important to us when we were pitching the book proposal to the publishers that they be on board with us, including what we call the grim women. to the publishers that they be on board with us, including what we call the grim women. And every time we tweet about one of these grim women, we get invariably at least one or two comments of people saying, well, I'm not going to celebrate her. And we have to say again, we are not celebrating her. We're not saying cheer on the serial killer. We're saying she

deserves to be put back into history as well, because it does no one a service if women are held up to be perfect and flawless and inspiring and just muses, as Jo said. It does no one a service at all to pretend that we're not all flawed and human, basically. Yes, it turns out equality is not always about making yourself look great. It's about admitting that you're a whole person just as capable of genocide as the next man, it turns out.

And I think that expectation that what is called women's history should be uplifting belongs to this sort of meme philosophy that every woman we ever see must be a fine moral example and it ain't necessarily so well it goes back to that idea of women not being full human beings that in some way we have to exist as a support person of somebody else and we use these women of history as support people for us now you know oh well if i look at her wonderful example and she won a nobel prize that will somehow inspire me to sit down on this chair and get on with my work today. Well, that's not what she did it for.

You know, she's just a person who was doing her work because that was what she wanted to do in her life. She doesn't exist for you. And actually, by extension, a lot of the women who we feature have become extraordinary figures in history precisely because they were sick of obliging everyone else. And one of the ones that I wrote up was Queen Christina of Sweden, whose sex, in fact, is a matter of dispute. She might even be called intersex now because there was some confusion when she was born as to whether she was a woman at all.

But once it was decided that she was, she spent the rest of her life trying to escape the constraints that were imposed on her, not only because of being a woman, but because of the expectations of being a queen. And so eventually, at the age of about 23, she said, right, this being queen thing, not really for me. I'm leaving. And the people of Sweden naturally went, what? And she put a pair of trousers on, apparently fell in love with her maiden waiting, and ran off, abdicated, gave up the throne to, I think, her nephew,

converted to Catholicism and went to Rome, where she is one of only six women buried in the Basilica of St. Peter now. So everything that makes her distinctive was about defying expectations of what she should do as a ruler, what she should do as a person. And unsurprisingly, she was rather liberal in her politics because she wanted independence and freedom of thought. So very often the women that we are noting chose to step outside of what they were allowed to do by definition. That's why we remember them at all. Joe, you've mentioned Christina, you've mentioned Grazie de Lisier, who I'd never heard. I'm very glad that you've mentioned that.

Else, you've talked about Sophie Scholl. Who else have you got in the book that you're particularly proud of? Well, one of the ones I really loved finding, or well, I say one, there's five women, actually, who are known as the Famous Five. So there were some Canadian women who were suffragists, so they felt for the women to have the vote. And they managed to do that by 1918. But they still were not allowed to hold political positions. And this was because within Kaledian law, persons were allowed to hold political positions, but women were not considered to be persons.

And so they started a campaign to get this changed and it took over two years and they took it to the supreme court in canada and it was turned down and in the end the canadian government appealed to the judicial committee of the privy council in london because of course at that time canada wasn't independent from the uk and on the 18th of October 1929, the committee chair, Maurice Hankey, I don't know anything else about him, said that the exclusion of women from all public offices is a relic of days more barbarous than hours. And to those who ask whether the word person should include females, the obvious answer is, why should it not? And they've got a magnificent statue, the five of them on parliament hill in

ottawa you know a wonderful active statue the five of them standing around talking and discussing and i think what an amazing thing and they went on to be politicians magistrates authors they carried on being activists and reformers but they changed the whole political landscape of canada hanky by the way if you're ever interested, is an absolutely essential figure in the history of the First World War. He's the key advisor to Lloyd George in the War Cabinet. So I'm glad that he made that ruling. Yeah, he did a good thing.

He did a good thing. So, Tanya, it sounds like you've got a bit of a serial killer thing going on there. But who else do you admire? I'll move away from the serial killers. going on there. But who else do you admire? I'll move away from the serial killers. Sorry, I said, who else do you admire? That's weird. Who else are you pleased you included in the book? I don't want to get that reputation, really.

Well, we all come from different backgrounds. And my background is in science. And so I have an undergraduate degree in maths and physics. And I had this amazing revelation when we were preparing for an event a couple of weeks ago that we did for the British Library, is that I've spent 30 years saying, oh, I didn't become a physicist because I was really bad at it. And then I was remembering something, there's a concept in psychology called priming. And for example, if you have a group of girls and they're about to sit a maths exam, and you say to them, girls are really good at maths, they will do better on that exam than if you hadn and you say to them girls are really good at maths they will do

better on that exam than if you hadn't said that to them and if you say to them girls aren't very good at maths they will do worse on the exam and so it really got me thinking that maybe I wasn't naturally suited to maths and physics but also throughout my degree and all my A-levels no woman was ever mentioned none of my tutors were female and I thought what psychologically did that do to me as Jo mentioned at the beginning I didn't see anyone who looked like me who was a physicist or a mathematician maybe I gave up and I could have worked harder so for me the revelation for what we're doing in the book has been finding so many women scientists and one I would love to mention because it gives me goosebumps every time I read about her. We've got her in the book on the 24th of September, and her name is Rita Levy Montalcini. And I apologise to the Italians if I've got that bit wrong. And she was a Jewish neuroscientist

in Turing. In the 1930s, she was working in the lab for a professor who was a neuroscientist at the university when the Italian government passed anti-Semitic laws and she was no longer allowed to go into the lab. So she set up a lab in her bedroom at home and she moved to the US in 1946. In September 1946 she got an invitation to go to America and then in 1986 she jointly won the Nobel Prize for research that had begun in that lab in her bedroom. And it was for the discovery of nerve growth factor, which is a protein that helps stimulate nerve growth. And it plays a vital role in so much current research from like Alzheimer's to Parkinson's disease and muscular dystrophy. And I just think that gives me goosebumps every time I read that

out. And I think everything that she had to overcome. And when she turned 100, she was the oldest living Nobel laureate. So remember, Rita Levy Montalcini. We certainly will remember her. Every time I think about this, or every time I read astonishing new paragraph by Hilary Mantel, and this is not just true of women, it's true of the billions of humans that we fail to help reach their potential. But just the reservoir of talent in the past, how many Mantels and Montalcinis were just denied access to writing, to learning, to sharing, to talk. I mean, it's just astonishing, isn't it? And how many of their names will we never know? How many of them that were doing things and they will never be able to find them yeah well thanks to you guys for unearthing a few more go on Elsa um yeah I wanted to bring in at this point Nina Simone who although is a

very well-known name to a lot of people as a jazz singer and pianist is a wonderful example of somebody who we might have lost because she wanted to be a classical pianist. So she had a year at Juilliard, which is still an incredibly difficult school to get into in New York, but then she applied to study somewhere else and her application was rejected and she believed very firmly that that was because of racism. And so she went into jazz music as a way of making a living, but not the way that she'd wanted to, and actually changed her name to Nina Simone. So her parents wouldn't know that she was doing it because they were very religious and they would have been ashamed and she didn't want to disappoint them. So she made this wonderful career.

So now we know her as this jazz musician. And of course, if you listen to her stuff, I mean, you can tell that she has magnificent training because her playing is just so astonishing. What fewer people know about her is that she was also a civil rights activist, because, again, you know, she was a whole person. She you know, she wasn't just a musician. And she had she had a great friend, Lorraine Hansberry, who was the first black person to have a play produced on Broadway, a play called Raisin in the Sun, which is brilliant for anyone who likes reading plays, but who died very young and had an unfinished play, To Be Young, Gifted and Black, which Nina Simone wrote a song with that title and it became the anthem of the NAACP. And she also wrote a song called Mississippi Goddamn about the murder of Medgar Evers.

She talked about this stuff during her concerts, you know, even in front of all white audiences. So, you know, she was this amazing whole person who, yeah, we could have lost. Well, you guys are whole people because this isn't even your day job. You've all got very impressive careers doing other things. So Tanya Hirschman, Ailsa Holland and Jo Bell, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Tell everyone what the book is called. On This Day She. On This Day She. Brilliant.

Thank you very much, guys. That's fantastic. Sorry we couldn't stop talking. We can never stop talking. That's literally the history on my shoulder. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Elon Musk, the richest man on the planet, and Stephen Fry, the British comedian and public intellectual, are two people who probably agree on almost nothing.

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