Dan Snow's History Hit - Rebel Women

Episode Date: November 25, 2020

Sarah Lonsdale joined me on the podcast to tell the stories of radical women who challenged the status quo in the interwar years.Subscribe to History Hit and you'll get access to hundreds of history documentaries, as well as every single episode of this podcast from the beginning (400 extra episodes). We're running live podcasts on Zoom, we've got weekly quizzes where you can win prizes, and exclusive subscriber only articles. It's the ultimate history package. Just go to historyhit.tv to subscribe. Use code 'pod1' at checkout for your first month free and the following month for just £/€/$1.

Hi everybody and welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Got an exciting podcast for you today. We've got the brilliant Sarah Lonsdale. She's a great writer of history and she today is talking about the remarkable women, the rebel women of the 1920s and 30s. Women like Una Marson, the first black woman to be a BBC radio producer. Leah Manning, who rescued child refugees from civil war-torn Spain. Alison Settle, editor of Vogue, who, when the Second World War broke out, had to hitchhike to the front because Montgomery refused to facilitate female journalists. This is a hugely important time in the history of women's rights, in all of our history. And Sarah Lonsdale is exactly the right person to take us through it.

So enjoy this. You can go to historyhit.tv. You can sign up for the world's best history channel. If you want to watch great shows, please head over there and do that. In the meantime, there is a controversy brewing. And one of those, you know, when the Twitter has lit up, there is a debate going on whether the History Hit shop knitted knight hat is in fact and i will quote this because i'm only going to screw it up is in fact a crocheted knight's helmet this is obviously hugely important to get sorted out we quite like to call it knitted knight's hat because then we get to use the amusing term history knit. If in fact it turns out to be crocheted that provides us with some really really big really big marketing obstacles here team. The knitted Knights hat is our best-selling object at the moment and as I say a lively debate has

broken out. If you wish to go and take part please let us know what you think it is. Go to history.com slash debate. Yeah that's thing. That's a thing that's happened. Anyway, in the meantime, everybody, enjoy Rebel Women with Sarah Lonsdale. Sarah, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. The interwar period was so extraordinary, wasn't it? Let's talk about some of these rebels. But why do you think these rebels came into existence as a group? Do you think they were always there and they've always been overlooked? Or why do we remember these ones from the 1920s particularly? What was the opportunity they were given? There were several reasons, I think,

why this was a watershed moment for women. They had the 1918 Equal Suffrage Act, which meant that women over 30 at least had the vote on equal terms with men. So that provided a huge boost in terms of viewing themselves as citizens on an equal footing with men. They also, of course, did very well during the war. Lots of women worked in the munitions factories, making armaments for the soldiers. Women went off to be nurses, both at home and abroad, often suffering alongside men when hospitals were attacked and things like that. There was also quite a bit of legislation, particularly in the early 1920s, which allowed women to keep jobs on equal footing with men, allowed them to take jobs in the civil service, in medicine, in areas that had previously been banned to them.

And these three areas, the vote, their war work and legislation, all combine to create this kind of big energy associated with women's involvement in parts of public life that have hitherto been banned to them. This sense of injustice had always been there. So, for example, in middle class families where boys were sent to university, when girls had to stay at home until they were married, was a very vivid illustration of the girls' kind of lack of equality with their own brothers. I mean, Virginia Woolf wrote about this herself, with their own brothers. I mean, Virginia Woolf wrote about this herself, where middle class girls saw that all their parents' income went to educating their brothers, whereas they were

neglected. So it was a source of huge resentment. But also, I think, again, the war was a huge social melting pot in this sense. So working class girls who were in domestic service before the war, very often a very lonely job. If you're in a sort of one family home, you are often the only domestic worker. They were down in the scullery on your own, day and night, no one to talk to. And then suddenly you were released either onto working on the land or into these munitions factories where you had a sense of purpose, you had the camaraderie, you had good pay. And then to be asked, as many, many were, to go back into that lonely life of domestic service was too much for these women to bear. And they often refused and therefore they didn't get

their unemployment money if they refused to go back into this lonely life of the domestic service. So this sense of injustice was always there. I think it was just that the combination of the liberating and the social explosion of the war. And don't forget, of course, that the first Labour government was voted in, in 1924. And so that really shows us that there was a real social revolution going on in the country, not just amongst women, but about everybody who wanted a better life for themselves. And they were just given this agency by the experience of the war, by being given, part of them at least, being given the vote that provided this huge impetus for them to go out and break the rules, do what they wanted.

What were the areas that you've identified that these very determined women decided to try and break into in between the wars in the 1920s? So pretty much all areas really of professional life were widening for women's participation. Obviously women could become MPs for the first time and one of my subjects was an MP in one of the early Labour governments but also some of my women they're engineers, they're foreign correspondents at a time when women weren't expected to be interested in foreign affairs. And in order to participate, they had to really break the rules. They went off abroad on their own, often exposing themselves to much more danger than, say, male correspondents of the diplomatic

journalistic core did. I've got women who were humanitarian activists who went off again, exposing themselves to quite a severe degree of risk in order to help refugees, in order to feed the starving children in Russia in the 1920s. So these were all areas, particularly of professional life. So most of the women in the book, I have to say, are educated middle class. That's really because they're the ones who left archives. So in order to look into these undiscovered lives, one needs a breadcrumb trail, as it were, of evidence of what it was that they did. So I needed to look at letters, I needed to look at diaries, I needed to look at menu cards, I needed to look at all sorts of physical evidence of what they did. And

of course, it was middle class women who could write and who had families that could look after their archives after they died, and had photographs of themselves that made it possible for me to follow the lives of these women about very little is known so I'm peeling below the surface so we know about women like Virginia Wolfe, Vita Sackville-West, Nancy Astor the sort of the elite women who've already been written about and who we know an awful lot about how they pursued their dreams, how they lived their lives, whether it was being married to rich and powerful men, whether it was being born into a very privileged family that opened more doors than others. This is about women who didn't have that kind of instant access to public life.

This is about women who had to work that much harder, strive that much harder. Tell me about a few of the ones that you came across. Wow, there's so many. I'll start off by telling you about Claudia Parsons. She was a very unusual young woman. She was an engineer. And in 1919, she persuaded her mother to let her go and study engineering at Loughborough College, as it was then. She was one of only two women taken on the course. So she was always interested in how things worked.

She was taking bicycles and radios apart from a very young age, although she was markedly left-handed and a bit clumsy, which is, I think, why I empathise with her so much, because I'm both of those things. She was very good at making things and putting things together. And she was fascinated taking bits and bobs apart and putting them back. And she then went and studied at Loughborough College. Three-year course, she came out with a diploma in engineering with a specialism in automobile engineering and quite naturally she thought that she was made up to get a job in an engineering workshop in a factory as a factory supervisor or inspector but of course she didn't she wasn't given any job at all because she was a woman and after a couple of very lonely years as a lady's companion,

which made her very miserable, she set up her own business as a chauffeur. So at the time, lots of wealthy widows who had money and wanted to travel were starting to go on adventures with chauffeurs. But when they had a male chauffeur, they attracted all sorts of scandal and opprobrium. So a woman chauffeur who could chauffeur around these wealthy elderly women wouldn't be so scandalous at all, or even wealthy younger women. And so Claudia Parsons made a very good living taking these wealthy American heiresses all around Europe. She took one young woman, Dolly Weidenfeld, she was called, an heiress. They started in Paris. They drove across Eastern Europe, down through the Balkans, back into Greece. There were times she wrote in her

biography about being chased by wolves through the snow, their windscreen wipers broke, they had punctures that she had to get under the car and fix. Wonderfully adventurous for a woman brought up to stay at home all day long. And one day she drove a couple of women across the States from New York to Vancouver and part of her payment was to sell the car. So she sold the car and with the money took a boat to Japan, took a train through Japan and another boat over to Southeast Asia, where she thought, well, I'm halfway around, I'm going to drive home. So from Calcutta, she picked up a 1925 Studebaker motor car and drove all the way home. And she had an extraordinary experience that women of those days really never had before. And she wrote a very beautiful memoir called Vagabondage

about it that was published in 1941. Her memoir, Vagabondage, is a really extraordinary narrative of a traveller. So, you know, you have these Edwardian and Victorian adventurers who conquer virgin territory, who vanquish unconquered peaks, and it's a very sort of militaristic, masculine approach to travel. Whereas Claudia Parsons' memoir is very sensitive to the fact that it is she who's the one who is out of place, that the creatures that she passes, the strange plants and the landscape she's going through, they're the ones that are natural and she is the one who is trespassing. And it's a very refreshing, different view of how travelling should be done.

of how travelling should be done. You're listening from Dan Snow's History Hit. More coming from Sarah Lonsdale 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. tell me about Leah Manning she's always been someone I've been fascinated in Leah Manning was a fantastic teacher she was a teacher first and foremost she qualified at Homerton Teacher Training College in Cambridge just before the First World War. And she got married just before the First World War as well, and should have actually retired from teaching and was going to retire from teaching, but she was needed in the war as lots of the male teachers went off to fight. So she escaped the marriage bar, as it was called then. She was a very committed,

radical socialist teacher. She taught the poorest children in Cambridge, children who, before they even went to school, had to do milk rounds and bakery delivery rounds. They arrived already exhausted, barefoot, malnourished, and then often had to go off and do a second job or help out with the family after they finished school. or help out with the family after they finished school. And this outraged Leah Manning, had a very strong sense of social justice imbued in her from her grandfather, who was a very strong sort of social liberal. And she almost lost her job again, actually. A child in her class actually died of malnutrition at a time when it was down to the local authorities' discretion as to whether they provided milk for children at school

and the Cambridge Education Authority didn't and this child died and Leah Manning kicked up a real fuss, invited the newspapers in and told them about this scandal and she was nearly fired when a sort of network of women's groups in the town that she was a member of, she thought that women's groups were a very good way that women could combine their strengths and their agency and help them break through the sort of obstacles to them participating. So lots of women's groups, women's institutes, the National Council of Women, they all came to her defence and she kept her job.

She lost her baby at the end of the First World War, her one and only child. She went into early labour and the baby didn't survive. But she dedicated her life to children after that. She made her way up the ranks of the National Union of Teachers. And then she became an MP briefly in 1931 on the NUT's union ticket. But she was only MP for a few months because then it was a disastrous 1931 election, disastrous for Labour, and she lost her parliamentary seat. But she didn't lose the connections that she made. And she kept on campaigning for children and children's rights. And so it was quite natural, really, that in the Spanish Civil War that broke out in 1936, that she should have

a special concern for the children caught up in the struggle. And it became very clear that lots of children were being made refugees. And there was a huge pressure on other European countries to take child refugees. France took thousands. And Leah Manning campaigned that Britain should take some. However, Baldwin's government wasn't so keen. He was worried about the burden on the state that these children would represent. And also, he was very worried that taking the child refugees who are children of Republican families, that it would look like Britain was taking sides. But he was prevaricating and Franco's armies were drawing closer along that northern Basque coast. Leah Manning went to Bilbao to see whether she could help try and organise an evacuation. And still Baldwin resisted,

even though she put the preparations together. She got doctors and nurses to come out to accompany the children. And it was only really by sleight of hand that she managed to persuade Baldwin to relent, when by using a little bit of subterfuge she got hold of the consul's telegram machine and with the second consul who was Spanish managed to get a telegram over to England to say that basically it was too late the yacht was leaving and they finally got the permission they needed and just in the nick of time so Guernicaica, the town just along the coast, had been bombed dreadfully by the German Condor League a few days before they left, and the bombs were coming closer to Bilbao. But in May 1937, she managed to get 4,000 Spanish children on board a yacht,

set sail for Southampton, And they arrived a couple of days later in Southampton and then were distributed amongst families who'd said that they would take these children. Literally days later, Bilbao was bombed and many of these children's parents were killed. But the children obviously were safe and she saved literally thousands of lives that way. She is not really remembered in this country, but she is in Bilbao and there's a beautiful leafy square, the Plata de Mrs. Lea Manning, in the school's quarter of Bilbao that commemorates her work. Fascinating that we hear a lot more about Sir Nicholas Winton with his extraordinary work with the young children Kindertport, rescued from Central and Eastern

Europe. But so few people have heard of her. And what she did was exactly equivalent. Remarkable. Yes. I mean, so what Nicholas Winton did was extraordinary and saved many, many lives. But also what I discovered was that there were many women, Quaker women particularly, working in Germany, working in Czechoslovakia, who also accompanied children by train out of Prague, out of Munich and to the Dutch coast, completely on their own. Many of them very young, Tessa Roundtree of the Roundtree Quaker sweets family. Her diary is now in the Imperial War Museum and it tells about this extraordinary journey she made on her own as a young girl across Europe with this trainload of Jewish children coming out of Czechoslovakia. But like many other women,

they've all gone under the radar. In your book, I was fascinated by the story of the radio producer, the BBC radio producer I'd never heard of. Yes. So Una Marson was quite an extraordinary woman and suffered from both gender prejudice, sexism and also racism. But nevertheless, she became the first black woman producer at the BBC. nevertheless, she became the first black woman producer at the BBC. So she was born in Jamaica, and she went to school, English teachers taught her, she learned and fell in love with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton, and she was completely inspired by the English poetry that she learned. Only later did she realise that at school, she had learned nothing about her own country's literature and her own country's history which was something that she hadn't realised at the time but there was this kind of vast gaping vacuum about the island that she was born and grew up in

anyway when she became a fairly well-known playwright and poet in her own right in Kingston, she decided it was time to seek her fortune and go to the mother country and go and get the fame and influence that was waiting for her in London. So she took a boat and sailed across the Atlantic and arrived in England in 1932, expecting sort of intellectuals to clam around her and doors to be opened. When in fact, when she arrived, they were slammed in her face. Landladies refused to give her board and lodging. Secretarial employers refused to give her a job purely because she was black. And she was thrown on to finding help from the small, growing diaspora of West Indians who were coming at that time to live in London. And she joined

the house owned by a Jamaican doctor called Dr. Harold Moody, who had arrived in England about 20 years before Una, had trained at King's College Hospital to be a doctor, had qualified but then couldn't find any work at all because he was black. He set up in private practice in Peckham and formed an organisation called the League of Coloured People and set up a magazine called The Keys, the black and white keys of the piano being the symbol there in order to try and foster more understanding between black people and white people in the UK and across the world. Una Marson became the editor of the magazine and turned it into a campaigning organ where she campaigned against the colour bar and she also worked very hard to get women's names into their magazine, to include women in the growing

black public sphere in interwar London. She lost her job there. There was sort of lots of discussion about whether a woman should be the editor of such an important magazine. And it's really the story of a lot of these women's lives, the jeopardy that they put themselves in by straying into territory that they shouldn't be in. But anyway, she also got a job at the BBC as the first black woman producer. She first of all started actually out in television and then joined BBC Radio and produced a programme called Caribbean Voices, which highlighted poetry and writing coming out of the West Indies. And then when war broke out, she produced a programme called Calling West Indies for the West Indian troops

fighting in the British Army. But again, she came up against the forces of conservatism, of obstruction amongst the white West Indian community that was very powerful and had very good links with the colonial office. And she was forced out of her job from the BBC in 1946 and left Britain to return to Jamaica. And that's just a really strong example of how this intersection here of prejudices of race and of gender combined to create this almost insuperable obstacle that Una Marson, through sheer force of willpower, managed to overcome. It's such a remarkable life. Are there other lives in your wonderful book? What's the book called? Tell us. It's called Rebel Women Between the Wars, Fearless Writers and Adventurers.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing their stories with us. It's just wonderful having historians like you putting these women back into our canon. Thank you very much and good luck with it. Thank you so much. I hope you enjoyed the podcast. Just before you go, a bit of a favour to ask. I totally understand if you don't want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash money. Makes sense. But if you could just do me a favour, it's for free.

Go to iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. If you give it a five-star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, purge yourself, give it a glowing review, I'd really appreciate that. It's tough weather, the law of the jungle out there. And I need all the fire support I can get. So that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome. But if you could do it, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.