Dan Snow's History Hit - Warrior Queens & Revolutionaries

Episode Date: January 5, 2023

The first author in history, the inventor of the dishwasher and the lawyer who refused to be kicked out of the room the Oxford law school; when it comes to revolutions, says novelist Kate Mosse, you don't always have to lead from the front. There are thousands of women in history who've changed their circumstances and the world for others in smaller but no less impactful ways. She talks to Dan about her new book 'Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries' which tells the stories of some of those women. Produced by Beth Donaldson and mixed by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe to History Hit today!Download the History Hit app from the Google Play store.Download the History Hit app from the Apple Store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Antinous History. I've got one of the world's best-selling, the most famous,

the most brilliant novelist on the podcast right now. It's Kate Moss. She's won awards. She's been translated into 38 languages and published in more than 40 countries. She's the founder of the Global Women in History Campaign to honour, celebrate and promote women's achievements throughout history and from every corner of the world. She's very, very brilliant, as you'll hear. You need to buy her new book. It's Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries.

It's out now. You also need to check out her website because she's doing a tour, a tour of the UK, talking about these remarkable women. It's going to be brilliant because, as you'll hear, she's an extraordinary communicator. Lots of her novels are set in a historical context. She said that despite not being a professional historian, history is what makes her eyes light up. As such, she is welcome and among friends right here on this podcast our eyes light up in this case perhaps our ears are heating up with excitement at the history that's about to be poured all over them as ever that's a a dan metaphor that's got a bit out of control there a bit like french government debt in the late 18th century but anyway here is the wonderful Kate Moss. Enjoy.

T-minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the king. No black-white unity till there is first and black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off. And the shuttle has cleared the tower. Kate, thank you very much for coming on the pod.

It's a pleasure. I've been wanting to do this for ages. Oh, well, that's very kind. I've been wanting to have you on for ages. What's going on at the moment? What's going on with women and history at the moment? Why are we finding out about all these people that we've forgotten to remember? What is the moment about? I think it's partly because we are witnessing, for the first time in quite some time, a dialing back of women's place in the world. And the things that I think a lot of people took for granted or had forgotten had been fought over in the first place seem to be vanishing before people's eyes.

And what we see within history, I mean, Dan, you know this better than anyone, is that history is used to justify decisions made in the present. And so you will hear saying, well, it's traditional that women never did this or people never did that. And you need to go back to the history and go, well, actually, women were always there too. And so we see this in Afghanistan, say, where women and girls after a year still have had their rights to education, to work taken away from them. They're no longer equal citizens. But before the Taliban went back in in August last year, there were more female politicians in Afghanistan's parliament than anywhere else in the world. So things can go backwards as well as forwards. And only by knowing the complete history, insofar as that's

possible, of women's lives all the way through history can we say and challenge these things now if you like so it matters it's not just about a dictionary of names I think it matters to say the history you're telling us is not true. So this is the conversation that I've had in this pod with people like Mary Beard and I ask as a result of your studies, do you think that women were denied an education, denied agency, oppressed, and therefore have not been as prominent in history and in the kind of histories we choose to tell as the men? played hugely important roles, wielding often real power, hard power and enormous influence, but they've been deliberately excluded by historiography. Is it about the women themselves or is it about the way their story has been remembered? It's the brilliant question and it's the only question really to answer. Women have always been in history with men. Women and men have stood shoulder to shoulder in every period

of history. History is a pendulum. As we know, it goes backwards as well as forwards. And so you can look at the lives of Cathar women in 13th century France, and they had much more liberty than women had 200 years later in France after the consequences of the Huguenot diaspora and the re-Catholicism, if you like, of the country. So it's not that everything gets better little by little, but it is about who is seen of value. And more importantly, possibly than that, is who is recorded. So it's the phrase that I've come across a lot now about the silence in the archives, that if there is only a certain record kept, so if the lives of women are not seen as valuable by the men who are doing the recording, and therefore the evidence of

their lives and their achievements is not put in the archive, then it's not there to be found. So it isn't the women. It's not that the women haven't done extraordinary things all the way through history. It's that the nature of recording and writing history has very often been in not just male hands, but a very narrow band of particular types of men as well. Because women are not the only ones left out of history. There are many people who have been left out of history because they have not been seen as important. But one of the reasons about writing Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolution is precisely that. So that every time someone comes up to you at a party and says, well, there's never been any female classical composers, you go, well, I beg to differ if you turn to chapter 10.

So it is about all of us repeating those other names. And if you like, it's history completed. It's all the way through history from the very earliest days. And we know in the polytheistic traditions, women and men were much more equal in terms of what they were allowed to do in ancient Egypt. It was about owning land and your finances. And if you like, that's what we saw when we got suffrage in the United Kingdom, that it was about land owning and property. And so just always going back to the history and go, okay, women had a great deal of agency then, and then they lost it it so what happened? I'm really interested because I come from a family of remarkable women and my great-grandmother was a sort of matriarchal figure. You have got an extraordinary great-grandmother who you've

seeded throughout this book. Can you tell me about her before we get started on the other amazing women that you focus on? Yes it was something that I discovered in lockdown. I knew in somewhere in my family that there was a woman who had written, but it was very much presented as she dabbled a bit. But what I discovered was that Lily Watson, my great grandmother, who was born in 1849 and died in 1932, was a really successful and famous novelist in her day, to the degree that when her most famous novel, The Vicar of Lankthwaite, was published in 1893, Gladstone, the prime minister, wrote a letter to the Times saying, it is a great delight, you know, to have a new novel from Lily

Watson. And in front of the edition I've got, which was handed down to me, there is a letter from Gladstone that was printed in the reprint edition in 1897. And so I went in search of her and found nothing. And that's really what set me off on this train. One of the two inspirations for it was if a woman like that, who was very famous and well-known and in a very privileged position, living in Victorian and then Edwardian London, comfortably off all sorts of advantages, if she can completely disappear from the record,

then what about everybody else? That really brought it home to me. This isn't a long time in the past, and this is someone whose own words should have been speaking for herself. Hugely influential columnist, she wrote for the Girl's Own Paper, hundreds and hundreds of articles, and yet not a single one of her books is in print, and she doesn't appear in any dictionaries of Victorian literature just one Victorian circulating library reference so I turned detective essentially and discovered all sorts of things about my family that I didn't know and I've always been interested in family history and my family has always been interested in family history so

I was astonished to discover in a deed box a family tree. And I looked at it and I thought, this is really peculiar. And in the family tree, I suddenly realized that there were only men listed in this family tree. And next to some names written in a red pen was an H, and next to others was a green C. Green Sea. And that was the second bit of paper that was kind of attached to it. And on that, there were men and women. And at that moment, I discovered that all of my family, the men in my family were haemophiliac. And many of them had died really young. And because I was descended down through my dad, we weren't tested. But I spoke to my cousin and said, oh, I had to be tested. So it's this extraordinary thing about what history is and this sort of sense of curiosity about history, even your own history, that there are huge stories hidden in plain sight, but you don't know them. And this helped me find a framework for the book because there's nearly a thousand women

mentioned in the book, some in detail and some very briefly, but there needed to be something more than just a list of names. You know, the book of myths that the great American poet Adrian Rich talks about. So Lily, tracing Lily's story, was an incredible pleasure. And the thing that I also discovered is that her real name was Martha. And my daughter is Martha. And I had no idea. Get out of here.

There we are. That is cool. You know, we felt we'd just chosen this name out of the blue. I hadn't seen any of that side of the family history. I'd got all the Moss side of the history, but not the Watson side. There we have our own Martha. And there she was. It turned out her name was actually Martha. Martha Louise Watson, but known as Lily. So crazy. Crikey. Who are some of the women that you've chosen to highlight in this book? I love the first one. Take me all the way back to the beginning. Well, the first one, you know, what we're talking about, if women are denied the opportunity to write their own stories or to learn to read even, then obviously women's stories will be invisible. So I wanted to start

right at the beginning because I discovered that the first known named author was actually a woman, a woman called Ehejuana, who was in Mesopotamia, essentially, the city of Ur. And she was a high priestess. And we have few fragments of the poetry that she wrote to the gods and goddesses that she was responsible for within that culture. And the reason I'd heard of this particular part of the poetry that she wrote to the gods and goddesses that she was responsible for within that culture. And the reason I'd heard of this particular part of the culture and Sumer within Mesopotamia was that it's mentioned in an Agatha Christie novel. Because Agatha Christie, of course, her second husband was an archaeologist, Max Malowan, and she loved traveling with him. And she did a huge amount of excavation

and one of her novels is called They Came to Baghdad and other novels are actually dedicated to their friends in Syria and Jordan. And Louise Meitner, she's a character in that novel and is inspired by the great Catherine Woolley who was involved in the digs out there. And that's the first time I came across the idea that just somebody mentioning in a novel, oh no, the first named author was actually a woman.

So it just highlights, apart from anything else, the importance of the arts in this broader sense, because quite often the earliest records we have are of sculptures or fragments of stone. and then they are written about in another book and another book and surely but gently it filters down from the 21st century BCE to the 21st century CE. So I start the book with her because the pen is mightier and we need to keep remembering that women have to be able to write their own stories, otherwise all of these things get lost. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. We've got Kate Moss on the pod, more coming up. Did you know that the earliest condoms were made of animal guts and they were designed to be reused? Or that beans were once considered to be an aphrodisiac? Join me, betwixt the sheets,

the history of sex, scandal and society. A new podcast from History Hit, where I, Kate Lister, ask the questions about the stuff we didn't learn in history lessons or sex ed. We'll be bed hopping around different time periods from ancient civilizations to the Middle Ages to Renaissance and early modern right up to now. Listen and subscribe to Betwixt the Sheet now, wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone.

Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Are you interested in the women who did wield actual power, who some traditional history has remembered, people like Catherine the Great and Elizabeth Tudor, or are you interested

in different kinds of impact that women have made? I'm interested in both. It was a big decision. The book came out of a campaign I did during the third lockdown. I was launching my novel, The City of Tears, which is set between 1572 and 1594 against the backdrop of the French wars of religion. And I like going out and about and meeting readers and I couldn't do that. So I simply asked a few writer friends to name one woman from history they wanted to celebrate or thought should be better known. So covering both of those things. And various people joined in. So the writer Anthony Horowitz said Laskarina Bouboulina, who was the only female admiral in the Russian Navy and was a Greek freedom fighter. Lee Child suggested the women

of the SOE. Claire Balding suggested Lily Parr, the greatest British football player. Now more people know her because of what happened in the summer with the Lionesses, but she's the only female footballer to whom there is a statue. And that story is really extraordinary because women's football was the biggest sport in the country during the First World War. And in 1918, the Boxing Day match had 48,000 people watching it. And the FA resented the power of the women's game and they shut it down. So this is part of the pendulum of history that it's not that women didn't play football, they did. And it was resented and stopped. So I did that. And then I put out a call on social media, doing the same thing. And I think because everybody was trapped at home, thousands of people joined in from all over the world. So a young woman in China telling me about the Chinese poet Ding Ling, people in Saudi Arabia talking about some of the women that they really admired, particularly the Afghan poet Rabia Balkhi, who is the great 19th century poet of Afghanistan, whose image the Taliban has been religiously, and I mean it that way, removing from walls some of the ancient sites in Afghanistan,

not least of all in Balkh itself. And so what I got out of that was, of course, you need to put some of the big names in there, because this is about completing history, that we were all there at the same time, women and men doing extraordinary things together. And you sometimes need those people in because firstly, they're extraordinary. As you say, Catherine the Great, I've included her partly for her extraordinary work in libraries, in building some of the most extraordinary libraries that anybody had seen of the time. Although a lot of that was, of course, looted. That was, of course, looted. But then they set the context because the other very important part of the narrative, which I know I've heard other guests talking to you about before, is that there is a myth of the one extraordinary women. And underlying that is the idea that women sat around doing embroidery, but every now and again there was an Elizabeth I or a Joan of Arc or whoever. But the truth is that

sustained change is not about one person. It is about the second person and the third person and the 10th person, because that is the way that change becomes impossible to resist. So that was important to me to put the famous people in, but also say, you know, even if they were very famous, Mary Seacole, big example. People now know Mary Seacole in every poll, she's voted one of the most influential Black Britons ever. And she was very famous in her day. But like my great grandmother, she completely vanished. And she's only well known today because of the work of campaigners bringing her legacy back to the light. So there's all these different ways of doing it. And some people are mentioned in passing in just a quotation and

others get a bit more meat on their bones, if you like. Yeah, I was very struck, like Rachel Reeves talking about women in Westminster, like that really brings that back. It's the second, third, fourth to 10th, 20th, 50th woman. They are truly remarkable. And they're not remembered. They don't get the statue. You know, this book is a celebration. I want dads to give this to their daughters and mums to give this to their sons. And it's about, there is a structure, patriarchy, which doesn't benefit anybody. It doesn't benefit men and it doesn't benefit women. It benefits a tiny number of people. So this is not about good women and bad men. This is about all the people who were there. And one of the stories that I suppose I liked best was in the chapter on women and faith. I come from a faith family with many vicars and nuns and campaigners in that area of Christianity. hilarious story to me. The first women who were ordained back in 1994, my aunt Margaret Booker was in the second range in April in Chelmsford, but the first women ordained were in Bristol in March 1994. And they have recently put a new plaque up because the plaque that was put up in

the cathedral to commemorate this extraordinary moment had the names of the men who did the ordaining, but not the names of the women. And the Bishop of Bristol, who is a woman, said when she was explaining where the plaque had gone, said, and the new plaque will be slightly longer than the old plaque. And I was just like, oh my Lord. My favourite piece of information possibly, and this will make sense to a lot of women, I think, was that in 1890s, a woman around Christmas had clearly just had enough. And Josephine Cochrane went to her shed in the end of her garden, and she built a dishwasher.

It was patented in 1893, the very first dishwasher. And then she built her own engineering company, the Cochrane Garris Company. And it is basically the blueprint for all the dishwashers that we have in the world. Or the lovely German woman, Frau Melitta, who in the 19th century spilt some coffee over her son's homework. And it went into the blotting paper and she lifted up the paper and thought, that's interesting. And that was the first coffee filter. And that became the company. That's where Melitta filters come from. So there's a lot of that kind of detail in the book, as well as the women who gave their lives, who stood up against oppression, who marched for their land rights. You know, the Rosa Parks and the Pauli Murrays and the Claudette Colvins, the Freedom Riders,

because they're the quiet revolutionaries too. It's the idea that women have always been inventors too. They've always been physicists too. They've always been comet hunters too. And they've got to be in the book too, not just the people with the sword. Yeah, interesting though, the quiet revolution, because at the moment we're talking against a backdrop of women serving in the Ukrainian armed forces on the front line. And also, as we talk, it seems women-led uprising against the Iranian regime. And we know from previous revolution, the Russian revolution effectively began on International Women's Day with a march by women.

And the women seemed important at the beginning of the French revolution as well. Because you mentioned quiet revolutionaries, but women can be noisy revolutionaries as well. I mean, it's been very interesting seeing women challenge these gender stereotypes with taking direct action against the regime in Iran, for example. Yes, absolutely. And I would say particularly in Iran and Afghanistan at the moment, but also all of the brave women that have been marching in Turkey, who have been marching in Mexico, who have been marching in El Salvador, have been marching in America. Because there are different things going on at the moment. One is actually about the denial of women as citizens. But the other, in many other parts of the world, we are seeing a rollback in women's bodily autonomy that seemed unthinkable even 10 years ago. It just didn't seem possible.

So there is a great sense of direct action. There always have been. One of the things that is so interesting about a lot of the suffragette movement, and obviously there was a great deal of attention on that a few years ago for the anniversary. But one of the biggest parts of the challenge was direct action in the streets. You know, the women who were arrested on Black Friday, including Ethel Smythe, who, of course, famously was in Holloway conducting the March of the Women with Her Toothbrush Through the Bars when Sir Thomas Beecham came to spring her bail. So there's always been women physically fighting. But also, I think the reason that I use the phrase quiet revolutionaries is that some of the people who have incredibly transformed women and girls' lives have been those women who were determined to be doctors or determined to be lawyers.

Particularly, I would say in India, Cornelia Surabhai, she's just the most extraordinary person who changed the life of six, seven hundred women and orphans simply because she refused to not be allowed to work. So she's not leading a march, but she is sitting in rooms refusing to be ejected from them. She is insisting that she is allowed to take an exam. She is insisting that they let her in, that they open the door. So I think that be yourself in the way you campaign and try to change the world. Know your history, know in whose footsteps you walk and what you owe them. But don't feel that you have to be at the front of the march waving a flag or nothing else matters. You might be the person in the back room saying quietly to the person next to you and changing their mind and changing the person

next to theirs and so on and so on. And that I think is important because otherwise the idea is that the only people who affect change are the big belligerent people, if you like, in the world. And I think it is about everybody affecting change. What about your life and career? You're a writer, like your great-grandmother. What have you witnessed in your lifetime? It feels like there's not a day that goes by now without another first, many of them far too long in their coming. Is what strikes you now the challenges that women face or the opportunities? Actually, honestly, the opportunities. I feel a little bit melancholy by some of the things that were so dear to my generation of feminists. And in a way, I thought I could have hung my

boots up on some of those things, like a woman's body is her body rather than somebody else's, or women not being allowed to wear what they want to wear or do what they want to do. I didn't think we'd be losing ground in this way quite so quickly. But in a way, it's predictable because the world is in enormous conflict in many, many ways. But when you take these things out, you've got to say that the opportunities for more people are greater than ever before. Programs to do with mass immunization and all of these things have made massive amount of difference in the world. In terms of public health, we know about all the things that are disastrous, climate change and the way that that is affecting people's lives. But we also know that

it is for many people a healthier time to ever be alive than it has been before. Life expectancy in many parts of the world is much longer. The kind of blatant misogyny of the Taliban in Afghanistan in terms of girls cannot go to school beyond a certain age and women cannot work and cannot leave. That shocks people. But actually, that was a situation all over the world for most of human history. history. And so I think it's really important when I talk to my daughter and my son about these things, both of whom just take it for granted that women and men should have the same opportunities, girls and boys, that people should not be discriminated against. And I say, well, you know, I couldn't take that for granted growing up in the 1960s. There were many people who felt that women should not work if they were married and they should not work if they had children. And when we were talking about things like the Me Too movement and sexual harassment,

and of course, my children said to me, well, you won't have had to deal with anything like that. I said, hold my coat. And I would explain what it was like being a young woman working in the late 70s and the early 80s. And that it was just accepted that you would have to get yourself out of the reach of people with grasping hands, or it was just expected that those things would happen to you. And that there was a philosophy of, if you can't stand the heat, get out the kitchen. So if you couldn't cope with the world of work, and you were all fragile and silly about it, then you didn't deserve to be working at all. And that's why nobody wanted to employ women. So that dialogue was still there.

And my daughter actually said, but why didn't you report a particular incident I was telling her about? And I said, darling, who do you think you'd report it to? so i actually am despite the evidence the contrary in the last few years i am optimistic in the end i think that we go through tranches of history where things go backwards as well as forwards i feel a faith that things will improve again but i think we do have to remember the lessons of the past and that nothing that has happened has not been fought for by somebody. And as long as we remember that, we keep moving forward. That was such a rousing finish. Thank you for coming on. And your book is Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries. It's out now. Go and get it, everybody. Thank you.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.