The Wellness Scoop - A Celebration of Imperfect Women

Episode Date: August 11, 2020

We speak to Helen Lewis, author of Difficult Women, about feminist hero’s, the importance of embracing our imperfections and flaws, why we airbrush certain parts of stories, why we tear each other down and why women can’t always support women. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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can take to our mental health it's been some of the best feedback that we've ever had and it's just been amazing to see and also so excited i mentioned it on the intro last week but that new exercise content for our app is live now went live yesterday um So that's over 50 new videos with nine brilliant new instructors covering Pilates, strength, conditioning, cardio, core, and as well as more yoga, which we already had on the app alongside the guided meditation and over 500 recipes. And it's all just 99p a month. If you haven't checked it out yet, it's on both iTunes and Android. So I hope you love that. And again, thank you so much for that feedback on last week. It really means the world. And if you haven't listened yet, then I hope you'll enjoy that episode as well as this one today. I was just getting ready for today's podcast and Sky,

my little one, got on my computer and started typing away. And so I've just been trying to get my notes back on track. But if I stumble, that is why, because I've got typings in between what I thought were coherent thoughts for today's episode. And today's episode is about the flawed imperfection of human beings, particularly when it comes to women. And I know we have a very, very female heavy audience. So I'm hoping this will be particularly interesting to lots of you. And that importance of seeing somebody as a whole, including flaws, you know, all our faults, which we all have as human beings, and whether we're creating impossible standards for one another in expecting feel good heroines. So I read Helen Lewis's book, Difficult Women, a few months ago, just before the whole coronavirus lockdown happened. And the book looks at the victories secured by 19th and 20th century feminists, among them things like the right to divorce, to vote, to study, to work, to enjoy consensual sex, to compete in team sport, escape violent partners, and so on.

But more importantly, Helen points out how often we ignore very important parts of the story. And they're the parts that show these pioneering women as deeply human, but deeply flawed and sometimes actually slightly unpalatable figures. And for me, that raised some really interesting questions, which is why I wanted to invite Helen on the podcast. The first for me was the idea that of trying to reduce billions of people with different experiences, religions, ethnicities, races, to kind of one standard, one way of being, one description, which seems like a near impossible task. And perhaps that's sometimes why we're failing. The second was the way in which women communicate with each other, the idea of trashing. And Helen was very honest in her personal experience of that, which I found very interesting. And the third was the expectation that we have on women to be nice, to be selfless,

to be pretty, to be perfect. And even in this day and age, we can still see sort of difficult women as women who are just trying to get things done and to be ambitious and speak up for themselves and how on earth we try and push beyond that. So I've got so many questions. It's an absolutely fascinating topic. And it's hard actually to know where to start other than just to say, welcome, Helen. Thank you so much. Hello. Thank you very much for having me. I can't tell you how much I enjoyed the book I've now texted it to so many girlfriends who I thought would really enjoy it as well I just thought it was such an interesting way of looking at things and I think it's so

relevant to so many parts of the way in which we're living life today but I'd actually really like just to start with the idea of the way in which we can quite often wash away parts of the truth, the parts that don't really fit the narrative that we're looking for. And there's a book and actually Sky, my little one's got it on her bookshelf upstairs. And it's called Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls. And you mentioned it and I know it's really popular. And it's a good example of it. I mean, obviously, it's a book for children. So they're only going to go so far. But I think it is an interesting example of how we admit the truth sometimes. And it mentioned Coco Chanel and that a wealthy friend of hers lent her the money to make her dreams come true and start her business. But it doesn't mention that her lover was a Nazi officer. It doesn't mention that there's a question as to whether or not she was a spy for Germany during Hitler's time. It doesn't mention the fact that in the 1930s, she tried to remove that wealthy friend from the company using a very racist law, which forbade Jews for owning businesses. And, you know, your point there is to say that she's not a feminist saint by any means, you know,

obviously collaborating with the Nazis isn't empowering, but it's not a part of the story that we ever hear. I just feel like we get into these really stupid conversations about was x or y a bad person and very few people maybe like 0.01% of people are either a total villain in every respect or a total saint in every respect and everyone else is in the kind of broad middle I mean I always feel bad about staking off good night stories for rebel girls, because I think it's a good book and I think it does something really important, right?

Like the gesture behind it is really lovely to say, actually, if you've got a daughter, you want to read stories to her that show the full breadth of all the things that a woman can be. But unfortunately, never quite be able to take on the fact that one of the things that a woman can be is just as awful as a man.

And I think that's kind of part of, you know, what we need to, what we need to accept. And you're right, Coco Chanel is an interesting example to me, because I think it's part of a desperate desire for things to be simple or for our own hands to be clean. Because what you don't want is someone to say to you, well, how knowing all that, can you still wear Chanel clothes? I mean, obviously, I can't wear Chanel clothes. I haven't thought of Chanel clothes. So that's solved that problem for itself but but you know this kind of comes up with so many things basically everything that we use is tainted in some way every writer that you love had some terrible opinions every you know institution you've been involved with has problems inherent in it and we

have to to some extent live with that and deal with that and people don't want to they find it really uncomfortable because they feel it's being a collaborator. But to some extent, we're all collaborators. Yeah, no, and I think it is exactly that. And that's what I found so interesting about the book is obviously, you've got this big focus on these very interesting pioneers of the kind of first and second wave of feminism. But actually, what you're talking about, as you say, is so kind of incredibly relevant to everything in life today. And this need that we have almost for things to be good or bad and people to be nice or not nice. And that we're kind of creating an impossible standard for people. And I also

think it's interesting that you point out women's deep unkindness to each other so often, and even kind of the suffragettes, these amazingly pioneering women who were happy to go on hunger strike for their cause that, you know, we learn about in history class and that we really kind of revere. But they also encourage violence. You know, some of them were arrested sort of 13 times. And there was actually quite a vicious rhetoric between them. You know, some of them were too upper class, some of them were too this, too that. And we've got a kind of real history of that. I think the suffragettes are a fascinating case study, because they weren't very alike,

apart from the fact that they all believed in this one political cause, you know, they all believed in votes for women. And actually, one of the most controversial things about them, I think, is they believed in that above everything else, you know, it was above Irish Home Rule, which was a massive deal at the time. It was above the class struggle. It was above putting, you know, extending the franchise to all men, which happened in the end of 1918 at the same time as the first women got the vote. But they were single-minded. And actually, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst were dictatorial. You know, they ran it, they saw it as an army and they ran it like an army, you know, they were in charge. And some women went off to join the Women's Freedom League, some actresses left for another thing, two of their big donors, the Pevic Lawrences, who ran the newspaper, left.

I was just writing about Mary Blathwaite, who ran a retreat for suffragettes in Somerset, where they would go and recover after a hunger striking. And it got to the stage where, no, she'd had enough as well. Two suffragettes assaulted the Home secretary I mean imagine this right this is the thing we we downplay their violence now to I think I think Mary Poppins is the massive villain in all of this right so Mary Poppins the mother there is just depicted as this sort of dippy well-meaning upper-class woman and you know imagine now if if political activists threw a hatchet at the prime minister you know this would be an extraordinary this would be seen as terrorism. And they were really terrorists.

And what we've done is in order to kind of, because they won, and we kind of acknowledged that they were in the right, all that stuff, the encouragement is to forget it and downplay it and degrade it. And actually, that was something that was consciously done in the 1920s. But I think it leaves people today wondering why their own social movements and their own stuff feels so kind of petty and contested. And it's not brilliant like it used to be in the past. And the only reason that's true is because they don't really know what things were like in the past. And do you feel like in forgetting these parts of history and of the fact that actually all of the women that you include in

your book did incredible things and made history and are still being talked about, you know, sometimes hundreds of years later. But, you know, as you say, they were all actually partly successful because they were contradictory and because the suffragettes, for example, you know, really went to a huge length to change the status quo and as a result they were kind of difficult women obviously which is why you've chosen them but do you feel like it kind of perpetuates the what I feel like now at least is kind of a completely impossible standard for women by the fact that we see them as perfect when they were anything but? I think you're right. You know, the great line

about the fact that Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did, but backwards in high heels. You know, I think that is so how I feel that the media treats women now. You know, you can be, you know, you can have some principles, but don't be angry. You know, you shouldn't care too much about your appearance because that makes you vain, but you also should just look perfect at all times without really trying. There's a brilliant description, you know, the novel Gone Girl, about this idea about the cool girl, which I always think is absolutely brilliant. And one of the lines in it is, you know, she effortlessly maintains a size eight while eating hot dogs, like it's kind of going out of fashion or something like that. And that captures to me that demand on women. We want them to be perfect and contained, but we also don't

want to see the effort. We don't want to see the legs paddling furiously under the surface, because that kind of makes us feel bad. And I think that's something that's really, particularly for young women, it's really hard to get your head around is the idea that you're supposed to do all this stuff, but also you're judged for doing it. You're supposed to have a career, but you shouldn't have to sacrifice anything else or nothing else should be let slide in order to do it. You should be the perfect mother, but at the same time, you can't give up any time to do anything else in your life. And then the demand on top of that is that also you have to make this look really easy so that it looks completely effortless. And that's the cruel, deforming thing, I think, because it's

just impossible to do. You're setting people up for failure. Yeah, no, absolutely. And I was so struck by that. I thought it was really interesting, your most recent example of Erin, and I don't know how you pronounce her surname, Pitsy? I think it's Pitsy. Yeah. But she set up the first women's refuge now, you know, known as the Charity Refuge in 1971. And she has saved various women's lives and, you know, made a fundamental difference to thousands of women. But she's now actually become the editor-at-large of an anti-feminism site called A Voice to Men. And she now says feminism's a lie. She's an advocate for men's rights. And as you kind of quite rightly say, what do we do? You know, she's become a footnote now and she's not really allowed to be celebrated, even though she's done so much good work.

I think that story is a really fascinating one. So it was 1971, she founded that first refuge. So it's coming up for its 50th anniversary next year. And it will be really interesting to see how it's celebrated. The book has just been Radio 4's Book of the Week, and that episode has just been on. So I've just been talking to her. And I feel feel there should be a plaque on that that well you know that should be something that is a part of feminist history that we that we celebrate even though she's not a feminist hero because she kind of isn't a feminist she's still a huge part of the feminist tradition I think we should kind of be okay with with celebrating that but what fascinates me is that it's been really interesting having conversations since the book has come out about which stories really touch people.

And Erin Pitsey's story has for two reasons, I think. First is that my mum's generation, who are now in their 70s, now my mum wasn't a feminist in the 70s, but I'd still had heard of Erin Pitsey. She was absolutely everywhere. You know, she was on Being Interviewed and stuff. You know, she was on Who's Who. She was making documentaries. And then as far as people like my mum were concerned, she just dropped off the map entirely, never heard of again. And there's this kind of worry that if that can happen to her, that can happen to any of us, no matter how big a contribution you make,

or big an achievement you have, you can be kind of written out if you're inconvenient. And the second thing is that ideological journey, I think, is just fascinating to people. How do you go from one side to another? We live in a political climate that can feel so polarised, you know, you can have people who just kind of go, you know, there's a very popular Labour t-shirt that I hate, which says never kissed a Tory. And you think, really? Like, really, that's the thing you want to boast about the fact that you would put a hard stop on dating someone with a different political opinion to you. But that's kind of where we are. And if you think of politics in that terms of one people in their like bunker over here and a load of people in their bunker over here,

how on earth are you ever going to kind of compromise, let alone is how on earth is anyone going to kind of change their opinion from one side to another? And, you know, Erin Pitsey is an example of someone who did that. And I think people find that really, really interesting. Yeah. And I think it leads me onto the way that you speak about trashing and actually I mean I've seen trashing myself and I've seen it many a time and I hadn't actually come across the term before so I don't know if you'd be able to kind of give us a definition in a second but again it's just so interesting because it's this kind of concept that we're not really allowing each other to have faults or or to get wrong. It's all part of the kind of cancel culture of today. And again, it's just interesting when you think of these people that

have changed history, if they exist today, like what Twitter would say about them, because I don't think it would be very nice. And I just wonder if it would have dampened some of their quest to actually make a difference, because we're so quick to tell everyone that they're wrong and that they're bad. And as you say, you know, I think it's a really brilliant example that never kissed a Tory, you know, wherever your political allegiances lie, it feels like we now have to be one thing or we have to be another and we can't have that kind of fluidity. And I know you had a very personal experience of trashing and people calling you everything under the sun. And you know, they feel like they kind of actually hate you, you know, and I've had the same thing. And it's a very interesting experience of someone

that's never met you. Oh, I mean, I do think that I think they do actually hate me, or at least they hate this sort of creature called Helen Lewis that stalks their imaginations, right? It has absolutely, well, I mean, it has some connection to me as a human being, but it's often more about what you have come to represent. And I'm sure that's happened to you, right? That you've been put into the space of, you've come to represent a set of ideas or a movement, then people use you as the kind of avatar, because what they want to do is have a go at the ideas, but it's much easier to personalise the attack. I think that happens to women a lot, not least because people want to illustrate stories with pictures of women, right? So what happens in newspapers is that women kind of get used as the decorative, nice picture to go alongside a story because editors are like,

well, that'll brighten the paper up. So people get, you know, I see lots of stories that have got absolutely nothing to do with Meghan Markle, where she's just sort of co-opted in because people are like, oh, people have got strong opinions about Meghan Markle and she's quite attractive. Let's put a photo of her on there. It's so interesting. But don't you think that's, I mean, I'm sure that has happened to you, right? That you've been co-opted in and it's because, oh, she's pretty. Let's have a photo of her next to our random piece about some sort of food. But trashing is this idea that Jo Freeman, a second wave feminist came up with, which she said, you know, it's not honest disagreement or criticism. It's a campaign of psychological

annihilation. You know, it's slashing and righteous.. It's a campaign of psychological annihilation. You know, it's slashing and righteous. And the aim is to kind of destroy you. And I think anybody who's been involved in a social movement will probably have experienced that or anybody who's had any kind of success will actually also have achieved that because there are a whole brew of emotions. You know, there are people who feel that you're getting too much attention. There are people who feel that your views are wrong to the extent of being dangerous, and therefore you

need to be brought down so that other people don't listen to you. And there are people who just, you know, are opposed to you for whatever reason, and they find a personal attack a much more effective weapon than fighting you on the ideas. So to some extent, trashing is always going to happen. And it's the same thing about, you know, dealing with personal disagreements anyway, is that if you're trying to do any kind of social change, you have to accept that these things are not a bug, that, you know, they're a feature, they're something that needs to be dealt with and contained. And you need to have systems and processes in place to deal with them. And I think one of the reasons that the atmosphere can feel so vicious right now is that people don't feel that they have anywhere that's listening to them where they can air grievances and there is some sort of process for those things

being resolved so what do they have left they have the court of public opinion as you say council culture it gets so vicious because they've lost trust in in democracy or whatever it might be you know HR departments to actually solve these problems. How did you find it from a personal perspective having so many people trash you online? I mean, awful. Anyone who says it doesn't affect them is either lying or a psychopath, as far as I'm concerned. And the interesting thing is the extent to which people talk about it. I mean, I don't know if you've ever had this, but you have to make a policy decision quite early on about what you're going to respond to, what you're going to try and let into your head, or affect the way that you do your work. Because in feminism, lots of the

criticisms are couched in valid reasons, fundamentally, right? So it is true that feminism has been dominated by white, straight, middle class women, because they've got the most, you know, existing power. And that's perfectly reasonable as a criticism to say, you need to make sure that you're not just talking about issues that affect the top 10% of women, that really affect all of them. The bit that's hard to separate out is when somebody is criticising you and it's something that you need to take on board and reflect because you haven't thought about it because of where you come from

or who you are or the people that you've got around you and the stuff you're exposed to versus people who are doing it specifically to either bring you down or just as often actually raise their own profile and kind of I feel like whenever you do anything in feminism you're without meaning to entering a world's best feminist competition right and there's always someone there to point out that you're not the world's best feminist and implicitly to say that they've got a better title to being the world's best feminist than you have and there's no real way to get away from that but yeah I mean I have to be honest I find it absolutely horrible to the point of of really really severely affecting my mental health and I don't say that to kind of boohoo who

gather sympathy but I think there's a tendency on the internet to treat it as if it's all just sport and that people with positions of power and people who've got otherwise very good lives aren't real people they don't have real emotions well having a good job and a loving family doesn't actually protect you from severe mental health problems you know there are people who've got everything going right for them who are severely clinically depressed who are bipolar who've got anxiety problems that make their lives you know torturous to live on a daily basis and I think there's become a sense that if your life looks materially okay then you don't have to be treated as if you're a human being which is

is a really unpleasant tendency that I think that social media is exacerbated. Yeah no it's really interesting and the other thing you're so quick to point out and it's it's definitely my experience as well is that we can as women just be so deeply unkind to each other you know I think you make the point that women are the biggest consumers of magazines and websites that point out other women's flaws yeah I mean I've spent more time on the sidebar of shame than I really ought to but that's the interesting thing is that my husband doesn't really give a toss about what Hollywood actresses put on a couple of stone, but I find myself morbidly clicking on it. And not to absolve myself of that, it's a bad habit that I should get out of. But also it does matter because we do know that those are terms in which we're judged. And I write about this great phrase in the book by Katha Pollock, which is Smurfette

syndrome, which is the idea there was only one female Smurf of all the Smurfs, Smurfette. And, you know, that's how it often feels being a woman in lots of places is that there's only one place reserved for women and you've got to fight for it. And your competition is therefore not everyone else. It's the other woman who's got that thing that you want. And I hope as things get a bit more equal in public life, particularly that that kind of fades away a bit. But there's definitely a kind of big contest to be the only woman. We're accepting the premise that there can only be one Smurfette rather than saying, well, what about a gender balanced Smurf rota here? Yes, it's such a good point.

I've definitely experienced that. Definitely my kind of deepest criticism, which, as you said, I think comes much closer to the form of trashing rather than having like an interesting conversation around the actual principles for which our company exists, always comes from women. And the biggest criticisms I was ever kind of caught up on was a whole debate around clean eating and things like that. And there wasn't a single man mentioned once in any of the criticisms in every single paper that existed in the UK. Even though there's a lot of men existing in the same space. And it's always something that's completely fascinated me because it was so often written by women and it was solely about women. And it's not to say some of the points weren't interesting and important to raise, but it's just, I found it kind of consistently really, really interesting. And when I was then reading about the suffragettes and how they kind of viewed each other, it's just clear this is something that's existed for hundreds of years. And it feels like it's something that holds us back as women and that everyone's trying to move forward and progress together. And yet,

so often, we're quick to tear each other down. And it really, right at the end of the book, where you were talking about the fact that in the conclusion about the fact that we're trying to reduce 3.5 billion people or so to one definition. And I don't even know how one actually defines feminism anyway, because it's such a complicated topic. I found that a very interesting idea as well. The idea that, you know, we're already trying to hold women to arguably impossible standards as you said you know they've kind of got to be not difficult um and and that exists today as we saw you know Theresa May was described as a difficult woman for not sitting quietly just a couple of years ago I found that really interesting and I don't know how you found that in writing the book

of you know trying to kind of reduce all these women who've done all kinds of different things to one definition? Oh, it's absolutely impossible. And it's also so contested because it's so effective. Feminism has achieved these incredible victories in the last 150 years. It undeniably gets things done. If it was totally irrelevant and unthreatening, it wouldn't be fought over like that. One of the things I don't think we talk about enough, it's the other half of the feminist conversation, is that actually it's really hard for men to admit vulnerability. And things that are associated with women are kind of become off limits to men. Like I very briefly mentioned in the book that, you know, the big fight for women to wear trousers. And it's always fascinating to me that massive fight for women to wear trousers, the fight for men to wear skirts has never ever

got off the ground and and that will be because you know it's aspirational for women to be like men and it's not aspirational for men to be like women and I think that's a real shame because most people are just people they're not one end of a kind of Ken doll Barbie doll axis and actually we do a great disservice to men by not letting them live their fullest most flawed human lives and embrace those bits of their personality too. Yeah I thought it was interesting at the beginning how you sort of there was a paragraph and it's men are this and women are this and you said men are rational and women are emotional and I think it's so true it's definitely still how in a kind of very reductionist way we see each other at the moment. I've definitely read some and seen some

quite interesting stuff about toxic masculinity and this need for men to be non-emotional in that sense and kind of manly and keep it all together and be brave. And that puts a lot of pressure on a man in the same way as telling a woman that she needs to be emotional and be very emotionally intuitive and very connected and very kind of soft in that sense. It puts both of us in a box that I feel like can be quite, feel quite like a confinement really. Yeah, I think it's one of the things that's really fascinating when you go back and read, you know, second wave 70s feminism and how radical they were about the idea that we needed to kind of smash gender stereotypes. They really envisioned a world in which you wouldn't, people wouldn't care when you had a

baby whether or not, you know, the first thing they would ask wouldn't be, is it a boy or a girl? Because that would be like asking, you know, do you think they're going to grow up to like aubergines, right? It's as if that sort of some, that tells you some kind of deep, unalterable fact about the child that entirely defines their future life personality life chances and and actually what's happened is the reverse i think we've probably got more maybe for marketing reasons you know there's a big reason that toys are so gender split is because if you have two kids that are the same sex you can't two kids of different sexes sorry you can't hand one toy down from one to the other

when they're one of them is like aggressive pink rainbow sparkles and the other is like a trucker digger dinosaur and that's kind of sad to me because I you know I grew up in much more gender neutral times you know I'm just I cut the hair off some of my barbies and you know and I had I had toy trucks and stuff like that and I think that that marketing level of gender expectations is is a really big deal there for parents yeah no I completely agree and I definitely we've got a little girl and everything is pink because everything that's basically designed for a girl is is pink and it feels like there's not as much in the middle as you would possibly expect to find the absolute nadir of that is that there's a company that sells,

it's called Baby Glue, which sounds terribly like glue made out of babies rather than glue for babies. But it's so that if you've got a daughter and she doesn't have any hair yet, you can still glue pink felt accessories to her head. And it's like, what are you doing? Gender expression is what? Why are you gluing stuff to your baby? It's just like, let it go, let it go'll be that is extraordinary oh I have to load that up I'm not

going to start gluing stuff to Skye's head but that is that is extraordinary but that's that kind of level of anxiety about it that you must signal to people that your your baby girl is a girl like why why does it matter yeah no it's it's it's so interesting and actually one of my friends from from baby groups got a little boy and whenever she sees guys she's like I've got to remind myself not to just say to her like oh you're so pretty because she can be but she can also be so much so much more than that and that as women as well we've got to remind ourself to be more than that and for that not to be the kind of big focus. But again, it feels like in a kind of very image focused, social media focused world, it's really hard to escape the importance

of image. And again, I'd be fascinated to go back and, you know, all the kind of feminist heroes, if they existed in the world that we do today, whether or not that kind of sense of image would have been very different. That's a really interesting question because some of them were quite aware of their image. So Christabel Pankus was very aware that she looked sweet and unthreatening, despite obviously being someone who was fully okay with bombing people. And so her image was used quite significantly, which was also done very deliberately because there was a big effort to depict the suffragettes as kind of hideous, you know, man-hating women who couldn't get a husband, all the stuff that still gets thrown at feminists today.

And then Jayaband Desai, who I write about in the work chapter, she led a strike against the Grunwick Film Processing Laboratory, which treated its primarily Asian workforce in the 1970s and 80s really quite shabbily. And she was very aware that by being she was four foot ten um she's originally from gujarat and she wore a sari they were called the strikers in saris that this isn't what people in the 1970s thought a trade unionist looked like they thought they you know they were expecting a big fat sort of jowly man with a mustache and that she looked like a tiny little grandma but she was actually an absolute firecracker. And I think that's one

of the things that always is really interesting. And you have to, the line you have to walk as a woman, maybe as a man as well, about sometimes you have to acknowledge what the stereotypes are in order to kind of subvert them or say, if this is what people are going to think about me, then how am I going to make this work to my advantage? And I think that's a reasonably good strategy to use. It's quite a complicated one. There's this quote by Audre Lorde, the feminist saying, you know, the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. So by playing up to those kind of stereotypes, do you unintentionally reinforce them? It's a big question. But I always think it's really kind of magnificent when you see

photos of Jabba and Desai in her sari next to these row of 1970s, you know, bobbies on the beat all in their navy police helmets it must have been extraordinary for for women to see that and asian women to see that and see somebody who looked like them challenging power like that and i think that's kind of wonderful and having kind of spent so much time studying all these women could you pick out i don't know if you're allowed to have favorites but there are some really incredible stories in here that no one was ever heard of necessarily before, you know, like looking at a princess who discovered why so many women are, you know, having bad sex and things like that, which are just absolutely fascinating. And I wondered if you could pick out a couple of

favourites and tell us a bit about them. I've got a soft spot for Princess Marie Bonaparte because of the phrasing, God loves a trier. And she married her husband, unfortunately was gay, which was probably part of the explanation of why their sex life was so bad. And I think on their wedding night, he said something like, you know, I hate it as much as you do, but we must if we're to have children.

It's not really what you want to hear on a first date. And what year is this, sorry? This is the end of the 19th century. Yeah, and she is Napoleon's great niece. One great or two great nieces. I can't remember quite how many there are. And she was an associate of Sigmund Freud. And she was very in with the kind of intellectual circles

at the end of the 19th century. But she went on a mission basically to discover why she couldn't climax through intercourse. And being extremely enterprising, and I can only assume incredibly persuasive, she did a survey where she measured the genitals of about 200 women and discovered that if their clitoris was basically more than a thumb width away from the entrance of their vagina, it didn't get stimulated enough during penetration to kind of, you have an orgasm as a side effect of intercourse. So you needed like additional clitoral stimulation. And this was obviously quite a revelatory discovery at the time. It was, the really sad thing about it is that Freud himself had a theory that, you know, clitoral orgasms were for like juvenile women,

like so teenagers. And then when you became a proper woman, you should instead start to have what he thought was a vaginal orgasm. Now, it turns out pretty much there's no evidence that there are two different types of orgasm. Everybody who thinks they're having a vaginal orgasm is just having the sort of side effects of a clitoral orgasm. But what he did basically by doing that was make everybody who couldn't come through penitent of sex feel like a total failure. And I think that still persists today that there are lots of women who feel like, well, this is taking a really long time. There's a brilliant phrase in Catlin Moran's book where she talks about her worries of being a hand wearier, which I think captures it really well. And this whole myth about what was supposed to work for women sexually

was something that, you know, 1970s feminists were really hot about. There's this pamphlet by Ann Cote called The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, where they said, look, look, unless a clitoris is getting involved, it's just not going to happen for you. You just need to make your peace with that, but it's fine. And then that kind of gets forgotten every generation. And so, you know, now you have a, you know, I think, and I think porn now reinstitutes a model of sex where it's sort of foreplay,

penetration, you know, ejaculation, tea and biscuits. And actually, that doesn't really necessarily work for lots and lots of women. So I have a huge amount of respect for Marie Bonaparte for basically kind of going out and trying to get the evidence. I also think her story is essentially a tragedy because she decided to have her clitoris surgically moved by cutting the ligaments on either side of it so that she would be able to you know have what she considered to be a normal sexual response and of course it didn't it didn't work and she could have just got really into oral sex that would have been a perfectly reasonable way to address this problem so I love her story while also thinking that it's a it's a tragic one too and my other sort of semi-favorite in the book is Maureen Colquhoun, who is the first

openly gay MP. She came out in 1976. She fell in love with a woman called Babs Todd at the age of 45. And it basically ruined her political career. She was defeated by the Tory candidate in 1979. And she and Babs were together after that for 45 years. And Babs unfortunately died in February this year. But they were together for a really long time. And Babs unfortunately died in February this year. But they were together for a really long time, Maureen's now 91, 92. And they got married in 2015. And that's, I mean, that's the stuff that just makes me absolutely blab my eyes out. Because when I start thinking that, you know, we haven't come that far, I think about the fact that, those women were deeply committed to each other for 40 years. And they lived long enough to see that the world caught up and said, you know, your love is just as real and just as valid as any straight couples.

And you deserve the same recognition and rights as them. And that they lived long enough for that to happen. I loved I thought I phoned them up and talked to both of them in the Lake District the year before last. And I was really pleased to make sure that Maureen isn't forgotten because I don't think people think of her as the first gay MP. No so I remember you pointing out that actually I think most people. Chris Smith. Exactly which was in 1997 is that correct? Yeah so he was a minister in the Blair government and he's the first to come out voluntarily. She was outed by Nigel Dempster of the Daily Mail after moving in with Babs but I said to her you know was it, was it really bad? And she said, well, no, it was kind of a relief, actually. I was, you know, I was quite pleased. And she put Babs in her who's who entry as her partner.

You know, she was incredibly brave in that sense. You know, this is a parliament in which, you know, Jeremy Thorpe is trying to cover up his relationship with Norman Scott. Matthew Parrish came into parliament in 1979. And it was sort of, you know, he's written about the fact that it was in the Tory party, at least there was kind of acknowledged that there were some people were gay, and that was sort of unfortunate. But the best thing they could do is just never ever mention it and hide it from everybody. And she just refused to do that. She said, you know, this is who I am, take it or leave it. Yeah. And again, it's not really fair that she doesn't doesn't get the credit that she deserves for being for being brave and and being pioneering in that sense and then a man slightly gets the credit in the 90s

instead um but she said it's it's amazing that she now is able to reflect on the fact that she said the world the world has caught up yeah I really like that and I think that's one of the things that was nice about the book is I started it in a sort of spirit of despair after things like the election of Donald Trump, when I just kind of thought, you know, that great speech that Obama made when he became president in 2008, the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice, which I think is Martin Luther King. And I thought, well, actually, you know what, I've lost my belief that the arc of history does bend towards justice, actually, at this point, I do think that things can go backwards as well as forwards and and I still think that and I still look around the political climate and I think there are lots of things I don't like but I also just think when you look back even further and step back even further that we have come an enormously long way when I just think of that you know these women who wrote to Mary Stopes the contraceptive pioneer so a woman wrote to her who I think was 41 and had had nine children. And she, you know, my insides are quite exhausted. She'd had a uterine prolapse. And the doctor said to her, look, if you have, if you get pregnant again,

it was, it's probably going to kill you. And she said, you know, I don't want to leave nine children motherless, but no one would tell her how to avoid getting pregnant. It was the cruelty of that belief that, you know, every child is a gift from God. What that completely missed was the fact that every child is also the hard bodily work of a woman and actually the potentially fatal bodily work of a woman. And I just thought in the developed world, now that doesn't happen anymore. In places like Sierra Leone, where the average number of births is still really, really high, women are dying in absolutely huge numbers. But, you know, we have made life better for lots of people. And still really, really high. Women are dying in absolutely huge numbers.

But we have made life better for lots of people. And those efforts are really ongoing. Contraceptive access is a big focus of the charity sector in the developing world, simply because the fewer children a woman has, the more she's able to control her fertility, the richer she is, the better she's able to care for the children that she's got, the more education they're able to get, and the less poor those children will be. And, you know, we've made people's lives better through contraceptive access in all kinds of ways. Marie Stopes, we owe a huge debt to her whilst also freely acknowledging that she is a nightmare and was, I cannot imagine how awful it was to work with her because she was self-centred and very obstinate and also had some pretty alarming views about eugenics. But that's part of the legacy too.

But then she opened the first contraceptive clinic, is that right, for women? Yeah, in Holloway, which is nice because it's not that far away from the road where Holloway Prison was situated, where all the suffragettes were held as the women's prison. And yeah, she had a mother's clinic. And one of the suffragettes, Constance Litton, who I also write about, was one of the original sponsors for it. And she said, you know, what I'm going to do is have female nurses in that as well. So that's another big step, the idea that medicine has become more feminized. We now have, actually, a majority of medical students are now women. But at the time, it was like medicine was very much something that men did to women and

and she was one of the people as well who was quite instrumental in in changing that yeah you mentioned it quite briefly in your book but we had an author on last year um who wrote very interesting book called give birth like a feminist about the um the history of birth and the connection to feminism and it's yeah i found it absolutely fascinating as well. Well, Mary Stokes is an example of that. So the first time she gets pregnant is she's over 40 and she's in labour all day and they won't let her give birth in a squatting position.

They have to, it's insistent that she lies down on her back on the bed, which you're not getting the help of gravity then. And the baby eventually, after a long time, is stillborn. I mean, in which you don't know whether or not that's anything to do with the fact of the length of time that she was in labour. And then luckily, she then managed to get pregnant again and had her first child who survived at the age of 43, which is kind of extraordinary. It was one of the really strange and extraordinary things about doing the book is actually finding out quite how many of my feminist pioneers had a baby in their in their 40s um annie

kenny also had a baby when she was 41 and that was back in uh within the 1920s so the idea that kind of it's only women now who are kind of waiting in their 40s to to have children is just a lie yeah no it's absolutely fascinating these women are just kind of deeply flawed, but deeply amazing. And for me personally, they're actually more amazing because they're deeply flawed, because I find them much more relatable, not necessarily because I agree with any belief, as you said, you know, the belief in eugenics isn't fantastic, neither is collaborating with the Nazis. But there's something about the fact that they didn't get everything right, but still had a huge impact that I think is actually

much more inspiring than the kind of shininess that we're so often presented with, because it feels as though on a personal level, we can never achieve that. Well, they feel like people. Jess Phillips wrote this in her review, you know, saying that they moved for her from being the kind of people she'd fundraise for a statue for to being someone that she'd have like a proper screaming fight with, which I think is a compliment. But I think it's really important to understand, particularly now, that everyone who fought for everything that you value really deeply, you might not have got along with, you know, you would probably have had massive political disagreements with them about stuff that they believed which at the time

was completely commonplace and now to us seems completely horrifying and this is the other bit there's probably stuff that we all believe now that in 50 years time people will come to think of as being really horrifying I mean I often think that about eating meat before I tuck into a delicious sausage that it's entirely possible that people will think this is the most barbaric thing that, you know, human race could ever have done. And that's a good corrective, being like the sort of end of history thing where you're just like, wow, isn't it great that we've achieved the final perfect form of human society and eradicated all the terrible things that blight our history. Let's sit back and relax. Well, no, we haven't got there.

There are things that, you know, our children's generation, our grandchildren's generation will think were just as appalling as we think about these women from the 20s and earlier. Yeah, no, absolutely. But it's human. And I think that we need to be so much more forgiving of each other as human beings rather than expecting this impossible standard of constant perfection,

which is just so beyond any human capacity. But what's it about? What's it? Well, I think I'm always fascinated by, can they not stop themselves from doing it? Because I'm sure I do it too. What's it, you know, what's the psychological mechanism? And what's it for? What's the idea? If you call someone out for being imperfect, actually, what are people hoping to achieve? And I think there's a real difference. There was a kind of discussion about this a couple of years ago that petered out, which is unfortunate, because it was a really useful conversation about saying, when you're drawing attention to something bad that someone has done, you have to do it in such a way that you make it as easy as possible for them to change, to stop doing the bad thing,

in a way that is designed to kind of be kind and helpful right you'll try you it's not you're not there to kind of put on your black cap and send them down what you actually want more than to shame this person is you want to make a difference and there was a book that came out about the same time as john ronson so you've been publicly shamed which was a good counterpoint to it it was also about shame and it was about the fact that Greenpeace I think at the time had made a list of the 10 most polluting companies but the crucial thing is that they changed it every year they updated every year and a company could therefore get off that list and that provided a powerful incentive to it's your behavior that we're criticizing and change your behavior and we will no longer criticize you

and that's something I think I find has been lost particularly in social media discussions about people it works totally against making people want to change themselves because if you say to someone you're a sexist you're a homophobe you're a transphobe you're a racist people don't want to accept that as a label that sticks onto them forever because they know it'll never go away and it will you know it'll be you know on them it's much better to always say the thing that you're doing is sexist because then you can stop doing it or this phrase is sexist or this you know this this policy is sexist and actually that way is a much you're creating a psychological space for people to say if I no longer do this thing then I am no longer a sexist and I just think it's a shame that we we don't

seem to be able to make that very useful distinction no I couldn't agree with you more and I actually just literally before we got on this I saw something on um the author Matt Hague's Instagram about exactly that about the damage that this sort of cancel culture is doing where if someone says one thing or writes one thing or shares one thing that we feel we don't agree with, we write them off as just kind of fundamentally flawed, not in a kind of human way, but just in a they are wrong, they are bad kind of way. And we don't give people the space to progress or to evolve. And it's a very, very, very interesting standard to which we're holding people in the kind of public sphere, but actually all of our friends and everyone around us accountable as well. And I think we're holding

everyone accountable for everything to a point at which it almost feels like it's easier just to give up, which isn't going to help us progress in any shape or form. I mean, I went away, I'd like it more if I felt we were holding everybody accountable for everything. But I think what there is actually is incredibly selective accountability. And I think it's particularly pronounced on Twitter that if you transgress past one of the self appointed kind of gatekeepers of morality, that's it, you know, everything that you've ever done is kind of up for discussion. Whereas there are people pootling along in positions of really quite large power who've done quite terrible things. And I've kind of got away with it scot-free there's a brilliant um I say this as if I know I have a deep knowledge of Greek literature which

I don't I just happens to be that a friend did a version of this play called the Oresteia and basically what it's about is the end of that kind of eye for an eye justice system where you know you kidnap my mother so I go around and kill you which then means that your son has to then kind of go around and kill that anyway and cycles of revenge that go on and on. And the play cycle ends with the institution of a kind of court system, of a justice system. And that's the thing that I feel like we're missing at the moment is the idea that everybody gets judged by the same rules and the same laws. And that's, you know, that we outsource that to something approaching a kind of independent process. Because at the moment, it just feels like random people are getting kind of caught up in this and and and tossed

overboard and other people are just getting away scot-free and I think that feels deeply unfair to people and I think it could have happened to quite a lot of women in my book and and that worries me because without them we wouldn't have you know the rights that we enjoy today and you have to kind of accept that as part of their their legacy totally and I know I worried that you know, the rights that we enjoy today. And you have to kind of accept that as part of their legacy. Totally. And I know, I worried that, you know, having experienced some kind of online trashing that I wonder, you know, for how much they stuck their necks above the parapet, I wonder if some of them would have continued. And I think that's what really I thought was particularly interesting in terms of the trashing is how do we allow people to challenge the status quo to do something different to you know whether they're right

whether they're wrong but to put forward a new opinion and I think it's something for us all to bear in mind and I guess wrapping this all up and thinking about all these women and the way in which kind of women can approach women and these ideals of kindness and sort of mouse likeness and prettiness that we sometimes still hold women accountable for and the way that we can kind of communicate with one another and the way in which we also then leave out such important parts of the story to show people as genuinely flawed in order to show that actually like anyone can make progress. How do you feel like we best continue to move forward in this this kind of conversation of feminism because it you know it's obviously it's not it's not finished no god no I mean one of the things that was nice

about going back is the fact that there were so many enduring friendships and so many people had positive experiences too and and I feel like that about having written about feminism for the last decade or so. I've met some of the most brilliant and incredible people that I know through it and people who I'm in awe of their strength and their bravery. So it's not all just a valley of pain and despair. One of the things that, you know, being under attack also really teaches you who your friends are and who you can rely on. And you value them so much more because of that. You have much more deep and intense friendships, I think, with people when you've been in a kind of foxhole together. But my solution always about what you do in order to get over the personal disagreements

and the human flaws that are inevitable part of any organization is that you decide what it is that you want. You know, what do you want? Who can give it to you? How can you get it? And what's stopping you? It's a bit of a version of Tony Benn's five questions for power. But you ask yourself all of those things. So and in the case of the vote, you know, it's I want votes for women, this will have to be passed by a law in Parliament. Here are the opposition politicians who are, you know, we need to persuade. And here is the broad swathe of the country that we need to persuade that, you know, that this is a huge issue, which we can only do through eye-catching, attention-grabbing means. Right, who's with me? Like, let's go, let's do it. And then it turns

out there were enough people were with them that they were able to do it. And that alliance then, you know, fell apart. You have Sylvia Pankhurst going off and working with Marxist groups going to Ethiopia. You have other suffragettes who became fascists in the 1930s you know these were women from very different backgrounds and very different political traditions but they knew what they wanted and I think that's what you have to kind of do is you have to just go what's the you know what's my banner that I can ask everyone to rally to yeah and then see you see who turns up and then you know you're just doing you're doing the work well said I think it's exactly that and I think you've got to just turn up and do the work haven't

you but thank you so much Helen for your time today it's been it's been so interesting it's definitely yeah raised a huge number of questions for me and um I so enjoy getting to know these women I really could not recommend the book more for men and for women. It's definitely feels like it's written for all of us. And I think as well, your point about as much as we might shoebox women into being, you know, emotional and pretty and quiet,

we do the same for men in terms of being big and strong and tough. And I think it's really important to remember both sides of it, but yeah, massively, massively recommend the book. And huge thank you for talking with us today. Thank you. And we will be back again next Tuesday. Thank you so much. You're a podcast listener, and this is a podcast ad heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn ads.

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