Woman's Hour - 02/09/2025

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

Women's voices and women's lives - topical conversations to inform, challenge and inspire.

Hello, this is Nula McGovern, and you're listening to The Woman's Hour podcast. Hello and welcome to the program. Well, period pain. It can start in the teenage years, often an unwelcome addition to growing up. But there is a new study from Oxford University that found teenagers who experience moderate or severe period pain are significantly more likely to develop chronic pain in adulthood. So researchers are calling for more attention to be given to children. teens period pain.

And I'm wondering, is that something that you went through teenage period pain? Or perhaps do you have a daughter that's going through it? How do you talk to her about it? And as we know, it can be hard to be treated for period pain, so have you been able to teach her to advocate for herself? You can text the program. The number is 84844 on social media.

We're at BBC Woman's Hour. Or you can email us through our website for a WhatsApp message or a voice note using the number 03700-100-444 is the way to get in touch with us and we will get into that research and exactly what it found.

Also at this hour we're going to learn about the Red Duchess through a new book about Kitty Athel. She's Scotland's first female MP we're going to learn

all about her she's been forgotten in many ways and we also if you were listening to us on Friday you will perhaps have heard from mothers

about forced adoptions that took place in the UK well today we're going to hear from Cathy instead who as a baby was taken from her birth mother, Jean. They've met after almost 70 years. But I want to begin instead with new figures

from the latest Femicide Census, which are out today. It records the killings of women, and it shows that 122 women, that's more than two women a week, were killed by men and boys in 2022. Most women were killed by a current or former partner, but it also reveals that 10% were killed by their sons. To discuss the findings, I'm joined by the co-founder of the Femicide Census. That is Dr. Karen Ingala Smith. Good to have you with us, Karen. Tell us a little bit more about what you found. Good morning.

So one of the most important things we found is that 2022 was, in most terms, a year like the last 15 years in the UK with regarding family side. We see regular patterns with the number of women killed, the number of women killed by partners or ex-partners, the proportions of women. women killed by their sons, by strangers, and then by other men that they know. And I think that's one of the most important findings, if you like, the depressing regularity of the pattern of killing of women, women by men in the UK. And how do you decide it? What is the femicide census? How would you describe it exactly? So it is a record and an analysis and a commemoration of women killed by men in UK, we aim to increase the understanding of femicide and through that hope to put that the knowledge that we learn can be used in lessons towards prevention.

But with this, as you talk about it, Karen, you say, in fact, there is a pattern that it is not changing. So how, I suppose, how do you explain that or do you, how do you understand that the figures aren't shifting. So I think the main thing to say is that clearly any action being taken by the government isn't working. We've seen years and years of interventions with men's violence against women and the rate of femicide remains depressingly regular.

What we tend to see is a tiny little bit of prevention work. We have some work with perpetrators. supposedly prevention work and there's a lot of work on the criminal justice system which is obviously needed but we're not doing anything to look at why we have

a sex class of killers if you like why men still have the same sort of entitlement the same sort of belief in their right to control in a relationship the same sort of

sexual predatory behaviours from a number of men I don't think there's been enough done to address those areas. So for example, if you look at women killed by sons, which is one we've both just mentioned, we

we've seen that it's been between 8 and 11 percent for the last 15 years. That's 8 and 11% of all women killed by men. And when we look at women killed by sons, what we see is really high levels of problematic substance use, high levels of

of mental ill health, often relationship breakdown so they've become homeless and had to move back in with their mum. So it suggests that the same state agencies are repeatedly failing to identify the risks that these men pose, but also do anything about them. You know, it sounds, I suppose, it sounds perverse in a way that I'm talking about ending men's violence against women, and I'm going to talk about men's homelessness now. But if a man suffers a relationship and he has to move back in with his mother, and he is identified as being at high risk, if he's being abusive to her, if he's been controlling, if he's using drugs, if he's got mental health problems, if he's stealing

her money, maybe the thing to do is find him somewhere else to live, and maybe that's the way to keep her safe. And do you feel that isn't there at the moment? Yeah, it isn't being done and I'm the last person to cry poor men but it's very hard to get housing for a single man who's struggling with lives

we need to find we need to find somewhere to put them because I'm wondering if a woman was scared of her son what help can she have? She should be able to go to the police. She should be able to go to her local

independent women's service and they should be able to help her. I think one of the things is that women often don't recognise this sort of abuse as a form of domestic violence and they think domestic violence as services aren't for them.

I think there's shame around admitting that you're scared of your children and there can be a lack of understanding from organisations, whether they're so-called specialist organisations or whether they're state organisations, that actually this is a known risk and this woman's fears needs to be taken seriously.

I want to read some of the statement from the Home Office, the Minister for Safeguarding and Violence against Women and Girls. Jess Phillips has said the scale of the issue was nothing less than a national emergency. and goes on to say that's why we have pledged to have violence against women and girls in a decade, including tackling a child to parent abuse through an effective system to ensure problematic behaviours and victims are identified early, and services respond effectively to stop harmful behaviour from continuing or escalating.

It says the government also plans to overhaul the policing and criminal justice response to domestic abuse to ensure that more victims are protected and more perpetrators are punished. you will know that the government's delayed violence against women and girls strategy will be published this month. You hear those words, you know the strategy will be published. Does that give you hope? Not yet, because that, to me, sounds more like business as usual and nothing new. And yes, yes, it's all true. But we know that women's refuges are still having to turn women away because they're full.

We know that specialist services are chronically underfunded and can't meet demand. We know that there's a pressure to handle cases quickly and close cases rather than work with women as long as there's a need. We know that women in prostitution are high risk of harm from men and are at increased risk of homicide. And yet I don't know whether prostitution is going to be tackled as a form of violence against women in the women's strategy. and we don't even know whether the word

Femicide is going to be in that strategy. The last two government strategies which came out with under the Conservative government didn't even talk about the homicide of women. The only way that killing was addressed was in relation to talking about domestic homicide reviews

but none of them have up to now as far as we know had the guts to identify that femicide is an issue that woman killing is different and that we can learn something if we look at femicide rather than just domestic homicides. And that's the word that you want to have there. Also with the word prostitution and also controversial,

as we've often discussed on this programme. Some people use the term sex worker instead. But you have made your point clear in that particular regard. You know, we often hear about, or perhaps there is in the public imagination, of the danger for a woman, is with a stranger, you know, walking down the street at night. But I think your research shows differently.

Yeah, so we've collected data going back to 2009. And for most years, stranger killings and killings of sons by mothers by their sons have been very similar with the number of strangers, usually just slightly higher. This year for the first time, we saw more women killed by their sons than by, strangers. And if you remember on top of that that not all women are mothers, but all women go into context where they're strangers, then the proportion is even higher. And we spend, you know, we spend, we're socialised from being little girls, aren't we to take care of ourselves, the steps that we need to take to make ourselves safer from stranger danger?

it's horrific to know that actually women who are mothers of adult men are more likely to be killed by their sons than by a stranger and there isn't enough the services as I've mentioned already those men usually have identifiable risk factors those services aren't taking on

the fact that these men might be a risk to the women that they're living with to their mothers and sometimes in smaller numbers but grandmothers as well. Co-founder of the Femicide Senses, Dr. Karen in Gala Smith, thank you very much for joining us this morning on Women's Hour and if you have been affected by any of the issues we've been discussing, there are links to help and support on the BBC's Action Line.

I was asking just as we were coming to air about any experiences you had a period of pain as a teenager or if your daughter has, how you're speaking to her about it. A lot coming in, actually. I see here's one anonymous. with horrendous period pains. My mum used to make me hide the fact I was on my period as if it were a shameful thing. So I never got help. After six miscarriages and listening to news articles such as those and women's are, I realised I most likely had endometriosis. I now have fibromyalgia, which is chronic pain. And I still have a lot of stomach pain, even though I'm postmenopausal. I would definitely say there is a link. The pain I had when I was younger seems to have just spread. I hope mums will be a lot more responsive and caring these days. 84844 if you would like to get in touch. The reason I'm reading that comment is because there's a new research from Oxford University that has found that teenagers who suffer moderate or severe period pain are more likely to experience chronic pain as adults.

It's a study that was published in the medical journal The Lancet, looked at data of more than a thousand people included in the Avon longitudinal study of parents and children, also known as the Children of the 90s study. The research has found that the participants with severe period pain at age 15, have a much higher risk of experiencing chronic pain at age 26 than those with no period pain. Well, here to tell us more about the study, also what it means, a professor of gynecological pain and consultant gynecologist, Dr. Katie Vincent. Welcome to Women's Hour, Katie. Good to have you with us. So I give a couple of the top lines there, but explain it in a bit more detail for us.

So thank you ever so much for having me on this morning. So exactly as you said, we were really interested in whether teenagers experiencing period pain who haven't experienced any other kind of chronic pain before that, so nothing that had lasted for longer than three months, which is our definition of chronic pain, whether they would then go on to develop chronic pain as a young adult. And we know that chronic pain, once it's set up, once it's established, is really hard to treat at least a quarter of the female population living with chronic pain at any time. So we were interested to see whether actually your first experiences of pain as a teenager might be a predictor of that in the future. And that's exactly, as you said, what we found that those with

severe period pain at 15 was 76% more likely to have chronic pain at the age of 26 than those who didn't experience period pain at all. And those with moderately severe period pain were also much more likely to have chronic pain at 26 as well. I suppose my first question is, and anybody who's period pain, we'll understand this, but how do you quantify it, moderate or severe period pain? That's a really good question. And in research studies, we often use scales like from zero to 10, but we are aware from some other work that we're doing that actually teenagers find it quite hard to conceptualise those numbers. So actually, we didn't put the questions into this birth cohort. You mentioned we used the children of the 90s. So that's a birth cohort that's been

giving these questionnaires out. The puberty questionnaires were given out every year. So those questionnaires have been kind of well used. But the questions that they use kind of gave an explanation of those definitions. So moderate was the type of pain that you've had it hard to ignore even if you were doing something, whereas severe pain was pain that stopped you from doing the things that you would want to do. So it was conceptualised in a way that teenagers and their mum's would be able to understand. You know, I read out one listener's comment there about fibromyalgia that she has suffered with and she's convinced there is a link. But what sort of chronic pain are you talking about that people may suffer from? And I think this is why this is so important.

So we did know that from some other studies that period pain often precedes other types of pelvic pain and can be a predictor of things like endometriosis. But what we saw was that actually this is pain throughout the body. It included headaches, jaw pain, joint pains, wrists, hands, knees, back pain, hip pain, for example. So it isn't just located to pelvic pain. What is the link? Well, that's a really good question. And we do have some other work still going on within this project to try and explore what the mechanisms might be. We had two, potential theories. One was that we know that having period pain as a teenager is associated with increased rates of depression and anxiety later in your teens. It interferes with so much of

social developments and schooling and so on. So we wondered whether mental health might be a mechanism and we were able to explore that with the data that we had and we could see that actually that only explained a really small proportion of the relationship. So definitely we saw more depression and more anxiety symptoms in girls two years after they'd started to experience period pain but that only explained a small amount of those going on to get chronic pain so what we think is most likely the explanation is that your nervous system is changing all the time but it changes an awful lot during adolescence it's a time of real development in the nervous system and we wonder whether the experience of having repeated episodes of pain is actually enough to kind

of turn up the volume on the pain sensing system and change the way that the nervous system responds to pain, therefore making you more likely to develop chronic pain in the future. A couple of comments coming in and be curious for your thoughts on it. Awful period pain as a teenager, really dreadful, continued on into my 20s where I got worse and worse. Finally, in my 30s, when trying to have children, it was discovered that I had one ovary that was badly mangled and another one that was tiny. My mother dismissed period pain is something we all had to go through, but it's so important to try and find the reason behind the pain as young women. Another, Pauline gets in touch. My daughter, age 17,

has crippling period pains. It has her curling up desperately unable to do anything. We have used ibuprofen, hot water bottles, tapping her back, handheld massage her over the abdomen. It's a very difficult issue and we try to just work through it.

We always talk openly about these issues as it is otherwise so isolating for her. So we're seeing definitely a change in generation there in the way that they're dealing with it. But what about somebody who's a teenager who has very severe or moderate period pain? Because obviously people want to avoid chronic pain. at a later stage. What are you advising?

Well, I mean, that's part of the reason that I'm delighted that this study's getting some exposure because I think the most important thing is to get the message out there that period pain matters that we should take it seriously, that you shouldn't have to put up with it, and that there are treatments available. And we know that actually the majority of teenagers with period pain don't even present for care. So it's not just a problem that doctors aren't treating them. It's actually that they're not coming forwards to be treated. And we have heard over the the last couple of years of various schools around the country, for example, saying that you can no longer miss school for period problems,

that you need to sort of man up and learn to live with these symptoms because it's part of being a woman. And we really want to kind of change that message and say, actually, you shouldn't have to put up with it. There are things that we can do about it. So rather than saying, you know, don't come to school, put up with it. It's go and seek treatment so that you can come to school without this interfering. Yeah.

And I guess I'm just thinking as you're speaking there, it's about treating the symptoms, do you think, or is it possible to get to the cause of why somebody has period pain compared to somebody else? I think it's a bit of both. So what we saw in our study, which aligns with lots of other work from around the world,

was that about 60% of our population were experiencing moderate or severe period pain. That's incredibly high numbers. And we know that things like endometriosis, for example, we know that that only affects about 10% of the population. So a large proportion of those with period pain won't have any underlying cause. We don't completely know why they experience these symptoms. Maybe their womb is more sensitive to the contractions.

Maybe their bleeding is a bit heavier. Maybe there's more inflammation going around. But it's not anything specific in terms of a diagnostic label. So in that sense, yes, I think it is a symptom that is of itself deserving of treatment. There may be a smaller proportion who have an underlying disease that in the future we need to identify. But I would argue that our priority is just getting on top of the symptoms to start with. And obviously those who don't respond to kind of initial treatments should be referred on into secondary care and see a gynecologist. But most of this can be managed in the community.

And that's a much quicker route to getting care. We know how long gynecology waiting lists are at the moment. We do. Professor of gynecological pain and consultant gynecologist, Dr. Katie Vincent, and really interesting. Thanks so much for joining us. Thank you very much. 844, if you'd like to get in touch.

Now, you may know the Welsh actor, Eve Miles, from some of the following TV roles. Kerry Lewis in the BBC Wales drama series belonging. Gwen in the BBC science fiction series Torchwood. Faith Howells in the bilingually produced drama series Keeping Faith and also won, I should say, a BAFTA-Comri Best Actress Award for that role. Eve will be a regular feature.

or is, I should say, on our TV screens these months appearing in several series, including Cold Water, The Hack, and what I've been watching, the lead role in The Guest, which is a brand new four-part thriller on BBC One. You might have caught one of the episodes last night at 9pm. It's on iPlayer.

And it centres on an intense relationship between a successful businesswoman, Fran, and her cleaner, Ria. And Eve joins me in the studio. Good morning. Good morning. Thank you for having me. It was a bit of a, a jaw-dropping first episode that I experienced last night.

Oh, did you enjoy it? I did. I had to take a few minutes before I went to bed. Yeah, well, it's quite funny. I was speaking to my husband earlier on and he said, oh, Mom, Ghee's not talking to you. Mom, Gies, well, she's from your grandmother. And I was, oh, why, why?

And apparently my mother-in-law had a very unsettled night last night after watching it. But she wasn't the only one. And sent me a message saying, I shall only be watching this in the daylight. And it did get dark early last night as well, let me add. But let us talk about this character, Fran, that you play. Okay.

Yes, I play Fran Sharp, who is this enigmatic, ambitious, successful businesswoman, who bumps into, by chance, the character of Ria Powell and sees her being treated incredibly badly and takes her under her wing. But she's this very kind of mysterious force of nature and she's been an utter joy to play and to find. How do you understand her and how do you get under her skin? It starts always with good writing. And we're blessed on this.

Matthew Barry has done the most exquisite job with these rich characters that he's written. that drive the plot. So I start with the gift that's given to us, which is the writing. And it's all there. It's all kind of, it's all there. Sometimes it's a bit buried.

Sometimes it's very obvious. But it's always about how I'm affecting the person I'm in the scene with. It's always about that. And I try never to make it about me or the character. I always try and find what it is she does and how she works other people. I'm just remembering great reviews this morning. actually in the paper. You must have for a good morning. I've not looked at anything.

Do you not? No, I don't. I'm a complete coward in that way. But my reviewer is my husband and my family. Okay. I'm a friend. Yeah. I'm always happy when I get messages. I had messages from people last night who I haven't seen or spoken to in years. One of them being a tutor from the Roy Welsh College of Music and Drama who dropped me a line. Lucy Gannon got in touch with me last night who's an amazing.

writer, wrote a series I was in years ago called Frankie, and Russell T. Davis, and to get these messages from these people meant the world to me. What did they say? They were just very kind, you know, and, you know, explicit. Now I know exactly. Yes, you can imagine. You don't need to show me your phone. I will laugh at. But that is wonderful because you're working on something and then you launch it out and then wait to come back. And I do find it really interesting that you don't look at the reviews,

but you can take it from me that they've been positive. Oh, that's fine. And what they get into, and I think what really drew me in, are these tricky dynamics that Fran is walking through. And you talk about the other character. And I think it's the women that really draw me in. So you have Ria, obviously, which some might be familiar with an unusual dynamic that there can be.

There's been great documentaries on this as well between cleaner and houseowner because there's often such a disparity in income, for example, and also living situations. How did you approach that? Well, I think Matthew in the script has celebrated both worlds, really. Yes. You know, Ria comes from a lovely home.

You know, her flat is lovely. You know, she's got lovely friends. She is loved. Yeah. And she's got, you know, this great personality. She's smart. She's ambitious. And yet she just needs a bit of guidance.

And then, you know, you've got, you've got Fran who seemingly has everything. But actually, when that door is closed, has nothing. Yes. I love the other dynamic, which I was just touching on to, which is between sisters as well,

that you get Fran's sister who enters Helen, another strong female character in the series, one with kids, one without, and they're kind of tiptoeing around each other a little bit. Yeah, yeah. It's a power struggle. I mean, throughout the entire, I think, thematically, a lot of it is about power struggle

and being in control, seemingly being in control and what happens to us when we're not. Well, talking about being in control, I'm spoiler alert here for people who haven't watched, I'm not going to give all the details, but those jaw-dropping last few moments of the first episode, Frank comes home to a mess created by Rhea that will take more than a bit of elbow crease to clean up.

There's no vanish getting that out, let's be honest. Not if you had 10 spray guns on it. But that must be so much fun. I was thinking to play in episodes like that that are so dramatic and gobsmacking heart stopping. Yeah, I mean, when you read something like that, it stopped me in my tracks. And, you know, it is shocking

and it's an incredible hook. It was a brilliant ending to the first episode. And I think that took the guys about three or four days to shoot that sequence because some of it had to be done in the house. some of it was done in the studio of course we had to introduce stunt men and women

and Gabby and you know everybody involved just I think did an incredible job Nailed it They did nail it Kind of pun intended Yes excellent You'll just have to watch

Now let's talk about Welsh Oh okay I read that you learned Welsh in four months I did yes Yeah, it was like an out-of-body experience, fight-of-flight moment, I think. And this was for Keeping Faith? It was, yeah. I'd been approached about Keeping Faith four times.

And, you know, heartbreakingly had to say, I can't do it. Because it was bilingual. Because it was bilingual production. Yes, it was S-FO-C and BBC Wales. At the time, it was just S-FO-C. And I read these incredible scripts by Matthew Hall, and I knew that Pip Broughton was going to be producing it and directing it and it was a dream job.

Faith Howells is a, you know, she's an iconic character. And filmed in Lawn. I mean, it was like being in a painting. It was beautiful. And I had to say, no, I can't possibly do it. And then it got a bit awkward. It got to a point where they were like, well, you can't do it. And I was like, no, no, you don't understand.

I really don't speak any Welsh. whatsoever. And producer came around, Nora Ossla came around, and I'd come up in hives at this point. And I was going, I'm not being obtuse. I'm not being mean or rude. I genuinely, I'm not able to do this. You may as well come to me with a script that is, you know, Japanese or Russian. I'd be starting at the same place. And she said, let's just have a little read of the first page. And I promise you, I picked up the script and she leaned across. the table and she turned the script around. I had it upside down. And I swear that is the truth.

And I could see the colour draining from her, from, you know, pink to grey to blue. And she said, OK, let's start with the alphabet. And I thought, oh, I'm in for it here. And it was one of the best things I've ever done. I sat. I took my daughters to school at 9 in the morning. I'd sit at the table and I'd pick them at perhaps three. And I wouldn't leave that table until I had two pages, three pages under my wing.

So I just learned it and learned it and learned it. And it's, what a privilege to have been able to do that job and what a privilege it was to learn Welsh. Your husband, Bradley Freigard, speaks Welsh. Yes. And you're speaking conversational Welsh at home with your daughter sometimes, I hear. How's that? Is it like drop a little like, how's it going, that sort of thing?

Normally when I'm angry. Normally when something's happened, it just comes out and Brad finds that quite amusing, and so do my children. But isn't that such a... a wonderful thing to have as a gift really I suppose of something that is your heritage and that is representative

of Wales to have that skill now it's lovely I mean and I'm nowhere I would I'd still say that I'm a learner I'll always be a learner and I will continue to be a proud learner but what's really nice is that when people come to me now and automatically assume I speak Welsh

I don't have to apologise straight away because beforehand I'm sorry I don't speak Welsh now I can say bear with me I speak a little bit of Welsh but yeah it's a privilege an absolute privilege Eve Miles catcher

on the guest thank you so much for coming into us it is on the BBC I player as I mentioned and also on BBC at 9pm last night now I want to move on to a story that we touched on last Friday if you're with us and this is to do with forced adoptions.

Because between 1949 and 1976, thousands of pregnant women and girls in the UK were sent away to prison-like homes run by the church and state and other babies put up for adoption. In 2021, an inquiry by the Joint Committee of Human Rights concluded that the state bore ultimate responsibility for the suffering inflicted unvulnerable women

and their children, calling on the government to issue an official apology. On Friday's show, Diana DeFries and Karen Constantine told us about their experiences of force. adoption and why they're campaigning for years for an apology. And this week sees ITV's long-lost family special, the mother and baby home scandal. It follows three families as they search for their relative and looks at the experiences that the young women there faced.

One of them is Jean and her family. Jean was 16 when she was sent to a mother and baby home that was in 1956. After giving birth, she unwillingly handed over her baby, she called Maria for adoption. And even though she went on to marry and have four other children, she never forgot Maria and longed to find her. Here's Jean talking with her granddaughter, Caitlin, on the ITV special out this week. I've always felt inferior. I'm not good enough for people.

It was no better than a prostitute. I've been such a bad person. You haven't been a bad person. Those weren't your decisions and your choices. I spoke to the programme's director, Helen Nixon, and also to Jean's eldest daughter, Maria, who was given up for adoption, renamed Kathy by her adoptive parents. She was found by the program. I asked Kathy if she'd thought much about who her birth mother was over the years.

Yes, I had a little bit of information that my adoptive mother told me. I mean, she was very open about everything and gave me as much information as she had. although I didn't know that my name had been changed until I was probably in my early 20s. So that was a little bit of a surprise. But yes, obviously, when you're adopted, even if you have a very happy adoption, there's always times when it crops up, when people ask you about your medical history and things like that. You have to say, no, no, I'm adopted, so I don't know. So there is always that hole there.

There is always that bit that makes you wonder where they are, what they're doing, how they're faring. Have you got any half-brothers or sisters? So yes, that side of it never goes away, really. Your birth mother named you Maria, but your name is Cathy Maria now, I understand. Yes, and I think obviously my adoptive parents decided to keep part of my name. probably is a tribute to my birth mother because that's the type of people they were.

Yeah, I did. I was very touched by that, actually, when I saw that and heard that. Did you look for your birth mother at all growing up? Not growing up, no. One, it was quite difficult. We didn't have the technology in those days that we have now. And two, to a certain extent, I think I would have felt that I was betraying. my adoptive parents, although my mother had always been very supportive and said if I wanted to look for my birth mother, she would support me 100%. My father was a different matter because

as far as he was concerned, I was his daughter and that was the end of the story. So yes, I think whilst they were both alive, it wasn't something that I wanted to pursue for that reason. And for the other reason that given the era that I was adopted in, and there was no expectation of parents looking for children, children looking for parents, and the information wasn't released, I didn't know what happened on my mother's side, whether she told her family, whether they didn't know, and I certainly didn't want to turn up on somebody's doorstep and blow up their life. So that was another reason that I didn't seek her out until fairly recently. But did you seek before the program contacted you? Yes, I did, yes. Probably about

two years ago, I decided that I would bite the bullet and apply for my pre-adoption birth certificate. This sort of followed on from having a DNA test and being able to identify my biological father, but not being able to find any information about my birth mum. So I applied for the the adoption certificate. And that took about 18 months. It was a horrendous process. And then following on from that, I applied for my adoption records and they took about six months or so. And then they turned up. And then a week later, Ariel Bruce from Longless Families letter turned up to say that my female relative was searching for me. Oh, is that the wording that is there. Maybe that's a good moment to move over to Helen.

Because Jean's granddaughter, Caitlin, contacted the program on behalf of Gene, the female relative, aka her grandmother. Tell us a little bit about, for those that haven't obviously seen the program yet, why it was so important for Jean, Kathy's birth mother, to try and find Kathy. I think the whole family just really have felt the trauma of what Jean's been through. And that really struck us when we first met. we met Caitlin, we met her Aunt Mandy, who Jean lives with, and obviously we met Jean. And it was just very obvious that that sense of kind of profound shame and grief and loss was something that had been passed down three generations of women.

And it really struck me as well that, you know, these women were so angry on her behalf at how she'd been treated, at how she'd been made to feel. and they were desperate to help her as an 85-year-old at the time when she approached us there was a real sense of like this is the last chance and I think it's really tragic that women in their 80s

are still looking and obviously so many of these women have already died without being reunited with their lost children we've covered this story on this programme in relation to Ireland in particular tomb but I think the story of Mother

and baby homes in the UK is so less well known, which is a really big part of this long-lost family special. Why do you think that is? I feel like it's because partly there are so many disparate religious organisations who run these homes. I mean, we've been working with an incredible consultant, Dr Michael Lambert, who's been studying English mother and baby homes for the last decade. And he's estimated there are 170 of them, majority of which are receiving state funding. But I do feel like it's, in a way, the big difference with Ireland, for what I understand, is, well, first of all, the women tended to stay much longer in the homes. So it's that sense of having to repay the organisations. So you would be trapped there sometimes for years.

The other difference is that in England, it tends to be six weeks. So you're in the mother and baby home, you have the baby, and you're processed very quickly. So the average age that a baby is taken is six weeks old and then you're told to pack your bags and leave. You mentioned 170 there, the vast majority of mother and baby homes got funding, it says in the programme, from the state and the accusation is that the government

actively supported the organisations and their practices. What has the response been from the government? So we've had a right to reply from the government. I can read it to you. A government spokesman said this abhorrent practice should never have taken place and our deepest sympathies are with all those affected. We take this issue extremely seriously and continue to engage with those affected to provide support.

So that is what they've said so far. It's definitely not an apology. If people were listening to Women's Hour on Friday, we did speak to two campaigners. That was Diana DeFries, chair of the Movement for Adoption, apology, and Karen Constantine, author of Taken. they are looking for an apology.

Is that widespread what women are calling for an apology? I think that they are doing an incredible job of campaigning and raising awareness. I do think that given the huge numbers of women affected, I mean, it's an estimated 200,000 women. What shocked me really was the scale of it, but also the lack of awareness. And so it's incredibly important to raise this issue. But I also feel like, particularly in the case of Jean and Margaret,

who's in the second episode of this series, what struck me was that they had no awareness that they were part of a much bigger scandal. Because these women are extremely isolated. You're being processed very quickly. You're completely traumatised. And they often don't realise that this has happened to so many other women.

Do you think, Cathy, that an apology would make a difference to Jean, your birth mother? I mean, we meet her and it doesn't take very long before we realise she has very low self-esteem issues because of what she went through when she was a teenager?

I have to say that I think at this stage if it was an apology from the people in the home that might mean a little bit more. I mean, an apology would I suppose be something but I don't think it will make up for the years of trauma that she suffered from being forced to give me up and not knowing where I am

and not the Adoption Society not responding when she asked for help to try and find me. When Long Loss family came to her and they found you, Jean did write you a letter before you met. Do you have it? Are you able to read it for us? Yes, I do have it. The letter says, dear Maria, where do I start in writing this letter?

firstly to say how sorry I am for giving you up for adoption, but I had no choice. I was 16 when I had you and my parents would not allow me to marry your father or support me. When you were born, you had the cutest butt and nose and beautiful blonde hair. I told myself, throw my penance not to fall in love with you, as I couldn't keep you. But the moment I had you in my arms, I couldn't help it. It was love, and I haven't stopped loving you. I think about you every single day. Me and your father did separate, but I did meet someone and went on to marry him and have four more children who all know about you, and I never kept you a secret from them. I did write a letter when you were 18 years old and the Adoption Society, and they said they would keep it on file.

my daughter did try to find you without any luck and then her daughter my granddaughter had been trying for the last five years i do understand if you don't want to see me and that's fine i just wanted to know that you had a happy life but also seeing you would be a dream come true please forgive me love jean what was it like to get that letter kathy i felt very very sad that she was asking for my forgiveness because as far as I was concerned, there was nothing to forgive. I always understood that she never had any choice in the matter, and so therefore I didn't blame her. I also felt sad that she'd been searching for so long. Well, sad and happy.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because obviously it's lovely to know that she wanted to find me, but. said that so many years have gone by before that became possible. Because it was almost 69 years when you finally got to meet. What was that like? I mean, obviously we watch it on the screen and we've all seen some of those reunions, but I can't imagine what it must be like to live it. You open that door, you walk in.

Yeah, it was a bit surreal, really. It was quite extraordinary. and I think my main feeling was that she had been very, very upset about everything and I hope that our meeting was going to bring her a little bit of peace. But it was strange not just only meeting her, but meeting the rest of the family or most of the rest of the family. It was like we'd known each other for years. Really?

Yeah, it's very. very, very strange. We've met several times since and it still feels like we've known each other for years. There's no awkwardness. It just feels very, very natural. So literally a familiarity? Yes, yes, very, very. But it just feels so comfortable being with them. You did say in the programme that you had a whole in your life, which you mentioned to us there at the beginning as well. Yeah. Has it been filled? What does that feel like? Yes, it has definitely been filled and it feels really good. That is Cathy.

Thanks very much to her and to the director, Helen Nixon. Long Lost Family Special. The Mother and Baby Home Scandal is on ITV1 and ITV3 tomorrow and Thursday evenings, the third and fourth of September. Now, pub quiz question for you. Who was Scotland's first female MP? Any idea? Some of you might know.

It was Catherine Stuart Murray, aka the Duchess of Athel, or Kitty, to her friends. And here's a surprise, perhaps. She had campaigned against votes for women, but in 1923 she stood for election herself and won. So it was quite the U-turn. She became the first female minister to serve in a conservative government, but was later dubbed the Red Duchess by her opponents. That is the name of a new biography by Amy Gray. It's Red Duchess, Kitty Athel, a rebel in Westminster, and, Amy's here in studio to tell us a little bit more about this pioneering politician. Welcome.

Good morning. It's so nice to be here. Yes, that seeming contradiction between being elected one of the very first female MPs and having been anti-suffrage was the hook that got me interested in her. A friend who worked in politics mentioned this. It was 2020. It was the early lockdowns. There wasn't a lot more to do. So I'd disappeared down this rabbit hole of trying to find out more about the Duchess. And almost before I knew it, I was researching the book I wanted to read about her because I couldn't quite find that. And that's what I've written. Definitely. There's very little about her online. But why did she make that flip? Well, it's interesting.

There were quite a lot of people who were opposed to women having the vote. Some of them because women shouldn't bother their pretty little heads about politics. Kitty was in the forward movement of the anti-suffrage campaign. So she thought that there was a role. for women in politics, but some women already could vote in some local elections and stand in them, and very few did so. And her argument, along with a number of other very prominent women of the time, was that women really needed more experience of local government before they were equipped to take those big decisions about national government, you know,

issues of war and tariffs and those sorts of things. What I think changed her mind was the First World War. You know, all the suffrage campaigns were put on hold. Kitty visited a hospital on the Western Front that was set up by suffragette doctors and saw how they were all committed to the same end. She nursed her husband's soldiers. She turned the ducal castle into a convalescent hospital. She was mixing with very, very different people. And so once the war was over, she stood for election to her local educational authority. So she did what she had been saying other women needed to do.

A smaller role first. Exactly. And I think what she really came to believe was that decisions about women and children are best taken when there are women and children in the room influencing those decisions. And her husband had been an MP. She saw Parliament up close.

And it was actually a political opponent. It was the Prime Minister David Lloyd-George who first said to her, you should stand for election. And once a number of other local senior men had said, we need a candidate for the election that's coming up. How about you, your grace? She'd never have put herself forwards, but she was asked to stand,

and she did so. So, yeah, 1923, she becomes Scotland's first woman MP. She is perhaps the only Duchess? Yes, so far. So far, that this one we know is the only one so far. There might be another one that comes along. But she also had a life, I suppose, there could have been privilege and something completely different.

than the path she took. Yes, she was an incredibly talented musician. So she studied at the Royal College of Music. She wanted to be a concert pianist, but it was made clear to her by an aunt that that wasn't a suitable career for a baronet's daughter. She'd had one very sadly curtailed love affair, and her mother rather pushed her towards the very eligible young heir

to the Duke of Athel, but she fell passionately in love. They had a very slightly sort of racy correspondence during a two-year secret engagement and the Athol family were very committed to public service as many aristocrats of the time were so she sort of followed her husband's family but I think one of the key reasons

why her role in public life became so huge was that very tragically she was unable to have her own children and this was a sadness for her that she carried throughout her life and she was blamed for it at the time it must have been the woman's fault her husband had at least one love child probably more. So she had this very intense sense, I think, of shame and of sadness that she carried with her, but not having her own children opened up her life to the opportunity of

public service. And she was ahead of her time on several issues, women's health, pre-NHS, for example, and very much the rights of the child and refugees pre-kinder transport. Yes, yes. One of the surprising issues that I think she took on. In 1929, she learned about the practice of what we'd now call female genital mutilation at the time they called it female circumcision. And she was horrified that this was something that was happening in the British Empire, because from her point of view, the British Empire should exist to promote the welfare of its citizens and to try and ensure that women and girls throughout the empire enjoyed the same freedoms as women and girls at home in Scotland and in Britain. So there's this parliamentary debate in 1929 where this

sort of buttoned up Victorian Duchess describes in surprisingly graphic detail what FGM actually is. And, you know, Welsh Labour MPs try to try to shout her down. You know, this is, this is, what about the men? Why aren't we talking about men in this, in this debate? It's so interesting because we're almost 100 years later and there are still conversations that take place about FGM. I want to bring a little bit of BBC archive. Fantastic. Yeah, this is off the Duchess speaking in 1937 as chair of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief

about arrangements being made for the arrival of 4,000 Spanish refugee children at Southampton. We've had wonderful gifts of food and clothing also. We've had a whole lot of shoes, for instance, given us by the Boot and Shoe Trades Operatives Union, a most valuable gift. we've had two tons of onions given to us and 40,000 oranges and perhaps what the children will appreciate most of all

because of course Spanish children know all about oranges we've been given enough chocolate to enable each child to have a bit of chocolate daily for the fortnight it will spend in the camp really incredible actually to have that archive isn't it that's wonderful that's wonderful and that's wonderful And that really brings to life one of the more dramatic parts of her career where having been a very loyal and diligent minister

for four and a half years, once she returned to the backbenchers, she became one of the most surprising rebels in British parliamentary history on a succession of causes. And in the late 1930s, she read Mindkamp in the original German. She was, yeah, she spoke fluently. She spoke fluent. She spent a lot of time in Germany because of her music.

and she realized ahead of pretty much all of her colleagues the danger that Nazi Germany posed to peace in Europe and Nazi Germany was supporting the rebels in the Spanish Civil War and she thought well if they win the Spanish Civil War we will have a war in Europe and she visited Spain for herself she had seen that women and children were being deliberately targeted so she set up this joint committee

she spearheaded these attempts to persuade the government to allow them to bring these 4,000 refugee children to Britain. I've met some of their descendants actually. Some of them stayed here and made very happy lives here. But in order to fundraise for the children, she would share a platform with anybody who shared the same views. So she was travelling up and down the country, speaking to audiences of thousands,

alongside Britain's leading communist woman, for example. And a lot of her conservative colleagues thought this was beyond the pale. There's some extraordinarily rude things that they wrote about her. And that's where the nickname the Red Duchess came from. So it was trying to really put it down, I suppose. But, I mean, talk about being on the right side of history. She was taking a stand against appeasement of Hitler and Nazi Germany. She was. And she triggered a by-election on that issue.

She was the only opponent of appeasement, brave enough to do that. You know, the men would sort of cluster in their smoking rooms and their flats in Westminster. And she's out there on platforms around the country arguing for, Britain to take a stand because she'd visited Romania. She'd visited Czechoslovakia and Austria, these countries that were in the front line of the Nazi advance. I mean, she was an extraordinary woman, remarkable of any age, but particularly from, you know, best part of a hundred years ago. Why do you think she hasn't been remembered in the way that she should have been? I've been asking myself that question because I have a background in conservative politics.

And so I'd mentioned her to, you know, some really quite senior conservative politics. and very few of them would have heard of her. I think partly, you know, the Conservative Party doesn't generally want to be reminded of its more aristocratic past. I think that Scottish politics, you know, has gone in a very different direction. She was a unionist, very proud unionist. And I think also that she lost. You know, she triggered this by-election, hoping that it would change Neville Chamberlain's view and force the government to realise that the people of Britain did not want another war.

And the way to do that was not to appease Hitler. But she lost. You know, it was a huge gamble. The government threw everything at her. Winston Churchill rang her every night because he was told that if he went up to Scotland to support her, he would lose his seat down near London. And, you know, nine months later, Britain was at war

and her warnings had been right. I suppose the winner is always right history. They do. In the sense of those that remain within the political office, she could be seen as a winner in many other ways. Amy Gray, thanks for coming in. Pleasure, thank you. So nice to hear all about the Red Duchess.

Kiti Athol, a rebel in Westminster. It's out now, and I have to say, what a fascinating story. Thanks for bringing it to us. I do want to let you know that tomorrow a landmark tribunal case comes to an end this week. It involves a nurse, Sandy Peggy, who objected to a trans woman doctor using the women's changing room at an NHS Fife hospital. It led to an encounter between the pair and the doctor complaining about this Peggy. who was suspended and took the health board and the doctor to a tribunal.

So we're going to have an update on that. Do you join me the same time tomorrow right here on Women's Hour. That's all for today's Woman's Hour. Join us again next time. Two months ago, I was just an ordinary mum. From BBC Radio 4 as part of limelight, this is mother cover. Our system has identified you as a candidate for a position. See this woman here in the photo.

She attends a mother and baby. group at the town hall. Can I sit here? I'm Gwen, by the way. Liz, is she dangerous? Lives are at stake, Gwen. What do you mean lives? Gwen? What are you doing? I want out. I want out now. Oh my God, Liz, that tree. Look out! Listen to the whole series right now. First, on BBC Sounds. What on earth is your mummy up to?