Woman's Hour - Fran & Flora, Maths anxiety, the spy Virginia Hall

Episode Date: March 30, 2019

The folk duo, Fran and Flora play Eastern European inspired music from their album, Unfurl.The former Prime Minister of New Zealand Helen Clark, tells us about her recent work with the children’s charity World Vision where she’s been trying to help eradicate child marriage in Afghanistan.According to recent research Maths anxiety is real and one in ten children suffer from despair and rage when faced with the subject. We hear from Kayla Fuller who suffered from maths anxiety at school and from Lucy Rycroft Smith a research and communications officer at Cambridge mathematics.Do cultural attitudes to women and pain stand in the way of effective treatments? We're joined by Katy Vincent, Senior Pain Fellow at the Nuffield Department of Women’s and Reproductive Health at the University of Oxford.Sonia Purnell on her book, A Woman of No Importance, about Virginia Hall an American turned British spy who overcame a lost leg to become a legend in espionage and guerrilla warfare. We hear from Julie Morgan the deputy minister for Health and Social Services in the Welsh Assembly on why she is fighting to ban smacking children in Wales.And Hallie Rubenhold tells us about the five female victims of Jack the Ripper. She's written about their lives in her new book The Five.Presented by Jenni Murray Produced by Rabeka Nurmahomed Edited by Jane ThurlowInterviewed guest: Helen Clark Interviewed guest: Kayla Fuller Interviewed guest: Lucy Rycroft Smith Interviewed guest: Katy Vincent Interviewed guest: Sonia Purnell Interviewed guest: Julie Morgan Interviewed guest: Hallie Rubenhold

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. I'm Natalia Melman-Petrozzella, and from the BBC, this is Extreme Peak Danger. The most beautiful mountain in the world. If you die on the mountain, you stay on the mountain. This is the story of what happened when 11 climbers died on one of the world's deadliest mountains, K2, and of the risks we'll take to feel truly alive. If I tell all the details, you won't believe it anymore. Extreme. Peak danger. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to Weekend Woman's Hour. On today's programme, are our cultural attitudes to women and pain standing in the way of effective treatments? And maths anxiety, it is a real thing. How can it be overcome and why should it be taken seriously? My family is the sort of family where we all walked around saying we were words people and not numbers people. And that was the message I received growing up. It was OK to not be able to do numbers.

I think that definitely impacted how I felt about it. We'll hear about the five women murdered by Jack the Ripper. What were their real stories? We'll have music inspired by Eastern Europe from the duo Fran and Flora and the remarkable tale of Virginia Hall, an American turned British spy who overcame the loss of her leg to become a legend in espionage and guerrilla warfare. She went on to sabotage, ambush missions, she blew up bridges, she attacked German convoys, all without ever being captured. It's almost one of the most extraordinary wartime tales and the fact that she survived is really quite extraordinary. She was nearly three years behind enemy lines, that's a very,

very long time. Helen Clark was Prime Minister of New Zealand between 1999 and 2008. After that, she worked for the UN Development Programme. She's just got back from looking at some world vision projects in Afghanistan, where 9% of girls are married before the age of 15. Marriage under the age of 16 is officially illegal, but some families are driven to marry off their daughters in desperate circumstances.

Western intervention was supposed to make lives better for women, but has this been the case? I first went to Afghanistan in 2003, which was probably a couple of years after the fall of the Taliban government and Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda hiding in the caves and making it out to Pakistan. And I think at that time there was perhaps some hope that things could be improved. I went back again as UNDP administrator to find Kabul much more locked down than it had been when I'd been there 12 years before. This visit I go out to the western provinces

and to see the level of poverty and deprivation there, you sit back and think, where did the trillions of dollars go? Because it didn't go to the poorest of the poor to change their lives. Well, we were told that one of the reasons we had intervened in Afghanistan was, in particular, actually, to improve the lot of women and girls. Did you see any evidence that their chances have improved? You see, public schooling is now free. But with World Vision, I was meeting families who were so poor

that it wasn't possible for the children to go to school. There may be a range of children who have to go out to work every day because dad is absent, either dead or, in some of the cases we met, addicted to drugs and not able to perform any useful function at all. And so these children, from the time they're three and four, are out on the street working. Going to school is not a practicality as well. You have to pay for your school supplies. So putting it all together, the poverty is keeping the children out of school.

Anything positive to say about it at all? So what was positive was looking at some of the programming, working with imams to help families make the decision not to sell their daughters. Now, when I went, it was very much with a focus on what was happening for women and girls and the issue of forced child marriage, which is happening for children quite young, let's say 11, 12, 13. And we met a couple of families with girls of that age where the girls had been put up for marriage, in one case by a dad who wanted to pay his bills, and in the other by a mother who could never pay her rent and agreed that, yes, her daughter could be made available for marriage.

How old were these girls? One was 12, one was 13. And we met them. They're little girls. I just can't contemplate this. And I think in both cases, they were destined to be second wives. But what made the big difference was that the imams got involved. And they have been through a training program

which tells them about the dangers of child marriage and the need for children to have a chance. And they were able to work with the families. The imams that you spoke to, that you've been involved in trying to educate, had they in the past carried out ceremonies involving child brides? These ones who now work and relate through to the Ministry of Religious Affairs don't. But they do say there are some who are not in that network, who may be more kind of very local level mullers,

who will still do it, perhaps for a small consideration. But the ones who are in the network with the Ministry of Religious Affairs, they are very much trained up to say to the families, this is not good for your daughter. What is it like for you, somebody who comes from a obviously Western society, reached an incredibly high level, Prime Minister, apart from Head of State, which wasn't a possibility for you, you couldn't have got any higher. What is it like when you encounter women and girls like this who've got just absolutely no status whatsoever in their country? Well, very, very humbling.

You sit with families and you think, how much worse can it get? With one family, a little mother in her late 20s, seven children, the oldest a 14-year-old boy. So that boy must have been born when she was around between 13 and 14, and the youngest one was two. Dad was addicted to drugs and not really home at all. In fact, better when he wasn't, was the impression that we got. Every morning, the children are put out to work. None of them go to school. No one can read in that family at all. And that was where a 12-year-old was to be put up for marriage

to pay the father's bills. Apart from the agony of all that, there was a small boy in the family who was beckoned over and the mother said, show the visitors your scar. And this boy had been working on the street. Mum couldn't find him at night. He was eventually located in a clinic where it appears he had a kidney removed. So he was kidnapped and operated on. It was horrendous.

Actually, I mean, I genuinely I'm shocked almost into silence by that. We were shocked into silence. So what I suppose I just have to come back to the question, what good has all our involvement and the loss of lives, the loss of British lives, lives of troops from all over, what has this all been about? Well, it hasn't been about development, that's for sure, because the poorest of the poor are as poor as they ever were. And here's the rub in the Western provinces, they are suffering a one in a hundred year drought. And families, desperate families, have walked away from their rural hamlets because their livestock have all

died and they've run out of food, haven't been able to grow anything for two years. So on the outskirts of Herat and the other big capital in the Bad Gis province, you have well over 300,000 people in very crude shelters. Some have decent tents, most don't. And we saw those. We went into a hospital on the edge of Herat where you saw children in as bad a condition as the ones we saw in Yemen on the television. And yet this has had almost no profile. Now, it's at the point now where there's likely to be able to be a return, but you can't return unless you have money for livestock, money for another planting. And my experience working in development for eight

years with UNDP was that it's hard enough to get money for relief sometimes, but to get money for recovery and re-establishing livelihoods can be very difficult. But that's a task that's needed right now in Afghanistan. Being Prime Minister obviously means that you have all kinds of issues come across your desk, you never know one day from the next really what you're going to be confronted by. Were you ever, in your time as Prime Minister of New Zealand, ever up against it in the way that Theresa May appears to be right now? No, no, I never faced a crisis like this. And it is a profound constitutional, political, even economic crisis for Britain. And, you know, one day I hope Theresa May will get to really tell her side of the story. But it has been an extraordinary series

of events to watch from afar. What would you say about it? Well, from my perspective as a New Zealander, we have had one major set of referenda on a constitutional issue and that was on the nature of the voting system. We never would have dreamed of doing it in a single referendum. We did it in a two-stage. We first asked people whether they wanted

the change and if so to indicate what the form of it would be. We then came back with a second referendum with all the details worked out and I think that was what was missing in Britain. So what do you think now then? We should have another referendum? Well that's asking me to get into the British political debate. Purely theoretically. But it should never have been set up as a one-stage referendum. And again, the gender question. Some people say women tend to become leaders of countries when, frankly, the going isn't particularly good and no man would be willing to take it on.

Any view on that? I think when all else fails, often people will turn to women to do the job, yes. In fact, you could say that Jacinda, in a sense, has been a beneficiary of that, because after I left New Zealand politics, my party went through four male leaders, none of whom could get the party into a winning position. Seven weeks out from an election when things were dire, they turned to Jacinda and said, please do it. And look what happened. I mean, she's been a star, but she was turned to

when they were in desperate need. Have you talked to her recently? I've been in touch with her, yes. And just again, human interest, I'm not going to ask you to give away any secrets, but how is she? She's very strong and she's run really completely on instinct. There's no script for what you need to do in a tragedy like this. But I think the New Zealand way when something like this affects our people is we all rally around. It's been very, very inclusive. Jacinda said a good tone, but also from the community up, New Zealanders have embraced the Muslim community in cities and towns across New Zealand. Helen Clark. New research from Cambridge University's Faculty of Education and Neuroscience confirms that maths anxiety is real. One in 10 children suffer from despair

and rage when faced with the subject. My daughter has a total phobia of maths. She is now 15 and we are struggling to find a sixth form that she can attend because it is extremely unlikely that she will get her maths GCSE. Her problems with maths have shaped her whole education, confidence and sense of self. No exaggeration. It is like a form of punishment and has a constant impact on her life. Maths anxiety started in primary school for my daughter.

Now she thinks she is rubbish and can't do anything. Maths anxiety leaks into science lessons and any subjects that might contain numbers. Learning mathematics when I was at school was for me a completely alien subject. I would sit in class with tears rolling down my face and when confronted by my teacher as to why I hadn't written anything she would then very quickly go over the same problems and then leave me to it. I always find it stressful and yet what was very amusing years later I had to do my own VAT returns which funnily enough I quite enjoyed. As a child I studied my times table over

and over again with my grandfather and he assured me they'd stick. They never did and never have and when I used to get made to stand up and answer questions in front of the class I would feel sick, my face would burn red and I just dreaded it. I still feel the same and every time I'm in a work or social situation where numbers come up, I desperately try to hide my panic. The research in Cambridge surveyed 1,700 British pupils from 8 to 13. Why is it so frightening

and what can parents and teachers do to make maths less scary? Kayla Fuller is a digital communications coordinator at National Numeracy. Lucy Rycroft-Smith is research and communications officer at Cambridge Mathematics. What is maths anxiety? The first thing to say is that primarily it would be categorised as an emotional response and you heard lots of emotional words there from people who are saying, as you say, that they felt despair or rage or moved to tears. But actually, it also might manifest in a physical response, in a behavioral response.

So all of the stories that we heard there about people feeling frozen, feeling that they couldn't persist with what they were trying to do because of some sort of obstacle. And so that that sense in which it moves beyond just not being able to do something or feeling frightened, that actually it overtakes your brain in some sense. It co-ops your working memory. So you're actually in that very adrenaline-raised state of fear to the point where you just feel you can't do anything at all. Keller, I know you had it. How did it make you feel when you were going through it?

When I was originally taking my maths GCSE, which was 20 years ago now, I definitely suffered from maths anxiety. I would sit in class and my behavioural response was to disengage because I would feel stress and panic and fear, I think, a fear of humiliation, of being, I want to use the expression, picked on to answer a question, which I think is quite telling. So as a teacher, Lucy, what impact does this have on a child's behaviour in school and their attainment? As a teacher, when I'm faced with a student who is refusing to engage, my first response might be frustration and annoyance, because I might feel

that actually that's a behavioural issue that's nothing to do with my subject and actually it's very difficult to disentangle sometimes the effects of maths anxiety with just students who are being oppositional or difficult but one of the things to think about is that perhaps sometimes this is a response as exactly as Kayla said to a feeling of humiliation feeling ashamed and so it's my first duty as a teacher to make sure that pupils are feeling comfortable and comfortable enough to experiment and take risks because that's what maths is all about. It's about making mistakes. The report, Kayla, does say that teachers and parents

may actually inadvertently play a part in it. How much do you reckon that was in your case? I definitely think it had a role to play. My family is the sort of family where we all walked around saying we were words people and not numbers people and that was the message I received growing up. walked around saying we were words people and not numbers people. And that was the message I received growing up. It was OK to not be able to do numbers.

I think that definitely impacted how I felt about it. It does seem to be the case that girls suffer more than boys, Lucy. Why? Yes, I think there's potentially three different aspects of that. One might be that girls just generally suffer from a lack of confidence compared to boys. And that's the same for women and men as well that persists into adulthood often you will find that women feel they need to be more competent objectively speaking than men in order to cross certain thresholds another aspect might be stereotype threat which is the research idea that if you're reminded that you're a member of a particular group and there's a particularly strong stereotype about that group i.e that girls are worse at math than boys then your performance actually suffers as a result of that just being reminded that you're

female before you do a maths test can affect your mathematics performance you did overcome it yes how i reset my maths gcse as an adult i was almost 30 when i did it and i got an a and i got an a i know which i think i definitely went into the first class still feeling very maths anxious. And it didn't go well. That first lesson, they the teacher set a test when we on the first day just to get a baseline, I think, of where everybody was. And I sat there and my stomach flipped over. My palms were sweaty and my mind went so blank that I couldn't remember how to do things that I knew how to do but I kept on going because I think at that age I had a really good grasp of the value of what I was doing and I also had more resilience because I had life experience to draw on to know that I could overcome things if I needed to. What are we going to do to help the children who are

suffering now because exams are coming up tests are coming up to do to help the children who are suffering now because exams are coming up tests are coming up what do we do? So luckily there are some researchers in the field doing really great work on this some some of whom have been working for some time and the idea really is that like any other stress response you want to find a balance point a sweet spot so in maths if you're working on things that are repetitive and tedious and that you know how to do nobody's learning anything. It's quite boring. You won't actually register much of any kind of stress or anxiety. Similarly, if you go the other way and something is way too stressful and challenging, it might be the maths itself that's too challenging or it might be the context.

It might be the fact that it's time pressured or you feel there's a danger of public humiliation. You're not learning then either. In the middle, however, you're growing, you're learning, you're making mistakes, you are slightly overreaching and then coming back and you're able to be creative and experiment. And in order to allow students to find that mid ground, sometimes we actually have to present them with these sorts of models and give them the language and the framework to be able to conceptualise the way that they're learning, as well as the learning itself. I was very careful never to say to my boys that i was bad at maths what would you say to your children you can be good at maths it's not hard or just let them go i i probably wouldn't say that it's not hard because i think that's sometimes yeah i think that's part of it and it's um helping them to

understand that even when it is hard you can still keep going with it and get there in the end it's not going to be it's not necessarily always going to be easy um but i've it's difficult to not draw on your own experience and if you did really dislike maths at school and had a terrible experience it's so easy to fall into that trap of saying don't worry i hated maths at school or even saying things like you don't really need maths I think it's really important to be positive. Well Paula emailed to say I'm a former primary school teacher currently working on a doctorate which includes work on maths anxiety. I'd just like to raise the point that the government is bringing in compulsory times tables tests next year for all eight and

nine year olds. This will be under time pressure and is completely counter to all the research on anxiety it's likely to have a really detrimental effect on anxiety levels and enjoyment of maths it will focus teaching on learning by rote rather than conceptual understanding knowledge of times tables are useful but but certainly not the be-all and end-all. Vivian says, just want to say that the anxiety in my case was in art and geography lessons. I couldn't draw and didn't understand many geographical concepts. I was in a girls' grammar school and got no help whatsoever with these things. It's the teaching that's at fault and the empathy that's missing.

And just one more from Teresa who says, I have a daughter who struggled severely with maths. She couldn't sleep the night before a maths lesson, which included standing up and saying their times tables. I contacted the school, explained the situation and took control of my daughter's maths development. She gained a B in her GCSE and went on to gain a 2.1 in her science degree, has landed a super job and is developing well in her profession.

I urge any parent to work on a one-to-one basis with their child. Within a few months, you will see an amazing development academically, but more importantly, their confidence and well-being. This week in the news, we heard about the British woman who doesn't feel pain. Jo Cameron is one of only two people in the world known to have a rare genetic mutation, which means she not only feels no pain, she doesn't feel anxious or afraid. Well, we wanted to discuss how pain fits into female identity and whether our cultural attitudes to women and pain

are standing in the way of effective treatments. Katie Vincent is Senior Pain Fellow and Consultant Gynaecologist at the Nuffield Department of Women's and Reproductive Health at the University of Oxford. Before we hear from her, have a listen to this. It's Kristen Scott Thomas guest starring in a recent episode of the TV series Fleabag. Listen, I was in an aeroplane the other day and I realised, well, I mean, I've been longing to say this out loud.

Women are born with pain built in. It's our physical destiny. period pains, sore boobs childbirth, you know we carry it within ourselves, throughout our lives men don't they have to seek it out they invent all these gods and demons

so they can feel guilty about things which is something we do very well on our own and then they create wars so they can feel things and touch each other. And when there aren't any wars, they can play rugby. And we have it all going on in here, inside. We have pain on a cycle for years and years and years.

And then, just when you feel you are making peace with it all, what happens? The menopause comes, the menopause comes. But then, you're free it's so unfair Katie what do you make of that I think that really exemplifies the fact that it's not just us as doctors that need to change our attitudes to women's pain it's women themselves it's not just the fact that when girls and women present with period pain to their GP or to the gynaecologist, it's also when girls say to their mums that they're in pain with their periods that their mums need to take them to the doctors rather than saying, well, I had to put up with it,

so so do you. I think it's really sad if the first time a young girl plucks up the courage to tell her mum or her teacher that sex is painful, if the person that she tells says, well, sex was painful for me too, that's what you've got to put up with, then she's going to believe that. She's probably never going to pluck up the courage to tell someone else. Why is it? I mean, it's fine to say I've got a really bad migraine and I'm not going to be able to go to work, but far less acceptable to say you have hellish period pain. And I think that is one of the problems with a lot of women's pain is it's

very intimate it's very personal and so we don't talk about it. It's fine to say you've got a migraine it's fine to say your foot hurts after a rugby match because that's something you should be proud of but to say you've got period pain or you had sex last night so your vulva really hurts, that's not something you want to talk about in the office. But I think we should acknowledge that men do have sex-related pain and we don't treat that very well either. So maybe that's something that is increasing and we don't discuss that very often either. How is women's pain characteristically different? It's yesterday

hearing about this woman, one of two in the world, she doesn't feel pain sparked a lot of conversations about pain, but also women and pain specifically. I think there is an increasing interest in whether there really are gender differences in the experience of pain. And there's been a lot of research on that over recent years and some of it has been very good and some of it's not been conducted as well perhaps as it could have been so we've got quite blurred evidence but I think in some ways there are differences in the experience and certainly women's pain in general will often vary across the cycle. And that's not just pain associated with periods, but pain, for example, related to bowel function, pain related to bladder function.

Migraines can all change across the menstrual cycle. And men don't have that variation. Their physiology, the way their bodies behave is much more consistent on a day-to-day basis. How much of this is down to our hormones and how does our hormonal cycle affect the pain we experience? So again, that's something that we're only just beginning to really understand and unravel, but certainly we're beginning to see that hormones definitely do have an effect on all sorts of different things within the body not just on what we would classically think of as reproductive function so we understand now that our hormones affect how our muscles work how our brains work how our psychology works we all know that they affect our mood for example and we're beginning to see that our hormones also affect in some different ways how we perceive pain

and certainly things like for example migraine are very well understood to have a hormonally driven component to them. If hormones play such a big part in how we experience all these things pain included why is there so little research into it? I think that's a really good question and I think in some ways it's just because people haven't really thought of hormones outside of the context of general gynecology and reproductive health and we've really focused very much on them as a way of thinking about contraception or as a way of treating menopausal symptoms or very clear gynecological things like endometriosis or fibroids for example and I think also there's been resistance to use

them for other things because we've worried about the side effects of hormones there have been big publicity about clots for example in association with the pill or breast cancer risk in association with HRT and so people who aren't familiar with using them have worries about them and I think we need to dispel some of those myths because we know that a lot of the modern day hormone preparations are very very safe and we should be focusing on the benefits of these hormones rather than worrying about the risk. The pill is used to treat very heavy periods and period pain do we need to do more of that? In my view absolutely and I think again we need to think that we would use these treatments as contraception very happily for young girls so why are we so

resistant about the idea of using them as a treatment why are we because you say that's my view what's the opposing view well I think again people tend to think that periods are normal and period pain is normal so why do we think we need to medicalise it and for girls who are happy with their periods and where they're not causing them problems then we don't need to medicalise it but I think if girls are missing days off school or it's getting in the way of their lives then we know that we have very safe hormonal preparations that we would happily give to them as contraception to stop them getting pregnant and therefore why should we be letting their periods get in the way of their lives. How can we get to potential treatments if there's a reluctance to acknowledge the causes and little

research in this area? So I think education is the first thing that we need to do. And I think, as you highlighted really well with that clip right at the beginning, that's got to be education at all levels. It's got to be education of teenagers. It's got to be education of their mothers, their grandmothers, their teachers. And it's got to be education of healthcare professionals across the board. Katie Vincent. Caroline emailed to say as a retired woman having worked in male-dominated fields

and in women-only environments with qualifications in management and also in health and safety, it's starkly clear that there is a gender bias in health at work. It's OK for men to have weeks off with flu or back pain in a year, yet if women have the same number of days off, a few each month over a year, Still to come on the programme, music from Fran and Flora and why smacking children could be banned in Wales. A year ago, Gina Haspel became the first female director of the CIA and talked about how grateful she was to the heroines on whose shoulders she stood who had never sought public acclaim.

One of the women to whom she was referring was Virginia Hall, who's the subject of a new biography called A Woman of No Importance. She was American and became a spy for Britain during the Second World War. The Gestapo described her as the most dangerous of all Allied spies and said, we must find and destroy her. Sonia Pannell is the author. Before the Second World War, she had wanted to be an ambassador, been her lifelong dream, and she'd been continually rejected initially because she's a woman no women had been ambassadors before in America and then after she lost her her leg in a hunting accident because she was disabled she'd been dismissed as a woman of no importance

whatsoever but in fact she went on to become a very important woman indeed. So how did that accident happen? I think she was 27 when she had her leg amputated. She was out hunting. She was a great sort of adventurous tomboy type who loved country sports, loved riding, hunting. She was out shooting with a party of friends in Turkey, had an accident. She tripped the safety catch. It wasn't on her gun. It got caught in her coat. She grabbed it and shot herself in the foot.

Gangrene, I'm afraid, set in. She nearly died two or three times. There was no other way of saving her apart from cutting off her leg. So what sort of personality drove a woman who'd been through that to go on fighting and become one of the spies most feared by the Nazis. It's extraordinary, isn't it? In a way, I think perhaps her accident spurred her on. As I said, she was adventurous before then, but that gave her extraordinary steel.

What she didn't want to do was just to be resigned to a quiet, narrow life at home. She wanted to be out there to make a difference. She had to prove that there was a reason that her life had been saved, that there was a way that she could still make herself useful. Well, I mean, some of us wouldn't think of becoming a spy to do that, but she did. And she went into, on a mission, they gave her a 50-50 chance of survival, but she still went. But how was she recruited into the SOE? I mean, this young American woman who'd had a very close relationship with her father suddenly is recruited.

Well, first of all, she ended up driving ambulances for the French army, the front line, under intense bombardment and machine gun fire. She got through that. She was wanting to go to Britain to volunteer to do anything she could to fight fascism, even though America wasn't in the war at that point. An extraordinary sliding doors moment. She was noticed by an undercover British agent in a railway station in Spain. She told him a little about what she'd done so far and that she wanted to do more. He slipped a phone number into her hand and said, when you get to

London, call this friend of mine and he might be able to find something for you to do. Through that tiny, extraordinary slither of chance, she ended up doing this role. So who did she recruit to work with her when she was on her spying mission? So she arrived in France. There was no reception committee. She had to set up her own network pretty much from scratch. One of the first people she recruited, unbelievably, was the local brothel madam, an extraordinarily sexy, glamorous woman by the name of Germaine Goin in her 30s who went on to do extraordinary heroic things and also brought in the local VD doctor, Dr. Rousset. And these two became her chief lieutenants. So not exactly the most likely spies either. So how did they operate? Well, they set up safe houses. They looked after escapees. They found prisoners of war who'd managed

to escape. They got downed pilots into safe houses and then out into Spain. Slowly, slowly, they put these networks together of railwaymen, government officials, all sorts of people who could help in any way, find food, find fuel. And

they set up a nucleus, a network that was the nucleus, really really of the future secret army and she men with her sex workers or prostitutes as they called them then they would spy on the German clients so when they they drug the German clients and when they were asleep they would photograph important documents in their uniforms and send all this intelligence to Virginia who would send it back to London. Extraordinary thing. So why did the Gestapo describe her as the most dangerous of all Allied spies?

Because she was in the field for so long, she always managed to elude capture. She changed her name constantly. The way that she looked, her fieldcraft was superb. The CIA even now use a lot of the fieldcraft that she pioneered at that point in their operations to this very day. So she managed to elude them. She also managed to break all sorts of agents out of jails and these spectacular operations that remarkably we've never heard of. Later on, she went on to sabotage, ambush missions. She blew up bridges.

She attacked German convoys, all without ever being captured. It is almost one of the most extraordinary wartime tales. And the fact that she survived is really quite extraordinary. She was nearly three years behind enemy lines. That's a very, very long time. And the Germans particularly hated women spies, didn't they? And if they captured them, there seems to be evidence that they tortured them more viciously than men. I'm afraid that's true.

What they did, I won't describe on radio, is too appalling. The torture was extremely vicious and would include, if they could, if it was the local women, would include their children. I mean, they were barbaric. Virginia knew about this. She knew the price of capture. And slowly the Germans pieced together a picture of her. So they knew her as the limping lady.

They knew after a while that she had a false leg. And so she had to be very careful in the way that she walked to try and disguise her limp, take really, really long strides to try and disguise that. But she still operated right under their noses and managed to escape them. It's extraordinary. Why is so little known about her? She has been known, her existence has been known, but her full story has never really been told before.

And I think for various reasons. After the war, she wanted to go on being a secret agent. So she was one of the first women to join the CIA. And so she didn't want people talking about her. So she never trumpeted her own operations. She also didn't really fit into kind of the traditional, conventional female, feminine narrative that took hold after the war in the 50s, particularly when everything

was very conservative. People quite resented her. Men at the CIA in particular resented the fact that she'd done so much during the war, almost always more than they had. So it was a kind of way of keeping her quiet. It didn't really fit into this narrative. And I have to say, it took me three years to find out about her. I mean, intense kind of detective work, drawing together all these elements of what she did because she operated in so many different places under so many different disguises.

I mean, she employed Hollywood makeup artists at one point to teach her how to draw wrinkles on her face that would make her appear much older than she really was. She went to extraordinary lengths. In fact, when I was researching the book, it's a bit like we were playing cat and mouse ourselves. So she was quite elusive, even with me. Now, she died in 1982. How did she spend her life after the war? I mean, you said she worked in the CIA, but she did marry eventually, didn't she? She did. She found great happiness with a guy who was quite a lot younger than her

and a very different personality. She was this formidable, phenomenal, badass woman. He was kind of cheeky, laughing, rather fun guy. And they complemented each other very well. But the problem was that her mother didn't approve of him. So this extraordinary spy still didn't want to upset her mother. So for a long time they pretended they weren't together and didn't marry for a long time just to keep Barbara, her mother, happy.

So it's funny how far we all go perhaps to keep our parents happy even though we are extraordinary war heroes in her case. Sonia Purnell was talking to Jenny. Smacking children in Wales could be banned after the Welsh Assembly published a bill removing reasonable punishment as a defence. If it's made law, children will get the same protection from physical punishment as adults.

Julie Morgan is the Deputy Minister for Health and Social Services in the Welsh Assembly. How likely does she think the bill will be made law? We're publishing the bill today. I'll be making a statement tomorrow and it will go through the normal scrutiny process that all bills go through and I'm hopeful that it will become law probably towards the beginning of next year. And it will be a first, won't it, for the country as a whole, the UK, I mean? The government is promoting this bill in Wales. In Scotland, a private member's bill is going through at about the same time. But certainly,

it's the first government proposed bill in the UK. Right. And why do you feel so strongly about this? Well, I've campaigned for this for, I think it's about 20 years, because it's always seemed wrong to me that a big person can use physical punishment against a little one and that children have less protection from physical punishment than adults.

And I've also felt it's the wrong message to give to children. Is this the way we want children to think that we deal with difficulties? So I've always been a strong campaigner for this. And I'm really proud now that the Welsh government in the Assembly is taking this forward. Well, it does put the Welsh government ahead,

as I say, of the rest of the UK, because in England and in Northern Ireland and Scotland, reasonable chastisement can still be used as a defence. What do you think of that? Well, it really muddies the water because the sort of message that we want, frontline midwives and health visitors who are there to help parents with a very difficult job of bringing up children, when there is a reasonable defence

that people can put forward if they do use physical punishment, it means they're not being able to give clear messages. Because we want children to have the very best start in life. We want them to grow up with good standards. And I think that this defence does make that very difficult. Can I ask a bit of a personal question? But were you smacked as a child? I wasn't smacked and I've got three children and I've got eight grandchildren as well and I haven't smacked my children but I do understand that you know you do get sometimes

you know to the end of your tether bringing up children is a very difficult job and I think we need as much help and support as you possibly can have as parents. So one of the things we're going to do, we're not introducing this law in isolation. We're making sure that there's a lot of support for parents, a lot of education, a lot of information. And we see it, you know, as our role in the government to lead. But we want to make parents know that there's always somebody to go to to help them in these difficult crises. So when we actually introduce the bill, which is, of course, today, we will be planning a long introductory period. So if we get royal assent early next year, we'll probably have up to two years to continue a programme of, you know,

information and education and parenting classes and doing all the things that we need to do to support parents. Yeah, I mean, it's hard to criticise from many perspectives, but there will be some people who feel very, very strongly that this is deeply patronising and it's the living embodiment of the nanny state, if you like. Oh, I've no doubt that we will have some very lively discussions over this next year. And I'm really looking forward to that because it's really important when we make law that we do take into account all the different points that people want to make.

But I will say that most people are very grateful for any help that you can give them when they are bringing up children. And I don't really take that that you say about it being patronising. Julie Morgan. Few different opinions on this have come in. Graham on email says, when my son was 15, he got in trouble with the police in Cheshire. I accompanied him for an interview with a police inspector. The officer realised my son was not the main culprit.

He said he was sure I would deal with him at home. I took my daughter's horse whip to him. Elena says, I am a 12-year-old female. I feel that there should be a bond of respect between parents and their offspring and that the child should feel at ease with their parent. Any kind of physical violence undermines this. And this from Shane. and lack of empathy. As a father now with four children, I have never smacked any of them and I think it should be illegal to physically abuse children. Fran and Flora are a musical duo, a cellist and a violinist, whose first album, Unfurl, has been greatly lauded by critics.

Their work is rooted in or inspired by the traditional folk tunes of Eastern Europe. Francesca, the cellist, how would you describe the music that you play? In its essence, it's traditional, mostly klezmer and Romanian tunes that we've been learning for about ten years, going on adventures and things. But because we have lots of other influences, from early music, classical, to free jazz and experimental electronics and things, on the album we've incorporated all of that together. And so we've really kept to the tradition as hardcore as we can. Like that was a composition from Transylvania.

It's a modal sort of arrhythmic piece, but we kept it quite free and with an improvisational like essence. Yeah. Flora, clutching the violin. Why were you influenced by music rooted in Eastern Europe? Yeah, I mean, you're London and Buckinghamshire. Yeah, I don't have a Jewish background or heritage from Eastern Europe, but I was just so drawn to the soulfulness of the music. And I guess I first heard it on pop

records about 10 years ago, just little snippets of violin playing either from the Romanian or the Jewish traditions, which I didn't know, I wouldn't have been able to identify those back then, and have since just wanted to get to know how it works and how to play it. The fun and the freedom of it has just really spoke to me. Now Francesca, the klezmer, the traditional Jewish style, and you do have a Jewish background, has tended to be dominated by male musicians. How welcome into the style are two young women? I think back in the day, traditionally it would have been male, although women would have played and sung at home. But nowadays, I'd say it's not 50-50,

but there are a lot of women playing. And especially in the US, there's a lot of women being celebrated playing. And that's been going on since the 70s. I think we're totally welcome. It's just we have to stand up for ourselves. That's the challenge, but we're trying our best. Now, Transylvania is one of the places that you've gone to study and learn how to do this. It has that kind of slightly scary feel about just the name what was it actually like it was amazing we went to um study with a guy called marcel ramba in turga muresh he's actually

a very experienced teacher so he was used to welcoming people from sort of west like more western cultures in basically his wife cooked for us all day and then we just sat there and played tunes like for hours and hours and hours. It was cool. Now as I said Flora was clutching her violin. You have your cello between your knees. Flora you're going to play Romanian Fantasies. Tell me something about the music and what we're going to hear. So this is a very old tune, recorded in about 1910 by a violinist called Jozef Solinsky and it's part of a set of four tunes called The Romanian Fantasies and we've kind of put together two of them

to make a little medley. Away you go. Thank you. Fran and Flora, and their album is Unfurl. Mary Ann Nicholls, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly. Names you probably won't recognise. They were all victims of the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper. On Tuesday, Hallie Rubenhold spoke to Jane about her new book, The Five. What was life like generally for women in the late 19th century? If you were a poor woman in Victorian London, I mean, it was absolutely essential that you were part of a family group.

You know, this idea that we have today that being single is somehow empowering was certainly not the case in the Victorian era, especially if you were poor, but really for any woman. And women were wholly dependent on men really for their subsistence, for their livelihood. I mean, they could contribute to family income, but society was designed in a way so that women could never be the breadwinners. Let's talk then more specifically about these five women. First of all, they are popularly believed to have all been sex workers, all from Whitechapel in East London. Neither of those two things are actually true. Absolutely untrue. This is the thing that people find so fascinating about this is every conception we have about them is almost a misconception. And that's largely down to the

fact that the media over the years has popularized this image of these kind of young sex workers sauntering under the gas lights, which isn't true at all. None of them originally came from White Chapel, but they all ended up there. And my research found that there is only conclusive evidence to suggest that two were involved in sex work at all. And how do you know that two probably were? Because there are actual records. And there are, you know, in the case of Mary Jane Kelly, there was a very, very clear paper trail that she was. And she self-identified as that. With Elizabeth Stride, again, there's a very clear paper trail.

We find it in the records. We know that she came from Gothenburg, Sweden, and there are police records stating that she was a sex worker. How did she get to London? Well, she was an immigrant. She found herself in, I think the only way we can describe it is kind of state-sanctioned prostitution in Gothenburg, which she basically found herself pregnant. She'd been a servant and then she found herself in prostitution because at the time in Sweden, it was believed that a woman without a partner who was pregnant could only be one thing. And so that meant that the only door open to her was prostitution.

She eventually got out of that, but not without syphilis. And then she was able to immigrate to the UK. Annie Chapman, they're all sad stories, it goes without saying, but Annie Chapman's story struck me as being particularly tragic, not least because her family were on the up. They could have gone places. Annie's story really moved me as well. And Annie's story moves really quite a lot of people. I mean, Annie had an opportunity really to have a better and more comfortable life and for her family as

well. She was the daughter of a man who was a trooper in the Second Lifeguard. So he was part of the household cavalry, who then became a gentleman's valet. So if you can imagine Bates in Downton, that's what her father was. And then she married a gentleman's coachman and she lived on a country estate just outside of Windsor with her husband. And it's even believed that she sent her daughters

to a fee-paying school. But Annie was an alcoholic. I mean, she had inherited alcoholism from her father. And the evils of drink, gin alley, all that stuff, I really felt the impact of alcohol and alcohol abuse in your book. We don't actually, it's almost like we've forgotten about all this, but women were really brought to absolute destitution by addiction to that particular drug. Yes, and it affected everybody. And it's, you know, you can really understand when groups like the Salvation Army came into the slums and were trying to persuade people to embrace temperance. Because really even saving that little bit amount, that little bit of money that you would have normally spent

on drink would have made an enormous difference in somebody's life it would have made an enormous difference in the quality of their lives in the quality of their children's lives and yet alcohol was always there it was cheap it was cheaper than food in some cases cheaper than food yes it was always available of course it kept you warm and it kept you warm and it warded off melancholy as well. Let's talk then about the industry surrounding the serial killer because that is monumental and that is why you have had such a tough time researching the lives of these women. Yeah, I think, you know, we have some very fixed cultural beliefs about who these women were and what they did. And I think, you know, from the very outset, it was believed by the police and by the press that these women had been sex workers. And there's very little question about, you know, whether this was true or not.

And as a result, I think it's something we just have accepted over the years. Why have we accepted it? You know, that's a very good question because I think there is still very much a current in our own society, and there always has been, that bad women deserve to be punished. Yes, just remind everybody of what the judge said in the summing up of the serial killer in Suffolk. It's relatively recent, a couple of years ago.

It's extraordinary. I mean, here we are in the 21st century. And so the Suffolk stranger, Steve Wright, when his judge was doing the summing up for the jury, he basically said, I want you to disregard everything you think you know about these women, every judgment you have about the drugs they took, the lifestyle they led. And I just want you to realise that whether or not you agree with this, these women did not deserve to be murdered. And the fact that we had to say that today in the 21st century

kind of tells you everything you need to know. And I know you also feel passionate about what's taught in schools because this sort of, I suppose you could call it loosely popular history, is a way, or so we're told, of inviting young people into history. But it's a very difficult area. Yeah, I mean, it was really interesting as I was doing the work for the book. Some of the things that I came across were teaching materials that were available online.

Just absolutely extraordinary. Like, you know, copy this mutilated picture of Mary Jane Kelly into this box. Copy this picture? Yes. Yeah. Unbelievable. I don't know what purpose this actually even serves. But I've had teachers getting in touch with me and saying, yes, there are some teachers who go full pelt on this,

who really go blood and guts in order to get the kids interested in the subject matter. And there are other teachers who steer well away from it. Right. What do you think should happen? Well, I think there are other more creative ways of introducing the topic of the Victorian slum and Victorian social conditions other than relying on Jack the Ripper. Hallie Rubenhold. And on Easter Monday, we'll be talking about the rise in popularity of true crime,

podcasts and TV documentaries. That's it from us. Join Jane on Monday morning when we'll have the first in a series of discussions with women about their wigs. And we hear from women who are wearing wigs after their cancer treatment. We we hear from women who are wearing wigs after their cancer treatment. We'll talk about women and shame.

And we'll hear about the sculptor Anne Acheson. That's Monday morning, just after 10 with Jane. But from me today, goodbye. I'm Sarah Treleaven, and for over a year, I've been working on one of the most complex stories I've ever covered. There was somebody out there who was faking pregnancies. I started like warning everybody.

Every doula that I know. It was fake. No pregnancy. And the deeper I dig, the more questions I unearth. How long has she been doing this? What does she have to gain from this? From CBC and the BBC World Service, The Con, Caitlin's Baby. It's a long story. Settle in.

Available now.