Woman's Hour - Jessie & Lennie Ware, Christina Lamb, Barriers to disclosing sexual violence.

Episode Date: March 14, 2020

We hear from the singer turned interviewer Jessie Ware and her mum Lennie about their hit podcast Table Manners, where they cook dinner for a different celebrity every week. They’ve turned their favourite recipes into a cook book. Black Women and sexual violence. What are the cultural barriers making it difficult for black women to discuss and disclose sexual violence? And what is cultural betrayal theory?Chief Foreign correspondent Christina Lamb tells us about her new book ‘Our Bodies Their Battlefield'. And we talk about the signficance of Women’s History Month with Professor Selina Todd and Professor Krista Cowman.Presenter Jane Garvey. Producer Siobhann TigheInterviewed guests: Jessie Ware Lennie Ware Christina Lamb Leanne Levers Jennifer Gómez Selina Todd Krista Cowman

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, good afternoon. Welcome to the weekend edition of Woman's Hour. And this week you can hear from the Sunday Times chief foreign correspondent, Christina Lamb. She's written a brilliant new book about sexual violence in wartime. We'll also meet the stars of the hit podcast, Table Manners. They are the singer-songwriter Jessie Ware and her mum Lenny. That's a little bit later, but we start with a conversation about the legacy of the American basketball star Kobe Bryant,

who was killed in a helicopter crash in January, alongside eight other people, including his 13-year-old daughter. Kobe was much more around the world and his legacy was celebrated. But other people did highlight an incident in his past. In 2003, he'd been accused of sexual assault. The case was dropped after the accuser refused to testify. He later apologised to the woman and to her family. Opinions are now split on how he should be remembered and it sparked a debate around race and gender in the States. In particular, the way that black women have been criticised if they make allegations against black men. Dr Leanne Levers has a PhD in politics and

international studies. Jennifer Gomez is an assistant professor for the Department of Psychology at Wayne State University in Michigan. Jennifer told me how she felt about the criticism of some black women. I think what is striking to me is that the outrage that is heaved and put on towards black women who disclose sexual violence by black men or who simply discuss it, that outrage is not matched by outrage against actually sexual violence against black women. And so if we're thinking about what is betrayal and what is cultural betrayal, what is the solidarity that we owe each other as black people, it strikes me that what we're demanding culturally is that black women endure sexual violence over and over for decades. And black men who perpetrate violence, which is not all black men by any

stretch, but the black men who do, we should still be loyal to them. And that the framing around, you know, Harvey Weinstein, Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, all of these white men who have been operating with relative immunity, that somehow black men should be able to operate with the same level of immunity. And if they can't, then there's something wrong with that. And there is something wrong with that, that there's a racism problem here. But I don't think the answer to that racism problem is to silence Black women in the process who are being sexually abused. And I think that what we're doing is actually obliterating the wealth of psychological research that provides real factual information about the nature of

sexual offending, the ideas of power structures, the ideas of the difficulties that the Black community faces in terms of poverty, education, the effects, the impact of slavery and colonialism on gender interaction that we see to this day. And that kind of behavior, that failure to have those discussions is really actually detrimental to protecting black men who are not out there victimizing other black women or white women for that matter. There's a real cognitive dissonance about holding our heroes or our black men to account. When we look at our heroes, whether we're talking about, you know, Martin Luther King Jr. ranging from straight back to Kobe, they all had flaws, you know, usually personal,

usually involving their interaction with women. And I think understanding those flaws actually makes the idea of their contributions much more realistic and much more attainable for people because it makes, without doing that and without acknowledging that they are actually fallible human beings, those goals that they've achieved and their contributions seem that much further away from the average Jew. And I think that's a great thing about someone like Barack Obama, who is very transparent and who is very

open and honest and holds himself to account across the board. He was, of course, one of many people who paid tribute to Kobe. And I think there's nothing wrong with that. As I said, I think there's no problem in acknowledging the contributions that he's made while utilizing the discussion of his past to have an open and honest discussion about sexual violence. I think it's the intention behind the discussion, really. I don't agree with anybody discussing his past as a way of villainizing him or somehow tainting his legacy, but rather using it as a starting point to have a real discussion about sexual violence in the black community.

Well, tell us, Jennifer, has there been a real discussion about it? Yes, I think so. I think something that we are noticing that is different from 2003 is part of our framing is different. I think what Leanne was pointing to with this protection for black men being so strong. And I think when we turn the frame into who is being impacted here by the sexual violence and we frame it not around black men, some of whom are perpetrators, some who are not, but around black women, what we're seeing is that it's about 30 percent of black women in their lifetime are sexually assaulted. In the U.S., 40% of victims of sex trafficking are black girls under the age of 18. 40%. And black girls certainly do not make up 40% of our population here. And so what I think has happened from 2003 to now with the Me Too movement here, with black women, Tarana Burke,

in framing sexual violence as a problem that does happen in the Black community, it's by default had to highlight the sexism against Black women, both in the Black community and from people outside, from white people outside, as well as the racism that is experienced. And I think what is heartening to me and what is hopeful to me is that we are having these conversations in much more nuanced ways than we have in the past. And a lot of the silence that we've had in this protection for what is black and what is black being construed as what is black man has changed to black women really starting to become part of the forefront of this conversation and black women's pain beginning to matter here. Jennifer Gomez and Leanne Levers. Now it's important that we say that that was part, just part, of a much longer discussion also featuring the black music and culture journalist and lecturer Jacqueline Springer and you can find that on BBC Sounds. It was part of Friday Morning's edition of Woman's Hour.

Now, Jessie Ware is well known as a singer and songwriter, but she also has a very successful podcast with her mum, Lenny. It's called Table Manners, and they cook a Friday night dinner with a guest who they chat to. Famous people have done it, the likes of Sam Smith and Ed Sheeran, Paloma Faith, Jo Brand. It's become so popular that the duo have now published their own cookery book. And here they are talking to Jenny. Jessie, what prompted the idea of a podcast of Friday night dinner with your mother? I think I was always so interested in other people's stories and I was sick of talking about myself.

Being in music, it's so self-involved and um and all consuming about you you you so I wanted to have conversations with other people and I thought the best way of kind of having a conversation and not feeling like an interview was having my mum who is the best host I know the best cook I know cooking for these guests and us sitting around the table and having a chat which felt very informal and light and and talking about family and nostalgia and food memories and some I don't know what happened but everyone seems to quite like it and mum is the absolute star of the show Lenny what was your response to the idea because it sounds to me as if it was assumed that you would be the cook it was I was supposed to be in the background. I didn't know what a podcast was.

I thought I was just cooking for Jessie to chat to friends and I thought this would help her improve her interviewing process. And it just took on from there because I couldn't resist joining in with the conversation. You never have been able to resist joining in with the conversation, I suspect. I think that's right. It does sound, though, Jessie, as if it's not always an easy ride. Mother, daughter, one kitchen. Yeah, I mean, mum showed me tough love in the kitchen. She wasn't one of those ones that,

you know, here's your pinny, let's go and let's bake. It you're doing it wrong you're doing it wrong and I learned that way but actually I'm a pretty good cook from it so thank you mother um but yeah we're living together at the moment which has been testing but we're nearly out the end of it and we've managed to make a podcast together and write a cookbook in that time so I'm and we're not killing each other so it's it's all right I mean there have been a couple of disastrous moments. The blowtorch moment. The creme brulee with the Hayley Squires, yeah. What happened with the creme brulee?

Well, Jessie was using it too fiercely, I thought. Mum thought. So I said, I'll take over. And the whole blowtorch fell apart and set me on fire, literally. I went up in flames she was okay though we never used the torch again it's okay never used it again it was it came apart and um hayley squires just couldn't believe her eyes she was just us two arguing then me going on fire what other disasters have you had short Short ribs, George Ezra.

They weren't short ribs, they were very long and I marinated them for too long in wine and they were tough as old boots. We had to get a Turkish takeaway and it worked out all right but we laughed so much. We laugh a lot and I think even in these kind of catastrophic moments we end up laughing and that's just been how we've always worked really. How often have people asked you for the recipes? Because, I mean, now there's a book with all the recipes in it.

Have people been saying, oh, that lovely thing you've got there? Almost all the time, which is why we were approached to do a cookbook. So people kept on saying, gosh, that sounds delicious. Can I have the recipe? And in the end, we just sort of put them all together. And we've produced a cookbook, which I have to say is so easy. It's about easy cooking and just enjoying a lovely social time over a meal. But how easy was it for you to write down recipes for food that you have been cooking for years?

That was tricky because it's all in your head and you do it by instinct. So actually writing the recipes down was tricky. So they were tested. And tested and tested again. To make sure that they worked and they weren't just things that we could make work. So everyone's going to be able to make my chicken soup with matzo balls, I hope.

But wasn't there something, a recipe that you'd done and they couldn't make it work because you'd forgotten the eggs yeah the key lime pie i had done it and in fact we made it for cheryl cheryl yes we did cheryl cheryl well she's called just cheryl now cole as mom is called lenny now yeah i'm just yeah cheryl and and no one could make it work so i said well i'm going to do it and i'll make it work and I couldn't make it work and then I realized I'd forgotten the eggs quite simple yeah it's rectified they're in there don't worry the eggs are in there what were your Friday night dinners like as you grew up fun I mean they weren't kind of as you would imagine

a Jewish household you know we lit the candles and then the rest kind of it was whitney houston and and um and dancing around the table and it wasn't necessarily a full jewish meal but there was always the ask of chicken soup wasn't there in shop liver but we'd have all my friends from school who you know i grew up in south london there weren't that many jewish people there so they'd come over with their parents and we'd have these lovely long dinners together that would end up with singing and dancing at the end. You admit in the book to being a food lover. And your mother says your toes used to curl in your high chair as the food was on its way. What do you love most of your mother's cooking? She's the best with flavour.

I mean, well, chicken soup, she'll taxi over to me when I'm ill, when I'd be losing my voice in a singing. Well, it's the Jewish. Yeah, Jewish penicillin, absolutely. But she's so good with flavour and just everything. I don't know, you've always been so brilliant. And also my children children we're living together and my children won't eat my food but they'll always eat my mum's food and I'm like

hold on she's just done a roast the same as I but there's something about my mum's cooking that is the best there's always something about your mum's cooking yeah that's always the best as a single mother for much of the time with a job as a social worker how did you manage day after day after day to fit in good home cooking for the kids it's so important to me um eating and eating together that was really important that everyone sat down together at the end of the day and talked about their day and we ate together so um i plan it's just good planning really i would cook in the morning something for the evening and know it was ready there and we could just warm it up and we'd eat together you'd come back from school and there would be the smell of food because

you'd already have it ready it was ready yeah so i think if you plan it's easy i think doing the podcast now we're kind of planning all the time what we're going to cook for people. But planning together. Yes. I mean it's not entirely your responsibility. No, no. We do it together. Absolutely.

How surprisingly have you been at the success of the podcast? Beyond my wildest dreams really. I can't really measure the success except that if I'm at the Tube and I say, oh God, the bloody Northern line, someone says, are you Lenny from the podcast? I say, how do you know? Jessie says it's my whinging voice. But people recognise me on planes if I'm chatting. They'll say, are you Lenny from the podcast? It's so weird. So I know it must have a wide audience that people recognise recognize my voice it's very odd but how stressful is that then to suddenly become famous after all these years and to be cooking for all her famous friends it's very strange i mean it's you know when it's someone like the wonderful nigella lawson

i mean i think we planned for about six months if she ever came on what we cook but um meeting these wonderful people is just great it's it's marvelous how much do you still enjoy cooking let's say i'm not giving a i used to give lots of dinner parties that was my i love it but i don't give as many dinner parties that that's true. I tend to go out to eat rather than cook. Do you enjoy the cooking when you have to do it? Yeah, I do. I enjoy being good at it. That's what I enjoy. Sometimes I get tired and my back hurts a bit if I've been at it all day and then I'm home.

She complains a lot but actually still delivers the best food ever. I hope so. Imagine what it would be if it was cooked with love. Absolutely. I mean, just imagine. So it's was cooked with love I mean just imagine so it's not cooked with love at the moment it's pinches of love always go in my food

Lenny and Jessie Ware and you might be interested in our video with them it's on the Woman's Hour website and on our Instagram that's at BBC Woman's Hour find out why Jessie still thinks she needs to do as she's told when she's working with her mum.

Quite right, too. Last Sunday was International Women's Day, of course, and as part of the Six Music Festival, the poet, playwright and rapper Kate Tempest headlined an all-female show featuring the composer Anna Meredith, Kim Gordon from Sonic Youth and Jenny Beth from Savages.

You can download a Woman's Hour and Six Music podcast, which includes interviews with some of the best artists on that bill. And here's just a quick taster. It's Jenny Beth talking about going solo. I feel very lucky that I don't have anyone telling me what to do musically. There's always compromise to do in some levels. I work with people who understand that, who respect artists and artistry.

It's like the LCD Sun System song where it says, you wanted a hit? Well, maybe we don't do hits. So I think it's just believing in your own art, in your capacity to create. Or you can take another route. You can say, I'm going to just write music

for radio. I can't do that because I'm not good at it. If I was, maybe I would do it's i can't do that because i'm not good at it if i was maybe i would do it you know yeah i don't even think about it i just for me it would be um blasphemy you know to try to betray that but um but there's always a level of censorship whether you like it or not but it's whatever you're willing to let let in you know but i mean there's a lot of things you need to do to make a project stand and a lot of money to get involved. And, you know, I mean, when you make a movie,

that's millions of dollars, right? But when you make a record, it's still quite a lot of money. So you're gambling on yourself, on your art, on your end, but you're taking massive risks, you know, and financial risk, and financial risks, and people are with you, so it is quite a responsibility. There's a hole in my chest, I swear I'm frothing my hands. I don't even care about sex no more, I want to do things with innocence. Be thankful for the air you breathe through. Let's talk about the beginnings of this new Jenny Beth record.

It was David Bowie dying that was the thing that kicked you into a gear to make this record. It was 3 or 4am and I picked up my phone because I couldn't sleep and then found out the news, so I couldn't sleep at all after that. And listened to Lazarus from Black Star as a first track, and it dawned on me that we're mortal. You know, it seems like, oh, we know that, but we don't. I think we forget. We forget that death is part of life life and actually death gives value to life and to art as well because it's gonna outlive you I had a very poignant feeling of life is so short and

you know I didn't have a chance to meet Bowie or to see him live so but that was one of my biggest regret when he died I was like god I should have booked those tickets I should have done this so that feeling stayed with me and it's kind of with me now and things have happened I've lost some friends and so when I started writing the record I just I was motivated by that weirdly enough I was like you might die tomorrow so go to your piano now and write a song you know write was like you might die tomorrow so go to your piano now and write a song you know or write free because you might die tomorrow you know so he pushed me to work harder i think i absolutely love flower can you tell me about the inspiration for that track i wrote a

lot about women because they i have a sort of childlike fascination for when they are powerful and beautiful at the same time so I remember as a kid because I grew up like you know I'm a bisexual but I didn't know when I was a kid that's how you call it I couldn't really express my attraction to women so there was this sensation of being attracted but being at a distance so the song is really about that that sort of sensual incapacity to touch and that distance is even sexier than the actual touch I was in love with a girl who lived in my street and then her mom told me to stop coming because she felt I was you know expressing something that she didn't feel was right. I remember those long thinking about her and it's that sensation that I wanted to put into the song.

It's a very varied record, very eclectic. I'm expressing a lot of things that I think make us human, so it's the good and the bad. The things that keep me up at night and the things that I'm very afraid and ashamed to confess. I wanted to ask as well about PJ Harvey so yeah in 2016 she gave you 10 days to come up with some tracks for the Eden project yeah quick turnaround it was quite a challenge yeah what did it mean to get her

vote of confidence a lovely example of a female artist raising up another female artist she contacted me very early on when Savagy started and she gave her number to the management for me to call her. And I hesitated a few days because I was sort of shy. But then I thought, if she gave me her number, it's rude not to call. Who am I to not answer to that very nice gesture? So I called her and she was the loveliest person

and also the first thing she told me is that all right I am here for you anything you need you're on tour you're you don't believe in it you're tired you you don't know what to do call me like I'm gonna be here for you and I was sort of so blown away, and I did. We started a relationship on the phone and then met, and then she became very good friends with me, and she pushed me to do a solo album, I have to say. Like, she really did. When she asked me to play for her open for the Eden Project, it was her challenging me, saying,

now you're going to jump into the water, girl. No safety net. She's so brave and inspiring in that way. That's Jenny Beth. And we should say, of course, we understand that not everybody, incredibly not everybody, can listen to Woman's Hour live on Radio 4 at two minutes past 10, Monday to Friday, which is why BBC Sounds very generously supplies you with the Woman's Ad podcast. You can subscribe to it. It'll come in every day to your podcast feed and you can enjoy additional content as well. We always include in the podcast your thoughts on what went on the

radio that day. Now, this is a very explicit conversation, an extremely important one with Christina Lamb, the chief foreign correspondent of the Sunday Times. She's written a book called Our Bodies, Their Battlefield, What War Does to Women. And it includes chapters about the women of Bangladesh, Korea, Nigeria, Germany, the Democratic Republic of Congo. Unfortunately, I could go on. I asked Christina whether rape in war had always happened. Yes, it has always happened. I mean, if you go back to sort of the ancient Greeks, Romans and Persians, it's mentioned in the Bible, it's mentioned in Herodotus, the first sort of known written work of history. So it has always happened. But that doesn't mean that we should just say, well, that's okay, I think. And it seems to me, as somebody that spent 33 years covering conflict,

that the last few years, I've seen much more use of rape and sexual violence against women than at any time previously in my career. Men are, of course, also raped in war, aren't they? They are, yes, particularly in detention centres in Syria, for example, a lot of cases. I didn't know, I learned a lot from this book, I should say, I didn't know that it only became a war crime back in 1919. Yes. But there was no mention of it at all during the Nuremberg war trialsals, there was no,

nobody was brought to justice for what they did to women for the sexual violence. Was it referred to? No, it wasn't. And I don't know, you know, at the end of wars, and we're seeing it again, over and over again now, it's because people somehow think that the main issue is the killing and that this is somehow a side issue. And maybe it's because that it's mostly male political leaders that is still, you know, negotiating. If you had women, it might be different. But the fact is that there's been very little attempt to bring to justice. And even in recent cases, so I really became very passionate about this after reporting a lot on what happened to the Yazidi girls

and women who were taken and kept as sex slaves by ISIS fighters. And there was a lot of international outrage, as you know, and lots of coverage of what happened to them. And some, like Nadia Murad came forward and told their horrific ordeals that they've been through. And yet there hasn't been a single prosecution of any of these people. And lots of people have been caught. Can we go back then to Berlin? Because if you know anything, you know that rape happened in the city of Berlin when the Russian forces entered the German capital towards the end of the Second World War. What do we honestly know about what happened there? Well, we know that as many as two million women were raped when the Russian soldiers, Soviet soldiers went in.

Lots of women committed suicide because they were so, it was so horrific what was happening. Gangs of men were going round and capturing women and raping them. And, you know, there's a lot of evidence. But what happened, and this is one of the problems that we see again and again rape is one of the crimes where it's the victim that is stigmatized sadly and and it shouldn't be the case and so when the war ended people were ashamed to talk about what happened and also the men that went back to their wives didn't like to hear about it because it felt like they hadn't been able to protect them.

And that's why it's used as a weapon of war, because it destroys communities. What does Russia say now about that? They deny it. And yeah, they're completely. I mean, Anthony Beaver wrote this famous book and talked about it. And he believes the records have actually now been removed from the Russian archives. He wrote his book, I think, in the early part of the 21st century. Yeah. So we don't, there's a temptation, of course, to other this and to make it about other nationalities behaving outrageously. What do we know about how the British army has conducted itself?

Well, this is one of the things I looked at, You know, it seems so widespread. And why was it happening? And is there some armies where it happens less? And there's maybe less research on this than you might think. And it doesn't seem to be that many things done about the actual perpetrators. It's much more about the victims and survivors. So I think, you know, there obviously were cases. There's no way that the British Army was different. I mean, people sort of make comments that they put bromide in the tea and therefore... It's a bit of a joke somehow, yes. But there do seem to be in some armies there have been much more cases. It's a bit of a joke somehow. actually told or ordered to go and capture women or rape women, because otherwise, I think it really would be endless because it has happened in so many places. So do you speak or attempt to speak to the men who've done it?

Yes, because as I was writing all these terrible stories of the women that I had spoken to in so many different countries, of course, over and over you were thinking, how can anybody do this? And how can they get enjoyment from doing these terrible things to women? And so I became very keen on speaking to some of the perpetrators, which is not easy. And I managed to speak to some in Iraq, I was taken into a jail where some of the perpetrators, which is not easy. And I managed to speak to some in Iraq. I was taken into a jail where some of the ISIS fighters were. And I have to say, all through the research of the book, being a woman had been an advantage because obviously it was easier for the women to talk to another woman. But sitting with a male ISIS prisoners as a Western woman probably was not ideal. And I don't think there was any way that they were going to really

talk to me about what they had done to the women. So they talked about how their cousins had had sex slaves or their cousins had done this, but not, they said they themselves hadn't been involved. So is it a pack mentality that descends and is completely uncontrollable? Or are there outliers, brave men, perhaps men that we need to give credit to who say, no, stop it, or I won't do that? Well, there may well be, but they haven't come out publicly. And it's quite hard to generalise because obviously in some cases people have been ordered. In some cases, like ISIS, they were told that the Yazidis

are devil worshippers and that this is what should be done to them, so it was more ideological. In Nigeria, Boko Haram, who have taken thousands and thousands of girls, we remember the Chibok girls who were taken from their school, but there are thousands of other girls. In that case, for the young men, many of whom were unemployed and had no money,

actually it was very difficult for them to find wives because they couldn't afford a dowry. So to be given a girl who'd been abducted no money actually was very difficult for them to find wives because they couldn't afford a dowry. So to be given a girl who'd been abducted was like, you know, a kind of bonus for the fighting that they were doing. So it's different reasons in different places. But in some places, in Congo, in particular, DRC, really horrific things that they're doing to people, setting fire to their vaginas and just unimaginable torture. And I don't think we should just keep turning a blind eye to this. I think, you know, as people will say, this has always happened, but why should it be happening so much more now and why? And it all goes back to justice, in my view.

It is so difficult to get justice for what happened. It's hard enough here, as you know, in the UK to get justice for rape. We had the lowest level of convictions on record last year. So imagine in a place where the people running the country are the perpetrators and have guns and the police are all corrupt and the courts are corrupt. How are you ever going to get justice? I think the international community needs to step up and help on this, these women, because we're talking about hundreds of thousands of people.

That is Christina Lamb, chief foreign correspondent of The Sunday Times, and her book is Our Bodies, Their Battlefield. Now, International Women's Day, of course, was last Sunday. What about Women's History Month, which is also taking place in March? It got a lot less attention, so this week we asked why. Jenny talked to Krista Cowman, Professor of Modern History at Lincoln University, and to Selina Todd, Professor of Modern History at Oxford. Jimmy Carter as president

introduced Women's History Month in 1980 into the States and it was part of a really imaginative attempt to push by both the feminist movement and also the black civil rights movement there to recognise history as something that is obviously crucial in terms of helping to create identities and also spread awareness that the contribution of women to societies like America and like Britain has been absolutely significant throughout time. I think that the reason that it didn't necessarily take off in Britain in the same way is really that we already had various initiatives like history workshop, like various things that were happening in adult education at the time. So it didn't get the traction here in the same way and indeed wasn't really officially introduced into the UK until 2011. Christa, how useful would you say it is to have a whole month devoted to the subject? I think it's very useful in terms of getting air coverage, if you like, so getting it out there to a wider audience.

And I'm sure Selina will agree, this is a month when we get a lot of phone calls, get asked our opinions on lots of things. So I think it's really great to have this moment that actually focuses on women's history. But I think there's a great to have this moment that actually focuses on women's history. But I think there's a downside to that, of course, which is that women's history can be seen as what happens in Women's History Month. And that then there's nothing else in between and we have to wait another 12 months before we can have the conversation again. But Zelina, if it is significant and important, why is it still less prominent in this country and not funded and supported as it

appears to be in the USA? Yeah I think it's a really good question and part of it is because when it was introduced in 2011 we were going into a period with a government committed to austerity which meant that the kinds of institutions which have been really imaginative in promoting women's history over the last few decades, thinking about public libraries and museums, really haven't necessarily had the funding and support to push Women's History Month. So I think that's one thing. The other thing is that this relates very much to Krista's important point about the sort of sidelining of women's history. You know, I mean, I was at a co-educational comprehensive school in Newcastle in the 1980s. The very first history project that we did was on women's history. You know, I mean, I was at a co-educational comprehensive school in Newcastle in the 1980s. The very first history project that we did was on women's history. We were told to go and interview

the oldest woman who we knew and think about history from her point of view. Now, we've seen over the last 10 years, you know, ministers like Michael Gove really criticising that kind of approach to history. So at the same time that it was introduced here, women's history was also being sidelined in some really crucial ways. But I do also think that it was introduced here, it was women's history was also being sidelined in some in some really crucial ways. But I do also think that it's about the way that civil rights have been talked about in Britain over the last 10 years. You know, we have seen I know it's a very controversial subject, but we have seen, you know, contestations about how we define women. And certainly I was looking yesterday online at museums and bookshops and what they were offering in terms of women's history. And in the United States, as well as here, you know, when you look very often, they're saying, oh, here are the top 10 books that you should read this month.

Now, I looked at a couple of universities and libraries in the States and not one of them was offering a top 10 books that were all by women and about women. They were bringing in civil rights of black people, of other so-called marginalised groups. Now, that's great, but that's not what Women's History Month is about. Can we not just, for one month, say, let's read books by women and about women? So if it was part of your curriculum when you were at school, Selina, what place does it have on the school curriculum now? Well, it's very, very marginal in many schools

I'm afraid, and not for want of trying. I mean, I give a lot of schools talks, but the issue is really that with the national curriculum and particularly the way that GCSEs and A levels have gone, you need teachers with a huge amount of interest, enthusiasm and expertise to deliver women's history because

it's really not central to the curriculum. And that should matter to all of us because as a professional historian, one resource that I've relied on a lot are oral histories. Now, many of them have been collected from women over the years by community groups and also by school children and have been archived in public libraries around the country. So we're really losing that resource, which I think is a real shame. But what I would say is the energy and the interest are there. We see that in terms of the wonderful publicity that books like, say, Helen Lewis's Difficult Women is getting. And I see it when I go and talk to schools.

There's a huge amount of interest. I see it in my own students coming to Oxford. They've already been introduced to some extent to women's history. But it is unfortunately being really pressed out of the central curriculum. Krista, what difference did the 2018 commemorations of the centenary of some British women and the vote make to general engagement with women's history? I think in many ways a lot, and in many ways that was fantastic. It was such an amazing year. But it's exactly the same issue that Selina has just identified as the one that we have in the school curriculum, whereby it's a sort of modularization and compartmentalization rather than a focus. So throughout 2018, throughout 2018, sorry, historians always say 1918. Throughout 2018, there was a lot of emphasis on local anniversaries.

There was some fantastic work done in local libraries, local groups, local heritage, people reconnecting with suffrage in their own location and finding out what had happened. And there was a tremendous amount of media interest. But I think there is a real anxiety now that it's kind of been done. And it's not going to be until 1928, when we have the anniversary of 1928 in eight, nine years time, that we'll go back to look at women's history again. So I think the challenge for me as a professional historian is how you actually affect that mainstreaming. So it's not just this is the week we're doing women's history or even this is the year we're doing women's history.

But actually, women's history is part of history. What do the students, Christa, you encounter, think of the subject? What status does it have compared with other types of history that they might choose to study? I think it still tends to be a little bit mixed. And if you put on a course, my experience is if you put on a course which is specifically marketed or presented to the students as a women's history course, you will get many, many more female students opting for that course than you will male students. But if you teach women's history as part of another course

and you don't present it as women's history, you don't get resistance. So I think it's not as controversial as it was when I started teaching this subject and you would maybe get four or five women signing up and no men at all. But it's still seen as something that's a little bit marginal. How do you define it, Selina? What is women's history? How do women's history and feminist history differ? So I think that they've got a huge amount of links. So really the theoretical underpinning for women's historians is that women's actual and potential role as mothers has mattered

throughout time. That's not to say that they see women's biology as essential as determining what they can and can't do. But it is to say that very often in the past, women have been oppressed because of that role, and that their biology has something to tell us about the way that they have been treated and perceived. Feminist history and women's history

have been very keen to think about women both within spheres that were seen as, you know, quotes and quotes, traditionally male. And if we think about, say, a great historian like Krista Kauman, something that her work has really done is to show us how central women have always been to the political sphere. And at the same time, women's history has really opened up new spheres that historians perhaps didn't consider before, such as domestic life, where feminist history has been really important has been in thinking about how we might come up with ways of explaining who exploited or oppressed women in the past and how that happened. But also where women operated agency. One of the things that I've always found really inspiring as both a student and a practicing historian of women's history is that there's no sense that women were ever just victims. We have to understand their oppression. But also one of the things that's been really, really inspiring about women's history is to say that women operated as agents of change.

You know, Krista just referred to the suffrage movement. And I hear her frustration because one of the amazing things that historians like herself have done is to show us that the suffrage movement and feminist movements more generally haven't just affected life for those women who were directly involved in those movements, but also have affected society as a whole in changing what we think of as politics. You know, for example, welfare states

were really a concept that came out of feminist movements. From each of you, briefly, the most exciting example of something that people interested in this subject should read this month. Krista. That's a real pushing me on the spot, isn't it? I would go back to Sylvia Pankhurst's The Seperaget Movement. It's huge. It's a real blockbuster. If you have to isolate yourself for a week, it will keep you going. But it's full of personalities

and Edwardian colour and will tell you a lot of things that you really did not know about that period. And Selina? Okay, I'm going to be really cheeky and have two. And one of them is Margaret Foster's brilliant memoir of her life growing up as a working class daughter, which is called Hidden Lives, which is a brilliant social history

of 20th century Britain told by, you know, one of our best novelists. And the other one is a more recent history book by Christine Godsey, which is called Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, which is a brilliant bringing together of political and social history to rethink what happened in the Eastern Bloc. Selina Todd and Krista Cowman, they are both professors of modern history. On Monday on Woman's Hour, we'll be back live with a phone-in programme about what you're doing about the coronavirus outbreak, how you're preparing, what you're most worried about. It could be older parents. It could be a partner. It could be your children. They might be teenagers preparing

or hoping to prepare for public exams. What about the psychological impact potentially of being isolated? So we hope to cover as much ground as possible on that phone-in on Monday morning. My guests will include the psychologist Laverne Antrobus, Sarah Stewart-Brown, Professor of Public Health at Warwick University,

and the financial expert Louise Cooper. The phone line's open at eight o'clock on Monday morning. The number is 03 700 100 444. And you can tweet, of course, or contact us on Instagram via at BBC Woman's Hour. Thank you very much for listening. And whatever you're doing this weekend, I hope you have a very good one. 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 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.