Woman's Hour - Nelson Mandela's PA, Sewing, Porn

Episode Date: February 11, 2019

Zelda la Grange was Nelson Mandela’s PA. She was with him for nearly 20 years and became indispensable to him, so much so that some members of his family found it hard, and still do. As for her, she regarded him as a grandfather-type figure. It’s nearly 6 years since Nelson Mandela died and now there’s a new exhibition in London about him. Zelda’s come over from South Africa to choose some of the items on display. She comes into the Woman's Hour studio to talk about her bond with Mandela, how working with him changed her and what she’s doing now.Sewing has been the work of women for centuries: in clothing and furnishings and also protest banners, tapestries that tell stories and even communicating messages in war time. In her new book, the artist Clare Hunter argues that world history can be seen through the craft. She joins Jane to discuss.Guidelines on how to define "obscene" pornography have been changed in England and Wales. The Crown Prosecution Service had previously listed torture, bondage and sadomasochism as obscene and distributing it risked a prosecution. Now the CPS has replaced that list with a series of "tests" which are supposed to determine whether an image or video is classed as obscene. Some women have hailed change as a victory for queer, feminist and fetish porn but others have expressed concerns saying that it could damage and exploit women.

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. Hi, this is Jane Garvey. Thank you for downloading the Woman's Hour podcast, Monday 11th February 2019. On the podcast today, what it's like to grow up as the child of an alcoholic. Nelson Mandela's right-hand woman for many years, Zelda Lagrange, talks to Woman's Hour. And Threads of Life, a history of the World Through the Eye of a Needle.

The author of that book, Claire Hunter, is on Woman's Hour today. But we start with a conversation about guidelines on what constitutes obscene pornography. They have been relaxed in England and Wales. This is an explicit conversation which does reference various sexual acts, so if it's not something you're interested in or you don't want to hear it, then you can move, shuffle on a bit further into the podcast, maybe give it 10 minutes, 11 minutes, something like that. And we'll be in the sort of territory you're more at ease with a little bit later on in the pod. But to continue, pornography, which showed female ejaculation, consensual bondage and sadomasochism was until recently classed as obscene and it could have led, in theory at least, to a prosecution. But now the Crown Prosecution Service guidelines have changed.

They're going to use tests, they say, to determine whether an image or a video can be legally classed as obscene. Now, some people say this is very much a victory for queer, feminist and fetish porn. Others have real misgivings. I talked this morning to Rosa Friedman, Professor of Law, Conflict and Global Development at Reading University. And first, you'll hear the voice of Pandora Blake, a performer and a porn maker. And I asked Pandora why they were so happy about the relaxation of the guidelines. For me, I think the most important thing about these changes is that it officially recognises and enshrines our right to consent to the kind of sex that we have and to make creative expressions of that kind of sex legally in the UK. I mean, I do enjoy BDSM in my private life and there has previously been a gap between what it was legal to do

and what it was legal to show on camera, which means that if you're growing up with a minority sexuality, particularly if you're queer or if you're kinky, you might not have been able to find anything that was legal that depicted the kind of things that you're interested in. Let's just brief. BDSM means? So it stands for kind of bondage, discipline, sadomasochism. None of the acts that we're discussing today have ever been illegal? Is that correct? The acts I'm talking about here, not the distribution of images of these acts, but the acts themselves.

It's not illegal to tie someone up or to be tied up or to be gagged for sex. There is a cut off where it would classify as assault. So the law around actual bodily harm is that your consent doesn't mitigate the fact that it's assault. So nobody can ever consent to actual bodily harm? In the law, that is still the case. Although people who do consent to receive that kind of thing would disagree with you. But these guidelines cut off at the same point. So they're now levelling the playing field between what's legal to do on film

and what's legal to do in private. And things, for example, playing with urine, female ejaculation, as you mentioned, and kind of queer, non-phallic sex acts like in setting the whole hand or a woman sitting on someone's face, previously completely legal to do but illegal to publish depictions of them.

And so we're now seeing a culture where it's much easier to see these kind of female centric acts of pleasure, orgasm and dominance than it was before. And this is a feminist triumph of sorts? I think so. I think that consent is a critical issue in our times. And in order to combat rape culture, which is absolutely critical and to combat rape and abuse we need as a culture to start recognising consent when we see it to consider the consent of individuals to be valid and if we're criminalising pornography that's consensually produced when it was legal to do then we're kind of saying that the consent of those performers doesn't matter and I think that sends a really harmful message. Just to go back to something you said earlier, how important is it actually in somebody's life to see their own sex life portrayed in these arenas?

I think diversity of representation is absolutely crucial. You know, we need people of all ages, all sizes, all ethnicities in our mainstream media. And in the same way, we need all kinds of sex, particularly any sex that offers an alternative to the kind of heteronormative mainstream represented in our erotic cinema. You know, if you're growing up queer, if you fantasise about being spanked, which I did from a young age, you might think that you're the only one on the planet.

You might not think that you ever deserve love. You might think there's something deeply wrong with you. And it wasn't until I started, actually, it was erotic literature in my case, because I was kind of a little bit too young for free porn on the internet. But people nowadays are able to find out, find a community that actually there's nothing they need to be ashamed of, as long as it's consensual. And that's the most important thing, because I think that the way that this change recognises consent and actually puts a pressure on producers to make consent explicit in the material because that's one of the tests that you mentioned if the consent isn't very transparent to the viewer then they might still

find it obscene I think that sets a really great precedent just really briefly before we get to Rosa who obviously thinks very differently that the consent is absolutely at the heart of this it's completely vital It's a subject we refer to often on this programme and rightly, particularly now. I'm a bit baffled by these tests. Who's going to do the tests? Well, in the immediate term, given this is the Crown Prosecution Service's guidance to police, it's going to be the police making a judgment about whether what they're watching is consensual and makes that very clear. But these guidelines also inform what the British Board of Film Classification will classify for legal

distribution on DVD and in cinemas. So they are also going to be doing their own assessments. Rosa, I want you to give us your perspective on this. Look, I think there will always be some people involved in the pornography industry, and indeed in all of the sex industry, who have the agency and the capacity to consent to these types of acts or even and choice to consent in the way that you do, Pandora, or in the way that we would hope that in an emancipated society, all women and all men would be able to do. And clearly men are also involved in the pornography industry. I think from a feminist perspective, or from my feminist perspective, this idea that we can consent to harms being done, whether they're transient harms or not, feeds into a society where violence against women is eroticised and where men, and there are many hundreds of thousands

of abusive men, will be able to leap onto this and say, well, in our own home, my wife or my partner consented to this type of violence being done. And they will be able to point to the relaxation of the laws around pornography and be able to use that. So this isn't around sort of the emancipation or liberation of some individuals. This is actually feeding into a society where violence against women is just accepted and where people fantasize about violence against women and then go and perpetrate it. And they will use this relaxation as evidence that they're absolutely fine to do exactly that. I think what we've been seeing over the last 20 years or so is defences like rough sex.

Rough sex defence when women are harmed, sometimes killed during sex acts. We've seen a mass rise in pornography being distributed and even though the laws say very clearly that these can't be shown to children under the age of 18, we know that children, teenagers access pornography. We know that young men are becoming very desensitized in terms of sexual pleasure and that there is an increase in accessing violent porn and violent acts on the internet, which does then harm them. Yeah, it was interesting listening to you, Pandora, and you spoke very passionately when you made your case. You implied that this was porn produced by women for women. Obviously, a lot of lesbian porn is exactly that. But it doesn't mean that you're not entertaining what

we call the male gaze. Is that fair enough? Well, actually, I think that what's been made more possible by this change is exactly the kind of pornography that counters the male gaze. You know, a lot of the acts that we're talking about are things that are done between gay men, between lesbians, between queer folk. And, you know, you're talking about violence against women, which obviously is a massive issue actually a lot of fetish porn about half of fetish porn is men being submissive and women being dominant i don't quite see how that fits into your model well look go on rosa how

does it well i think within certain communities and within certain fetish communities that might be true but we know that the vast majority of pornography out there is women. Women, whether it's violence against women, whether it's whether it's films that are made for the male gaze and for male fantasies. And so I think that relaxing the laws for a very small group of people and not recognising the damage that can be done then for a very large number of people is a little bit disingenuous. I actually think that these changes are going to hold exactly what you're talking about to account. You know, what I think you're talking about is the kind of mainstream porn where a woman might be choked or slapped without any prior negotiation.

It's not done in the context of a negotiated BDSM scene with a safe word and aftercare, where it's kind of signalled that this is consensual. But do you think the average consumer of a lot of this porn is able to make that sort of distinction? Well, that's why this change is important, because now that's only going to be legal if the consent of the performers is very clearly signalled,

which is going to actually, you know, BDSM producers are already doing this, but the mainstream studios might not have been, and now they're going to have to, which is absolutely fantastic. And I think this comes back to the idea of consent. What can we consent to and what can't we consent to? Because the law regulates society. So you can consent to being beaten up in a boxing ring,

but you can't consent to being beaten up outside of a boxing ring. Do people have the freedom and capacity to consent to things like waterboarding? We saw in America recently that waterboarding is now being said, waterboarding, which is a form of torture, is now being allowed on porn certs. We know that there is a prohibition against torture across the world in all situations, and yet we're allowing torture for male sexual gratification. Sometimes female sexual gratification,

but predominantly male sexual gratification. I think it's about half and half, actually. There was a French study in 2015. How do you know? Well, there was a French study in 2015, Joanne et al., which found that between 46 and 65% of people had fantasised about domination or submission in a sexual context.

And that's men and women fantasising, like men fantasising about being dominated and about dominating and women fantasising about both too. So it's actually about half the population that find this kind of thing sexy in the privacy of their own imaginations. This change has happened. There's a degree to which a lot of people listening now

will not know anything about this. One of the reasons we are having this conversation. I don't actually think this conversation would take place anywhere else on the radio, by the way. And I'm rather proud of that. Are you concerned, though, Rosa, by the very fact that actually most people didn't know about this, but it may well have an impact on their life or their life of their children or partners? I think that very often what happens with campaigns, and I have a lot of respect for activists and campaigners on any issue, is that the people involved are a very small community. They are able to lobby and place pressure on and the broader public don't know about the campaigns, not just on this issue,

on many issues. I think bringing these issues to light and having frank discussions is the only way that society and law can go hand in hand and that we can work together to make sure that the regulations are in place in a way that protects women, protects children, but also that allows for sort of the neoliberal model that we live in and allows empowerment of women. But I think having these changes without having had a very public discussion means that we're now going to have to play catch up. There was a public consultation in September, which only 300 people responded to. Well, there we are. How public was this? Well, I'm trying to raise the profile of the conversation about consent. You know, I'm running consent workshops, for example, for adults and liaising with sex educators. I actually just want to come back to something that you said earlier,

that the majority of people in the porn and sex industries were not consenting. That is not, in point of fact, correct. I think the current stats on trafficking in the sex industry globally is around 8%, which is equivalent to kind of farming and agricultural and domestic labour. That's a lot of people and some hideous experiences. But we aren't looking at criminalising all paid housework or all farming or all agriculture or all factory work or all construction work. I'm not sure they are directly comparable, but I'll take the point.

Thank you very much. The majority of people making porn are DIY performers. The commercial porn industry isn't big enough to fund full-time jobs. So most of us are sex workers at home producing our own clips. Pandora, thank you very much. Really a powerful debate and a very interesting one from Pandora and Rosa. Your thoughts welcome

of course at BBC Women's Hour on Twitter or you can email the programme via our website bbc.co.uk slash womenshour. Now, this week, as you might well know, is Children of Alcoholics Week. It's organised by the National Association for the Children of Alcoholics. Five women whose lives really were shaped by a parent's drinking spoke to our reporter, Jo Morris, back in the May of 2017. You're about to hear from hillary jackie lynn

liz and camilla it started with wine and wine by the side well i think it was sherry at the first when i was under 10 and then it became wine by the side of the the cooker well you know well i cooked with wine and then it was vodka i suppose by the time i was a mid-teenager when you put the oven on you made the check that there wasn't a bottle in there. Not because she was hiding bottles? Oh, they were all over the place. They were in her shoeboxes upstairs, they were behind curtains, there was glasses of neat alcohol behind curtains,

just all over the place. And my sister went off and tried to persuade the local off-licence not to sell alcohol to her. But, you know, they just said, well, we can't not. By the time I was 20, she had alcohol in bed with her, so she drank before she even got out of bed in the mornings. Yeah, I think he was in denial, so then if someone doesn't admit they have a problem, there's nothing to discuss.

As a young person, you're kind of having to look after your parents. So I think that kind of builds up an independence in you so you had to look after your dad did you yeah like I think obviously when if he's home coming home drunk and stuff like that you're gonna have to like you know make sure he's okay make sure he's eating properly you know to make sure he's found the bed safely you know he's not bumped into anything and you've been doing that from quite a young age have you yeah yeah that's hard isn't it yeah I think it was hard to talk not necessarily because there was no one to talk to but just not understanding how to verbalize my feelings and how to explain the situation

because I was quite I still am quite shy but before I didn't really like have many friends and the friends that I did have I didn't really talk to about it because I thought it was normal if I came home at lunchtime I could open the door and sort of read the situation and take just the atmosphere and I would know she was drunk I just know through habit she always was but but I would know how vibes it's just so difficult to um explain just the way she would be still and she always drank out of a cup it used to drive me mad as I became a teenager I would have preferred it if she'd have sat there with a glass of beer but there was the hiding it away I know it gnawed away at me and I would come home by 3 30 4 o'clock and she'd be drunk and nasty and then you just knew that you had to keep out of her way

she'd hit me sometimes I mean she'd just you'd just get attacked um which was just, you wouldn't know what you'd done. Or she'd say something or just, and so nasty. And the language just really awful. It was just so confusing and upsetting. And I just, you know, sometimes barricaded myself in my bedroom so she couldn't open the door. So my mum, she was a very talented lady and very creative. And she was adopted into a family when she was younger and was kind of never really accepted by them. My mum's drinking definitely derived from mental health issues.

And that was her coping strategy, I think. So I just met my mum and she would spend, she got benefits every Monday. So Monday would come in and we'd live like kings and we'd eat lots of amazing food and she'd have loads of chocolates and sweets and things and also buy a lot of alcohol that I wouldn't see and then by Wednesday all the nice food would go and we wouldn't have anything left so on the Friday this particular week I remember her going out and buying a sack of potatoes and this is because of alcohol so it this isn't generally because she was drunk but this is because of alcohol so this isn't generally because she was drunk but this is because she'd spent all her money on alcohol bought a sack of

potatoes but she was quite creative but we just literally had potatoes to live on for the weekend so we'd have mashed potato and potato cakes and chips that we'd wrap up in like newspaper and she was very resourceful He's always had a problem, but it's probably manifested properly over the last five years, I'd say. I always just felt that he couldn't really be bothered to be spending time with us. It was a horrible feeling, always, you know. I didn't ever feel as though we were enough.

And now I realise it's because he had this, you know, this addiction and that's what was dominating so much of his thought process and that was driving so much of his behaviour. Whereas as a kid, as I say, it just always felt as though we weren't really enough for him and kind of think, well, maybe that's because I'm not interesting enough or I don't know, you don't really understand it. Does the impact end when you leave home and become a grown-up, being a child of an alcoholic?

No, like for me, it's been the complete opposite, I would say. I'm 36 now and this is the last two years have had the biggest impact on my life of my dad being an alcoholic. Well, you heard from Camilla, Liz, Lynn, Jackie and Hilary. The reporter was Jo Morris. And we do have a collection of all of these interviews on our website and a video as well about growing up as the child of an alcoholic.

And also on that website, sources of support and information about this subject. I know it really is very close to home for anybody who's lived that life. Not easy for anybody involved. So bbc.co.uk slash Woman's Hour if that is you and you feel you would like to know more about that subject. Now Nelson Mandela was released from prison on this day February the 11th it was 1990 incredibly. Zelda Lagrange was just 23 when she

became his PA after he was elected President of South Africa. Now, Zelda is Afrikaans, and in fact, she's from a family who had regarded Nelson Mandela as a terrorist. But Zelda became indispensable to him. And six years after his death, she acknowledges now that nobody is likely to replace him in her affections. A new exhibition about Nelson Mandela has just opened in London, and Zelda came to London briefly to help choose some of the items on display. She admits she was way out of her depth when she started to work alongside Mandela back in 1994.

The person that's put it best is, after the publication of my memoir, Good Morning Mr Mandela, the Sunday Times here in England described me as spectacularly ill-equipped for the job. But you got it. That is the absolute truth. You know, in every possible way, politically, knowledge in general, youth. I was naive. I was really, you know, actually too young for the job at that point.

And politically specifically, I grew up in a very conservative community. So I was the last person to expect to find a job or to get a job close to Nelson Mandela. I think many of us here find it absolutely baffling how it was possible for you to grow up in that very, very enclosed environment, actually knowing almost nothing about the way of life forced upon the majority of your fellow country people. That's the problem. If you live in privilege, you don't ask questions as a child about the struggles of people when it doesn't affect your life. So was it all swimming pools for you?

It was swimming pools for us, three holidays a year. Parents both had job, good medical health care, good educational system. So, you know, as long as a youngster growing up, as long as you had your friends and you had these comforts, why would you worry about the treatment of the majority of people in South Africa? Because it didn't affect you. But you say it didn't affect you, but you must have seen it and been aware of it. Yes, you saw it around you and you saw that there's different entrances for white people and black people and different benches and different beaches, but it suits your lifestyle. So why not? And as rumors began to circul government and Nelson Mandela in our eyes was pictured as a person that would be taking on revenge against white people for years of

oppression and in our eyes even after his release he was still considered a terrorist. So when you found out he was going to be out? We were driven by fear at that stage. I still remember the day, even of the elections, there was military vehicles all over the street in our community. You know, the military was protecting us, police everywhere. We expected a civil war. It didn't happen, almost entirely because of the sheer force of this man's incredible personality and his ability to forgive. But take us into your working life. There you were, a young woman. How old were you?

Twenty three. Twenty three. And you applied for a job as? A senior ministerial typist in an office within the presidency. So not directly reporting to the president or working in the president's office. But then whilst I was at the Human Resource Office in the head office of the president applying for this job and doing the interview, the president's then private secretary, who was a black lady, entered and announced that she needed an assistant.

And after the interview, they called me and they said, would you be interested in a job in President Mandela's private office? So, of course, you know, not knowing what to expect. You don't think a private office means that you'll ever have to interact with the president. You think you're going to be part of a staff complement of, what, 200 people. And then the day when I started the job there, I thought, well, maybe I've made a mistake because we were only five people in his personal staff and I was the youngest and the most junior of the staff members. So, yeah, at first I thought I've made a huge mistake and I was really the rookie.

Well, how much of an idiot did you feel, if I can phrase it? Completely, but it's only now. I mean, at that time, you don't think of yourself, you think you're world wise and you can change the world and you're up to everything. Now looking back, I say to people, it should be illegal for a 23 year old to work in any president's office. You're just way too young to comprehend what's going on around you. you were being used? Not at first. No, not at first. Not at all. And only much later did I realize, but maybe there was a strategy. And the conservative white people in South Africa tend to point out to me, oh, you were just the white token. And then I say, is there some truth in that? I then say to them, well, wouldn't you have wanted to be that white token then? Yes, not a bad white token thing to be. That's right.

But so be it. You know, if it was a role for me to play, so be it. I was happy to play that role. And did your inclusion in that role, did it impact on your family's view of the way the country was going or might go? Absolutely. Absolutely. It's not only my family, but our community.

At first, my parents were ostracized Because I was seen as a sellout And a white girl now working for the enemy Even though the enemy was now the president And gradually people changed The more they started experiencing the real Nelson Mandela They heard stories about him Of course I spoke with fondness of him.

And it changed people, but my family specifically changed the entire way of thinking. My father warned me against the release of this black man that I ended up working for. And the night Mr. Mandela passed away, when I spoke to my dad, he was inconsolable. So, you know, it's not only my life that was changed irrevocably by this man, but all the people around me. Your closeness to him grew and

grew. And as he grew older and frailer, he became really very reliant on you, didn't he? Was that ever just smothering for you? No, no, not at all. I come from a family of depression. My mother tried to commit suicide when I was 12 years of age and I rescued her. And from there, I've got this fear of rejection, abandonment. But that's what it played a role in my job as well, because I had this fear that Mr. Mandela would abandon me, my job. And I over delivered. I worked. I was I was as reliant of the smothering, as you call it, as as as he was on me. And it worked perfectly for the job. Did he understand that, do you think? I don't think I don't think to the, you know, the psychological extent of it.

No, not at all. I'm sure he saw in me a person that loved him unconditionally that grew to love him of course unconditionally he saw in me and someone that he could rely on and completely depend on and um he appreciated that he appreciated that very much and in return I got this unbelievable grandfather and the love love you know from this grandfather. Would it be a case of him ringing you middle of the night or? Oh often at two o'clock in the morning and that's how first I think I also was distinguished from the rest of my colleagues I was always the person to pick up the phone first. He had a very fair mind. So he would start with the most senior person in our office

and call at two o'clock in the morning. That person wouldn't answer because she's got a family and children. She's sleeping next to her husband and they would go down the line. And when he got to me, I was always the one to answer. So I say to people, if you keep on answering at two o'clock in the morning,

the person's going to keep on calling. So what might be on his mind at two o'clock in the morning the person's going to keep on ringing yeah so what might be on his mind at two o'clock in the morning sometimes he would wake up and be reminded of something and he would say well remind me to order my medication tomorrow yeah it would be an ANC matter and something that comes to mind and then the next morning you are expected to execute how much of an impact had those years of incarceration had on his mental and physical health? It's something that people don't often I think fully comprehend. If you remove, if you take how fast technology now grows and develops but in Nelson Mandela's time the TV know, the first television set was produced.

Computers was a very, very new thing. A simple thing like an ATM, a bank card. Those are things that he didn't understand when he was released. So that's the one aspect, being removed from society for so long, you don't develop with the times. And then secondly, of course, you cannot repair relationships after being absent for 27 years from your family, from your friends. It's very, very difficult. And those are the things people often don't think about properly when they think of Nelson Mandela and they think of the sacrifices that he's made. Those are not things that you can repair or you can catch up on.

It's just, it's very hurtful also to see. But with you, I guess it was a chance to create a fresh relationship with someone who played no part in his incarceration or his previous life. You were just a child when all that was going on. Yes, but I felt responsible. I did because in the last elections before, well, first the referendum, when South Africans were asked to vote for against the abolishment of apartheid, I voted against the abolishment of apartheid. Did you? Yes. Did you tell him? Yes, I did. And at which he laughed.

Yeah, politically, I was very, how would I say, innocent maybe, perhaps indoctrinated. Yeah, indoctrination might be better. Indoctrinated, yeah. His family is a large one and it's a complicated one. And there are some members of the family who really resent the closeness of your relationship to him and apparently still do. Is that fair? Yes, that's fair. And you know what?

I don't blame them I look at my own parents now and if someone gets very close to my father or my mother you do feel naturally you feel um a bit threatened I think and I do understand um you know because also as again as I said the damage that was done with his absence from that family is difficult to describe. And suddenly then there's this new person that he completely depends on. It was difficult for them. And on the other hand, some of them accepted. I guess it's also it's about personalities, right?

Even in my own family, there's people I don't get along with. Are you on speaking terms with any of his close friends? Oh, yes, yes yes yes yes yes. And if you were to assess your own life would you actually say that your relationship with him was probably of more significance than any other relationship in your life? Oh absolutely without a doubt. You know as I get older I truly realize the value of my relationship with him. You know, I miss him so, so much. It was really a grandfather to me and the impact he had on my life and the wisdom and things I actually took for granted because we do that as humans. You listen always thinking, oh, I'll hear that again.

And now I'll do anything for him to just repeat one of his stories again. So you really miss him? I really, really miss him. Has anybody or anything come close to replacing him in your life? No, nothing. And I doubt anything will. I haven't taken another job since I left him. I don't think I'll ever be satisfied again with a job or with a boss,

which is very unfair to a new person as well. It's pretty hard to replace in that sense. That's right. Yeah, I mean, I imagine as well being put into an atmosphere where you are with one of the most magnetic people on earth, where everywhere you go, people are pleased to see him and you're there as well.

I'm thinking about it. I can't see how you can take another job. No, I do. Look, I do motivational speaking now and I get to speak about him every single day and that helps me as well because it extends this unbelievable privilege I do motivational speaking now and I get to speak about him every single day. And that helps me as well because it extends this unbelievable privilege of being part of his life and him being part of my life. And it helps a bit.

It helps a bit. But I won't be able to take an office job. I'll rather be impoverished and take another job because I'll be so critical and unfair to any new boss. Zelda Lagrange. And that exhibition is already open. It's on Leek Street, which is in Waterloo in London. And it is called Nelson Mandela, the official exhibition, which is pretty simple, isn't it? And that was Zelda Lagrange, as I say.

So let's celebrate a night of female successes, notably at the Grammys, which we'll get onto in a minute. They're the American Music Awards, of course. But first of all, a quick chunk about the BAFTAs, if such a thing is possible when we talk about such elevated topics. Sinead Garvin is here. Garvin, I do apologise, Newsbeat's entertainment reporter. So, Sinead, the host was Joanna Lumley again, second time she's done it. Who writes that script? I don't know. I don't know.

I don't know. They're keeping a low profile today. Yeah, it wasn't very good. The opening monologue, I think everyone just felt, it felt very, very flat. It's just odd because we're celebrating the very best in British entertainment and the script writer can't do, or script writers can't do better than that no it's almost like what was the point of the opening monologue i think graham norton should take over next year that's my he'll be listening because he never misses an edition of the hour

so let's get him on there all right let's talk about olivia coleman was the best actress for the favorite and i think that was always going to happen i mean i don't think anyone thought anyone else would whether this translate to her getting an Oscar, I don't think so. Surely she will. No, I think it will go to Glenn Close. So obviously Olivia Colman won the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy performance in a film. Glenn Close won the drama performance. If you look at Oscars, they're much more in the realm of like drama.

And I think for Glenn Close and an American audience as well. Yeah, of course, Glenn Close's film was The Wife, wasn't it? Yes. Just outline the plot of that in case people haven't seen it. It's a good film. I like that. OK, it was the film in which her husband, played by Jonathan Pryce, doing a bit of filling here, won the Nobel Prize for Literature. But there was a twist. I'll leave it there.

If you haven't seen The Wife, seek it out. That's a feminist goody, no mistake. Okay, let's move seamlessly on to the Grammys last night. Now, the big winner, well, let's hear some music first of all. Let's hear a bit of Dua Lipa and a bit of Kacey Musgraves and some Cardi B. Here we go. Give it to you

And even if I could, I wouldn't, I know you. We've seen enough, seen enough. To know that you ain't never gonna come down. So why don't you get your... Hey! I'm in district in the jam. Sir, by you know I'm down, down, down, down. Drop the top and blow the brand.

Oh, he's so handsome, what's his name? Get on it. Cardi B and she won best rap album. Why is that significant? I think, well, she's the first female to win this award. Excuse me to start with. I think it was always going to go to her. It's been such a huge couple of years for Cardi B. In terms of like being very, very famous in the last two years, but also her music, which, I mean, there's a lot of profanities in it,

but I think young people quite like that in music. Apparently. But yeah, I mean, she's the biggest rap artist in the world at the moment. And last year there was a kerfuffle because very few women won the major awards. Yes, absolutely. And even the man in charge sort of made some kind of dig about it. Women needed to step up. Yes. And Dua Lipa won Best Newcomer.

And she made a reference to that in her speech saying, I think we've all stepped up. But there were so many female successes. Kacey Musgroves, won um for like best album and this is like the top award there's tons and tons of categories in the Grammys it goes on for hours um but this is so every genre of music there's a best album best rap best rock etc best pop um but this is the overall best album like adele's one in years before um and this is interesting because she is a country artist um but she's managed to go quite mainstream um without losing her country background which is what a lot of people accuse taylor swift of doing that she started off in country music but now she's very very pop um lady gaga winning um ariana grande who was obviously

not there uh she won uh for best uh pop uh recording why obviously not there oh it was a big kerfuffle last week i don't know if you heard about this but um she was due to perform and uh the grammys told her what they wanted her to sing and she was like i don't actually want to do that i want to do this and that stipulation wasn't put on any of the other artists so she was like, I don't actually want to do that. I want to do this. And that stipulation wasn't put on any of the other artists. So she was quite rightly, was like, OK, if I'm not going to let me perform what I want to, I won't do it. And to be honest, Ariana Grande doesn't need the Grammys. That in itself is an illustration that these women are, they're making the rules and they're not being dictated to. Absolutely. And I also think it's quite interesting in terms of awards and how relevant and necessary they are in the music industry.

She released her album on Friday and it's number one globally. She doesn't need to be performing at the Grammys to sell tickets to her concert or to get people streaming her album. But the Grammys lost out by not having the biggest pop star in the world performing at their show.

They also didn't have Childish Gambino who won the other two massive awards, Record of the Year and Song of the Year for This Is America. He wasn't there. He didn't perform. So they really missed out there. Thank you. Good to see you, Sinead.

Sinead Garvin of Newsbeat, who's there. She's their entertainment reporter. Let's have a word with Claire Hunter. Good morning to you, Claire. Good morning. Claire is the author of Threads of Life, A History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle. She's a banner maker. She's been a community textile artist and the founder of Needleworks in Glasgow. And your book was the Book of the Week here on Radio 4 last week. And if

anybody missed it, they can find it, of course, on BBC Sounds. The world of sewing, you might think it's a gentle sort of quiet place where everybody's mutually respectful and nothing much goes on. Not true. Never has been. And it certainly isn't true now, is it? It's not true now. And as you say, it never has been in terms of sewing's always been a way of people marking out their identity, of campaigning, of commemoration for people they've lost. It's a language. It's a way of people actually voicing things that they care about. And, of course, many of those voices and time have been lost through cultures and centuries because sewing itself has been demoted to being thought of

as just a domestic craft, which is much more than that. Done by women, therefore. Done by women, therefore. Not that important. Exactly. Allegedly. Let's go back then to the Bayer Tapestry, which is the place, I suppose, I perhaps rather crudely assume sewing starts. But of course, it's not actually sewing anyway, is it?

Well, it's not woven. It's not a tapestry. It's an embroidery. And so it is sewn but with the bio tapestry it's one of those textiles that actually has survived through time for 900 years remarkably but when I went to see it in France where it is then I was very surprised that actually the people who had made it who we think of as women from the nunneries in England, are not actually acknowledged in any way. While we champion it as the great piece of needlework of all time in European needlework history, then actually the people

who made it are unacknowledged. Which, well, I have to say that doesn't surprise me. It did surprise you that they weren't acknowledged? It did surprise me that they weren't acknowledged. Just simply because of the scale that is so visible in the piece itself. I had thought that maybe it would just seem to be like a sewn reproduction of a design which was created by, we think, Bishop Squalland, a male designer. But actually it was much more than that. It was, you know, because I do sew,

I could see the kind of detail of how they'd kind of use tension to loosen off a thread or tighten it up to make a very thick clustered pattern or to get, you know, the kind of curve of a chin in an anguished soldier's face. It was just very, very, very clever. When you describe it like that, it really is an incredible skill you describe there about very clever. When you describe it like that, it really is an incredible skill you describe there about the chin. I'd never thought of that. There are also

examples in your book about sewing being used as a cry of anguish, actually, particularly women in asylums. There's one notable example of a young woman who was trying to express her, well, it was more than misery, in a jacket? Yes, Agnes Ritschner's jacket. She was a German seamstress in the 19th century, but she had been a professional dressmaker. And so she had actually taken the very shapeless uniform that she was put into in the asylum

and remodelled it into something that was actually very chic with a lovely peplum and fitted her beautifully. But then she inscribed it inside and out with a torrent of words, mostly in Old and New German, which we can't totally decipher what she was talking about. Ich, the word for I, is repeated throughout it. And in some ways what it seems to be

is an expression of her mental state, that while she could sew very, very beautifully, she chose to sew these words very erratically, very almost clumsily. And in that way it was a kind of visual representation of what she was feeling, what her brain felt like to her in that state. And has survived again like the Bayeux Tapestry as one of the very rare visual representations of what mental distress feels like. I think it's really important because

we tend to associate sewing with these days people might think of it as a mindful activity, something gentle but actually as you say there are examples of the absolute opposite end of the emotional spectrum. That's right, and I think if you think of the banners of the women at the Green in Common, where they then brought... And the suffragettes. And the suffragettes. In Green in Common, they created banners using lots of textiles from home,

discarded clothing from their young ones, etc. But then they put them together in a very bold very emphatic way to show that actually they were women who were politically active women who actually were using their energy to say no to nuclear war it is interesting claire that um people don't bizarrely to my mind don't seem as worried about the possibility of nuclear war as they used to why have we we stopped? I was terrified when I was 16, 17 but now it never crosses my mind.

Well I think I lived in a time of the Cuban crisis and we all thought we were going to die tomorrow. Maybe it was because that was the main focus. Russia, post the Cold War appeared to be the enemy. The only major enemy we had at the time.

And of course now, well, where could the threat come from? It could come from so many places and maybe it's just become too big a subject to even contemplate. I mentioned at the beginning that some people might think of sewing as a somewhat anodyne topic. And as you've already illustrated brilliantly it is absolutely the polar opposite of that and there is a lively debate about diversity or actually the suggestion really is a profound lack of diversity within the craft community and within sewing. What do you know about that and is it something that crops up a lot? Well in Threads of Life what I'm really looking at is mainly are the voices of people

who have used needlework because they're not being heard. And I think within that, then obviously, diversity or the lack of the demonstration of diversity in needlework is very apparent. And that's part of the hidden histories of needlework itself. There's been, you know, a lot now being talked about, being debated about, say, African-American quilts in the States where there's been a long history, actually, of slaves making quilts, partly to keep alive their visual traditions, which were lost when they were

brought to America, but also to then put in front of people a new, almost like a biography of American slavery, through both the way they were being made and also how they were being shown. So one of the quilters, Harriet Powers, who was born in slavery in the 19th century, she then made a couple of quilts which still survive. And on those, they seem to be very innocuous biblical quilts that she sewed apparently because of her biblical education as a slave. But actually, they're all in the theme of freedom and so they're subversive in the way that she's actually the themes that she's chosen to sew and and that kind of idea of of celebrating and conserving an African tradition through quilts is very strong in America and is increasingly becoming more acknowledged. Yes I You tend to think of the world of quilting

being owned by the white settlers. Am I just being... Well, that's right, but of course you've got very different forms of quilting. So, for instance, the white American quilt is a very orderly affair with blocks that are set out very symmetrically. African American quilts come from a totally different tradition of staggered strips, which really goes back to a spiritual base

of the idea of strips of fabric being put together, basically confused evil spirits, so they therefore couldn't penetrate the protection of a quilt and damage the person who slept under it so so they've kept alive through their quilting and say not just visual but spiritual traditions which is very interesting but there is a i mean i think it's fair to say a lively debate in the states isn't there right i think there is a lively debate not just about you know um what history has been lost in terms of black American needlework, but also how those who make are portrayed or not portrayed more accurately. Or on craft magazines or their work.

Yeah, it has happened here too. Romana Lasker, who was a contestant in the Great British Sewing Bee, did make the point of saying there was a lack of diversity on the covers of British sewing magazines as well. Yes, I'm sure that's true. But there isn't a lack of activity. No. So why should we have that lack of presence of women of all diverse backgrounds who've got talent in sewing.

Yeah, I was talking to a friend of mine who's a passionate sewer, I know, and she said that there's also an issue about pattern sizing in the States, that larger women do feel that they're being left out as well. Yes, I'm sure that's true. And I think that what's happening now is that with social media and online, then again, that's actually helping to make a much more democratic landscape for makers and crafters by creating sites where people can actually share their stories, either of discrimination or lack of acknowledgement, as I say, or where they can actually then celebrate what is being made and the talents that are there. This has been your entire working life, has it, this particular subject? Well, I started in theatre, but I very quickly claimed needlework as my professional life. You studied theatre in Bristol?

In Bristol. Yeah. So it sounds like a big change to you. Well, I'd always sewn since I was a child, And actually at school, I had wanted to take up needlework. But I was born into a generation where because I had a brain, then the idea, as I put to my teachers, of me going to what was then called Doe School in Glasgow to study dressmaking and needlework was basically met with derision.

Because why would you go and do something that they considered menial when you had a brain and could go on to university? So I wasn't allowed to do sewing, therefore, or art, and went on, did university, went into theatre, and then threw that into community arts, and started to use my sewing again as part of community arts projects, and then started getting into banner making as part of political activism. And what was your first banner? My first banner was for the People's March for Jobs. I was working in a fountain at the time.

In the 80s? In the 80s. A very scrappy affair, you know, just a bit of lining fabric and some letters glued on. But I made it the March for Jobs converged in Northampton and I thought they should have a welcome banner. And so I made one of my sitting room floor. Right long did that take do you remember it took about half an hour less than painstaking less than painstaking but it was all about the message but it was all about

the message absolutely right and you're still out there still doing it thank you both thank you both thank you and your alter ego for coming on um Claire really nice to talk to you thank you very much thank you really interesting and um what have we got a couple let me just read these two Thank you and your alter ego for coming on. Claire, really nice to talk to you. Thank you very much. Very nice to talk to you, Dean. Thank you. Really interesting. And what have we got? Let me just read these two out because I think they illustrate an impressive difference of opinion, this. And it just shows you that we will never please everybody. And we're here to please nobody. This is from Em, who says, as a straight feminist submissive woman, it was great to hear my views being aired this morning. There are many women like me who enjoy this type of sex and porn and we're not able to discuss it publicly because of the stigma and discrimination it would attract. Being able to see these desires shown in a consenting way will hopefully help to reduce this in the future. So that's the view of M.

And from Linda, your programme should be renamed The Sleaze Hour. I've switched off yet again. Well, Linda, if you're with us tomorrow, and of course, chances are you probably won't be, but you'll be able to hear a discussion on Donald Trump, on the women who continue to back President Trump in the United States. And there are many, many millions of them. They won't all be on the programme tomorrow, but at least one will.

That's Women's Hour live on the radio, of course, two minutes past ten. And then you can join us in podcast land whenever it suits you. But thank you for listening today. I'm Sarah Trelevan, 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.