Woman's Hour - Power List judges - Living a greener life, Women and epilepsy, Identity politics and feminism, Essex girls

Episode Date: October 10, 2020

Around 300,000 women have epilepsy in the UK. Epilepsy Research UK say that hormones can affect epilepsy, and drugs used to control it need to be very carefully balanced with medication that women take. Dr Susan Duncan is a consultant neurologist. Torie, 30 and Ruth, 60 both have it.Three of our Power List judges Lucy Siegle, Flo Headlam and Prof Alice Larkin answer your questions on how to live a greener life. The opera singer Natalya Romaniw has just been named Young Artist of the Year at the Gramophone Classical Music Awards, she tells us about the challenges of performing live during the pandemic.Last week the first hydrogen train in the UK took its maiden journey. There’s still a lot to do like making room for the batteries underneath the train, and increasing the speed. Helen Simpson and Chandra Morbey are two women behind the project.javascript:void(0)Writer and journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown’s new book, Ladies who Punch, is about fifty daring courageous indomitable women. The women who inspire her are black, white and brown.” Women,” she says, “have issues in common, regardless of race. Differences matter but commonalities matter more and we seem to have lost sight of that.” Joining her to discuss these issues is academic and writer, Ruby Hamad, author of forthcoming book, White Tears, Brown Scars: How White Feminism betrays women of colour. Essex Girls are the butt of countless jokes and preconceptions. Jane hears from the author Sarah Perry who has written in praise of the Essex Girl aimed at “profane and opinionated women everywhere”, and the food writer and political campaigner Jack Monroe who is a proud Essex Girl.Presenter: Jane Garvey Producer: Dianne McGregor

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, good afternoon and a warm welcome to Weekend Woman's Hour. This week you can hear from three of our power list Our Planet judges answering your questions about the environment. We also ask what's wrong with Essex girls? It's sort of one of the last bastions of stereotyping that we're yet to kind of reclaim. People still make the Essex girl jokes, even now.

They say, where are you from? Essex. Oh, have you got a pair of white stilettos? No, I don't actually. But even if I did, what difference would it make? Jack Munro, one of our guests on the programme this week. We'll also hear from the opera singer Natalia Romanu and Yasmin Alibi Brown and Ruby Hamad discuss what white feminism has ever done for women of colour. That's a little bit later. Now women and epilepsy is an important topic especially in the light of the Cumberledge Review which came out in July. It drew attention to the sometimes quite catastrophic effects of three different medical treatments given to women. An oral pregnancy test called Primidos, pelvic mesh and the anti-epilepsy

drug sodium valproate. Thousands of women of childbearing age are prescribed it but they should be on a pregnancy prevention programme. Epilepsy Research UK believe that hormones can affect epilepsy and drugs used to control it need to be very carefully balanced with medication that women take, like the pill. Dr Susan Duncan is a consultant neurologist at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh and she's also the principal investigator for the Scottish Epilepsy Death Study.

Tori Robinson is 39, Ruth Robertson is 66 and both have epilepsy. Susan, first of all, I asked her how many women have it? We reckon in the UK there's about 500,000 to 600,000 people have epilepsy, so it's roughly going to be about 300,000. So there's no gender difference here? It's not? Well, there's a slight gender difference, slightly commoner in men, but essentially no. Okay, but women and men are physiologically very different. So what about the impact of the female body on epilepsy or vice versa? Vice versa? Well, there's a number

of reasons. I mean, the first thing, of course, is so-called catamenial epilepsy, and that's the exacerbation of seizures or them becoming more frequent during the menstrual cycle. And this has been a source of fascination since Victorian times, with some studies showing up to 60% of people reporting increasing seizures, usually around the time of menstruation. There's no internationally defined, accepted definition of the condition, but there have been studies done into it. Sadly, they've been fairly inconclusive. There was a large study back in the early 2000s, bankrolled by the National Institutes of Health, and they looked at about 200 women and they did a very nice double-blind placebo-controlled trial of progesterone and they found that it didn't help in catamenial epilepsy. The theory is that oestrogen is epileptogenic and progesterone, which is the other main female hormone, is not, is anti-epileptogenic and just before you start to menstruate, there's a sudden drop in your progesterone levels and you

have unfettered oestrogen levels. And that's what makes the seizures worse or more frequent. But unfortunately, the hormonal manipulation did not work for the majority of women and it was declared a negative study. That is disappointing, isn't it? It is, yeah. Okay. Does it mean, because of that link or possible link, does it mean that girls are likely to start having epileptic fits around the time of puberty? Not necessarily. I think there are certain epilepsies, what are called the generalised genetic epilepsies, and the sort of classic one is juvenile myoclonic

epilepsy, which tends to start in adolescence, which of course is when girls start to menstruate. And these epilepsies, particularly juvenile myoclonic epilepsy, juvenile absence epilepsy, tend to be slightly common around girls anyway. Whether it's hormonal or not, we've never really sorted out, but it's probably the combination of these particular epilepsies starting at this particular time in life and that's also when girls start to menstruate. So there's been no proven link as such. Okay, let's bring in Ruth Robertson. Ruth, I know you're very, and it's very important that I mention this, you're not defined by your epilepsy. You happen to have epilepsy.

I think that's really important to say. And you are someone who's worked as a psychotherapist. That's right, isn't it? That's right, yes. Yeah, but you were somebody who actually did start epilepsy in your teens. Yeah, I was 14 when I had my first seizure, yes. And what happened around that time? Well, I'd moved down from Edinburgh to Sussex,

and so that was a big kind of shock. Apart from that, I don't think anything particular happened. I don't know if that can sort of cause you to start having epilepsy, but I suppose I was a teenager, and so that's the kind of time these things sometimes, you know, show their face. How were you treated? Oh, I think the local GP came in and, you know, I was given various medications and that made me a lot better. And I was fortunate in that it was, at that time, it was nocturnal. And for quite a lot of my life, it has been nocturnal, but nonetheless, the seizures were quite bad.

I mean, I think I went to see a neurologist, but I don't think I knew much about it really, except for what happened to me. Was there any sense in which your family tried to protect you? Did they suggest that perhaps you don't have a very active social life, anything like that? Well, I think my father was quite alarmed and I think the the doctors also had sort of saying, you know, well, she shouldn't, you know, do much and she shouldn't, she shouldn't go out by herself and, you know, make sure she's, you know, so I was kind of being

put back into the role of a much younger child. My father was quite alarmed and was quite keen to go along with that because he had had a brother with epilepsy who was also severely disabled in other ways as well. But my mother said, no, she's got to have a proper teenage life. And in fact, at the time, I just thought, this is the end. I'm never going to have a boyfriend. I'm never going to get married. I really felt that life was sort of falling apart. But my mother was the one who really said, no, she's got to go to parties. And you, to my father, you've got to go and pick her up at the right time, you know, not too late. And so that's what happened. Right. Thank you. That, I suppose, would be back in the 70s, Ruth, something like that. Yeah.

OK, slightly different for you, Tori, now only 39. How did your family react? Quite frankly, in a rather pants manner. So I was diagnosed when I was 10. And I was just plonked straight onto the drugs. And it seemed pretty straightforward, just like kind of dope up every day. And the impact on your adolescence, what was it? You know what, it was, it was just pretty awful. So like, I used to be nearing the top of my class. And then as soon as I was put onto anti-epileptic drugs, that was kind of it. Everything was so, oh gosh, I sound like I'm such a moaner, but it really, really was awful. I had to work, I kid you not, twice, three times

as hard as I had to before. I'd like fall asleep on the bus on the way to school and the way back. And my social life disappeared. And my confidence was just non-existent. And were you fearful of having a fit? Yes, I was to a degree. What was interesting in the beginning was when I was really little, I used to, in inverted commas, enjoy my seizures because they kind of took me away from the stresses of life. And it was a type of focal seizure. But later on and

especially after I'd been diagnosed I was I was scared because I didn't know what I would do in front of other people you know what would they think of me life was difficult enough as it was but I was actually very lucky in that my friends were very supportive they were you know a good lot but I was also very open about it from the beginning which helped I think. Yes perhaps slightly easier for you at that time to be open than Ruth and Ruth I think yeah you did say that your fits were confined to the night were they exclusively at night? At that time they were exclusively at night yes think, except for sometimes when I was ill and just, you know, aberrations like that. But yes, they were. So that did mean that I was fortunate in many ways.

And I did realise that I was fortunate in many ways, though I absolutely go with Torah about, you know, school and difficulty of being able to concentrate and that kind of thing. It does have an effect on all the medication and so on. Oh, it must do. Absolutely must do. Now, in your case, Ruth, you've had children. Was it something you anguished about or was it something you just really wanted to do? I think a lot of my friends were getting pregnant and kind of, there's a kind of funny time in life when, yeah, I just sort of thought it'd be good fun to get pregnant.

And so, yeah, I went off and became pregnant and then went along and the doctor said, yeah, to get pregnant. And so, yeah, I went off and became pregnant and then went along and the doctor said, yeah, you're pregnant. And actually, something I didn't tell you before was I was then sent along to see somebody else who showed me lots of pictures of disabled children to kind of encourage me to have an abortion, I suppose. And when I said I didn't want an abortion, he sort of went, oh, and put the pictures under his desk. Right, let's bring in Susan Duncan again. Susan Duncan, why might that have happened?

Well, I think in the 60s, 70s, even early 80s, there was this feeling that in some quarters that women with epilepsy shouldn't have children, that there was an increased risk of fetal abnormality, particularly with some of the older drugs. We've talked about Valparate, but Finitone was another one. And I think just frankly, good old fashioned prejudice. Epilepsy was tied up with notions of criminality and learning difficulty. And we didn't want this cascading down through the generations. I think attitudes

have changed. And I would have to say that the vast majority of women with epilepsy have normal pregnancies and normal, happy, healthy babies. And if you are a woman out there with epilepsy and you want to have a baby, go ahead. But I think it's very important before you get pregnant, you go and get advice. And this is where epilepsy nurses play a very good role, a very important role. And they've been a great boon in the last 20 years. Because if you go for preconception counselling, they have access to all the latest data about the effects of anti-epileptic drugs, different anti-epileptic drugs on the unborn. They can get that from our Belfast database and from the European database. And they can advise you before pregnancy is the time to make any changes in anti-epileptics, which we sometimes have to do and to get you onto folic acid. The other thing is that epilepsy nurses will also funnel you into

the antenatal clinic where women with medical conditions are looked after. So that ideally means that you'll see an epilepsy nurse during your pregnancy. If you're lucky in Edinburgh, our lead epilepsy nurse is also midwife, which is a great boon. And you will then have a birth plan. So you can labour normally, but you'll have a birth plan so that there's very clear guidelines about what to do if you have a seizure before you have your baby or during labour or immediately after. And you'll also get support and be followed up after. It's very important immediately postnatally if you're trying to breastfeed, not getting enough sleep to get all of that support, because that's a very dangerous time for women. We know that from the confidential investigations into maternal deaths in Britain,

one of the women with epilepsy are particularly at risk of death in the first 12 months after delivery. And often it's sudden unexplained death and epilepsy. And it's, you know, the suspicion is these women are maybe forgetting to take their drugs, they're not getting enough sleep, they're having breakthrough seizures. So it's a very vulnerable time for women. And it's very important that before they get pregnant, they get all this advice, get all this set up so that they can come through it. Right. But the take home message is, if you're a lady with women with epilepsy and you want a child, go ahead.

That is Dr. Susan Duncan, consultant neurologist. My thanks to her and to Tori Robinson and Ruth Robertson. An email here from a listener who says, my eldest daughter was diagnosed with epilepsy nearly 20 years ago when she was in her mid-20s. She went on to marry and have five healthy children. In only one of these pregnancies did she have seizures which were eventually managed and the baby suffered no ill effects. We are most grateful to the consultant here in Belfast who first diagnosed her and took such care in prescribing a drug which is compatible with pregnancy. Epilepsy and motherhood can be managed with the right medical advice. Alex says, when I told my GP I was pregnant last year, I felt like I was being told off.

My midwife was wonderful, though, says Alex. Well, congratulations to you, Alex. How can you live a greener life? That was the central question of a programme we did this week with some of our power list judges. The Woman's Hour Power List this year is all about our planet and we have had so many brilliant suggestions from you giving us ideas of women who should feature on the list which we will announce on the 16th of November. This week we invited three of our judges onto the programme.

Alice Larkin, Professor of Climate Science and Energy Policy at Manchester University, garden designer and horticulturalist Flo Hedlum, and Lucy Siegel, the environmental journalist and broadcaster. We started with a comment from a listener called 4starMary on Instagram. She asked, is there a green way to travel or holiday internationally in a post-Covid world. So here was Alice's take on that. It's really challenging. I mean, the lowest carbon travel around Europe would be probably by rail.

I mean, in France, they have a lot of electricity that's provided by nuclear power, which means that their rail network in particular is very low carbon. Eurostar is very low carbon. So that is, you know, in terms of going a reasonably long way in a low carbon way, that is a good way to travel. And then, of course, there's always the different choices around, you know, do you have just one person in your car or four? If it's what kind of car, do you have the efficiency and so on? So it's just thinking through when we're making decisions about anything that we're doing. It's just thinking through, you know, are there ways in which I can actually reduce the energy or go by a lower carbon mode of transport

in order to have this particular holiday? I was really keen to get to this question quite early on and it's from a listener. We don't need to mention their name actually. And she says, straight to the point, I try to live as climate consciously as I can, living and being and buying mindfully. I do what I can,

but I know it isn't anywhere near enough. How can I do all of this while living on a budget? How can I make a more meaningful impact on the fight against the climate crisis in the groceries I buy? Well, I am still much restricted by means. I have a tight budget and I shop at an affordable supermarket because this is the food store I can afford. I buy nearly Lucy, what do you say to that anonymous listener who wants to do her best, but you know, she's got a budget to stick to? I say to her, thank you. I say thank you for stepping up and doing so much on a limited budget, or on a budget, not limited, on a budget. I would also say to her, do you have any rich friends? Do you have any affluent friends? And they should be doing more. So could you offset some of your guilt and responsibility

and heck to them a little bit? Because we had a very important report that came out recently from Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute. And we know that the richest 10% of the world's population, so those who earn over $38,000 a year, were responsible for 52% of the carbon emissions and they ate up 31% of the world's carbon budget from 1990 to 2015. And then you go into the richest 1%, so that's over $109,000, who are responsible for even more, for 15% of carbon emissions. So there's a lot of people who are on more limited incomes or lower incomes

who are doing a lot. And there's a lot of richer people who are not taking responsibility at all. So I think that's a really important point. So if you can influence those people who might be living, well, irresponsibly, frankly. Flo Hedlum, question for you from Jess Wheats on Instagram. I've got two young children and I've got a new build garden. I'd love to know how to get a balance between practicality and an animal and bug friendly outside space and, something that's robust and easy to maintain. That's quite a challenge for you, but what would you say? The first thing is what sort of animal. I'm assuming it's a dog.

Dogs kind of like to run around and root things up and, you know, sort of pee in places. And I guess one of the main things is to get really robust plants in your garden that are going to take a bit of whacking around by dogs. The other thing to think about is raised beds, just sort of elevating what you're planting so they can't, you know, immediately get to them. And then in terms of bug friendly, there's lots of pollinating plants that you can get. I mean, there's a real sort of trend now towards bringing as much wildlife into gardens. So there's lots of lots of plants.

You can get sort of seed packets to just sow plants or very specific perennials. And then creating spaces for bugs like bug hotels or just, you know, sort of spaces at the back of the border where you can just sort of leave it a bit untidy for bugs to inhabit. Cheap food, because our first emailer just wanted to know about what they could do on a budget. I guess growing your own, if you have the space, is something we could all attempt. But what's the easiest thing to start growing? Well, tomatoes and strawberries. I mean, everybody kind of loves those and they're really easy to grow. Other things that might not be immediately you think about, but for example, some of the herbs that you buy in the supermarkets,

you can actually just pot them out into the garden and then start to cultivate them. Things like sweet peas are easy to grow. Lots of perennials, actually, lots of flowering plants, so fairly easy to grow. It's really quite straightforward. Philippa is a listener on the phone. Now, you have a whippet called Prue. That's right. Does she have any particular requirements? What's your question?

Well, my question is the most environmentally friendly way to feed Prue. She has dry food, which comes in a paper style sack, and she likes a small amount of wet food. And it either comes in a plastic tray or a tin, which is the best in terms of carbon footprint and recycling. Oh, that's a good question. Okay. Lucy, one for you. Yes, I have a similar thing because I just rehomed Daphne from Battersea Dogs Home. She's very cute. So dry food in a paper sack. I have also used with my old dog, Bobby, insect food for dogs in a paper sack. So it's made from insect flour. And I go, I've gone back to a tin of dog food because tins we know where we are with recycling them we know that aluminium is a you know a material that can be recycled many many

times I'm not saying the system is perfect but the recycling yield is high pouches and those little single servings or individual servings, for me, are mixed materials. So they're fraught with issues. Pouches in particular. And these are you also find them a lot like baby foods. They're mixed materials, lots of different plastics and metals glued together. They're not going to be recycled because we can't take them apart. OK, there's some experimental chemical recycling, but for standard recycling, a tin, wash it out and then put it in recycling.

Right. Why are manufacturers still using those apparently unrecyclable materials? I don't really understand it. If we're really serious about this stuff, then we've got to stop them using it, haven't we? Yeah, I mean, I agree with you. I mean, it's just a lot of obfuscation. And then we get into this whole kind of idea that we're going to be able to miraculously collect them all in and recycle them using chemical recycling or different sorts of techniques, which, okay, there are some schemes up and running, but you know, it's never going to be the amount that we use it's never going to be a viable solution and we should we should swap and we should be forced to swap by legislation i believe to easily recycle materials which are recyclable more than once so that is things like aluminium glass paper that we know how to recycle. Plastics, as we've heard in recent weeks, there's been a number

of reports, it's not easy to recycle plastics. And only 9% of plastics globally are recycled. And we have to acknowledge that pretty much they're recycled once. Wow. So it's just delaying the inevitable, really. Right. Okay. Do you think, Prue, is she going to take to insect food? What do you think, Philippa? I'm definitely going to look out for some of that. That sounds like an excellent idea.

How old is Prue? She's two years old, so it's only a small problem. But over her lifetime, you know, it's going to be quite significant. So it's worth thinking about. That was our listener, Philippa. And also we need to give mention to Whippet Prew, who I hope is enjoying her new world of insect food. Philippa, let us know how that's going.

If you'd like to hear more from that programme, that was Tuesday's edition of Woman's Hour. You can find it on BBC Sounds. Natalia Romano is an opera singer. She's from Swansea and she's just won the Young Artist of the Year Award at this year's Gramophone Awards. Her latest role is, or was, Mimi in the ENO's Lab OM at the Alexandra Palace in London. I asked her how exactly you go about performing at the moment. We had to, of course, you know, be very innovative about how we stage performance within, you know, the COVID guidelines.

And so we had to do that outdoors, which, of course, brought along with it the challenges of the British weather. You know, above all, we needed to be safe while we were doing this. And, you know, as an industry really needs to maintain that we, you know, we prove we can we can exist in a covid world and i think we did it rather successfully you know we had social distancing in in place on stage with a chorus the main cast and indeed the orchestra in fact the orchestra you know were behind us on levels, on tiers, upstage, and the conductor was rather unusually in a cherry picker. So not only behind us, but elevated as well, you know. And of course, the main aspect of all of this was that our audience were in cars.

You know, one might think that you sort of lose that connection, the intimacy that one generally has as a performer with the audience. And it's an important one. It's, you know, a huge connection for both parties, actually. But it only made the focus on stage more intense. And it was just so wonderful to perform live music again. Yeah, I'm sure that was. But can you explain, I'm really interested in what it does even to the sound. Is it different? Yes, I mean, of course, we were mic'd,

which, you know, we're not really accustomed to being. Well, you don't need to. No, we don't need to. We train so hard so that, you know, we have a very solid technique that carries over the orchestra. And, you know, it was no different. We didn't sing any differently. It's just that, of course, we didn't have that natural acoustic that the theatre brings to sort of bounce off. Instead, you know, we had fallback from the monitors at the front of the stage. And yeah,

it was rather sort of, you know, I felt at times like a rock star, particularly with the hip hop dancing element, which was added to the production. I'm sure it was amazing. Last night I was reading a newspaper interview. I think it was in the Telegraph. Forgive me if I got that wrong, from earlier this year. And I don't know whether you have these experiences,

but I very occasionally have a corona moment where I kind of come to and just get depressed by everything I can see and everything going on around me. And this interview really made me sad because it was in February and it was you quite routinely outlining what lay ahead for you this year. And of course, that world no longer exists and we don't really know when we're going to get back to it. Do you recall your working life before all this? Yes, very much so. And in fact, I've just had I've been, you know, hold a very privileged position at the moment that I'm quite aware of, that I've just had a little taste of of what it was in the new normal um quite recently and in fact I'm I'm sort of in the post-show blues phase at the moment having just finished doing an opera but yeah I remember I was um mid-run of uh

Madame Butterfly at English National Opera when we were shut down but I mean again I count myself quite fortunate because we were six shows in and there are many shows across the board that didn't even get to see the stage, you know? I know, but it is a bit bleak, isn't it? Sometimes I think we just need to allow ourselves a moment just to feel sad about everything. Oh, completely. And actually for artists to really channel that then, even more so into our performance, you know,

we're all sort of informed and shaped by our, you know, our human experiences, our emotions. And I think it'll, well, I know it will. It will make us all stronger as artists. You know, we will come back in full force. Well, let's hear a little bit of you. This is from Natalia's album, Arian, with Lada Valasova on the piano.

This is Nympha by Rimsky-Korsakov. Listening to that, Natalia, it's... Oh, I felt terrible for interrupting you there. It's so mature and, forgive me, it doesn't sound like you, if you see what I mean. I know it is you. No, I know my speaking voice is rather different to my singing voice. Well, yes. But I think people will be intrigued. You're probably fed up with answering this question by your name,

but they will be intrigued by your name because you actually sound like it's an opera singer's name to me. You're from Swansea, aren't you? I am from Swansea. My grandfather was Ukrainian and my mother didn't marry. So that gave me the fortune of having the surname Romanyu. And the first name comes from being named after a Russian ballerina who was very sort of hot of the press at the time in 1987 when I was born.

Yeah, well, your mother was obviously very intuitive about what lay ahead for you because it's just a brilliant name. Well, do you know, she thought I was going to be a rock star. She said because I kicked so hard in her belly that she thought I was going to come out sort of, you know, with epic amount of hair and playing the guitar and, you know, just rocking out. But yeah, it slightly went down a different path.

Yeah, but a brilliant path all the same. So what lies ahead for you just for today? Give us an idea. How many hours of practice lie ahead for you today? Well, today I'm going to be translating and phoneticising a little bit of Shostakovich 14. So, yeah, I need to need to get round to that. But also I need to go to the gym because I can't stay in the flat. We're in local lockdown here in Cardiff, you see. And so I do need to get out and about. But in terms of work, my next known concert will be in December in Katowice with the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Natalia Romanu talking to me this week. Another interview that I think it's fair to say garnered a certain amount of reaction from you was this conversation you're about to hear with a young man called Richard. That's not his real name, in fact. He's 28 and he featured in a short series

of interviews we had this week about dating apps in the 21st century and particularly this trope of younger men looking heading out to search for on dating apps older women to have relationships with richard says he has slept with around 30 women in their 40s and 50s old women they've been in their bodies for longer and so old women on average tend to be more comfortable with their bodies they also tend to be more comfortable with their sexualities they tend to know what they want and they're not afraid to ask for it or indeed just to go and get it which are all very attractive qualities and also i i think the the appetites of an older woman uh more closely resemble a younger man's. And I would say they're uniquely fitted in this sense. You know, young women and young men aren't actually that well suited physically.

They're really not, which I would argue why so many relationships fail. That was Richard. Again, you can hear the whole interview on Thursday's edition of Woman's Hour. And on Friday, you can hear from a woman we're calling Eva, who talked about she's 48 and she talked about her relationship with a man quite a few years younger than her. So always two sides to this and many different experiences. And I really enjoyed the emails we had from you on this. Many of you in very, very happy and fulfilling relationships with people who are in cases, a fair few decades younger than you. Thank you for all of those.

Of course, if you can't get to hear Woman's Hour live, and many of you listening on a Saturday can't, do remember the podcast edition on BBC Sounds. It's available on a daily basis. Now, here is a chunk of a conversation that went out live on Radio 4 on Friday morning's edition of Woman's Hour. Essentially, it's about the failure of white feminism to properly assist women of colour. We broadly started the conversation by asking why can't all feminists just get along?

Wouldn't it make life for women a heck of a lot easier. Involved here, Yasmin Alibi-Brown, the writer, journalist and author of a new book called Ladies Who Punch, 50 Trailblazing Women Whose Stories You Should Know. And she talked to Ruby Hamad, the author of White Tears, Brown Scars. And Ruby's the woman who wrote How White Women Use Strategic Tears to Silence Women women of colour. And that essay of hers went viral. She joined us from her home in Sydney in Australia. Now, Yasmin in her book says that differences matter, but commonalities matter more. I asked her why she believes that so passionately. Well, because my heroine in all of this is the woman who actually coined the term identity politics, Barbara Smith,

who was born during segregation, American woman, was in the civil rights movement against Vietnam. She's just the most amazing woman. She's been my heroine. She would have been in my book, but this was all about British women. And I completely agree with her that black women, Asian women, all of us with various identities and actually composite identities have the right to decide on our own agendas and priorities. But what she said was this, and this is what I believe, you know, they never badmouthed white feminists. You cannot be so, look for your mirror image all the time as a feminist, and you cannot be so immersed in what you are experiencing and what you are, cannot see the wide of a need to work for justice and find solidarity with others. And so I find this deeply depressing, this splintering off of feminism and the battles for women's rights. We have so much more in common than divides us. Ruby, what do you think?

It's true. We do have a lot in common, but this idea of splintering off, we're also talking about power here. As a group, obviously, there's going to be distinctions and hierarchies within that. As a group, white women have power as a result of their whiteness, and they definitely have a closer proximity to power than we do. And so what my book is attempting or is unwrangling is the history of that, of how women, white women, are able to lean into their race at certain times while at the same time amplifying their gender. And so amplifying the sexism that they are subjected to, but using that to gloss over or negate the fact that they do have a power due to their whiteness. Let's try to find an example.

Obviously, I am a white feminist, I should say, so I'm going to be very be very well by my own standards, relatively silent during this conversation. But Ruby, I just let's say let's say that during the conversation this morning, I say something and then you say something to me which I find upsetting for whatever reason. I then tearfully take to social media after the programme and ask for understanding. What would you say about that were that to happen? The context is obviously important. I'm not going to say anything. You're not allowed to get upset at anything I say for any reason. Like that's certainly not where I'm coming from.

Context is obviously important. Yeah, for sure. You are allowed to get upset but what I'm looking at is what is the actual interaction what I say in my book is that because of the racial dynamics that have been in place for so many generations it's like the the end is almost decided before the context is given if that makes sense. So it's like, you know, as I said in the essay, it's like even before we open our mouths, women of colour are positioned in such a way where position

has been aggressive, where position has been overly emotional. I know white women are too, but we are even more so. So the likelihood of gaining sympathy or understanding is very, very unlikely. Yeah, I completely agree with Ruby when she says it's very hard to be an outspoken feminist or even an outspoken public figure of another kind if you are a woman of colour. And my God, you know, I am apparently, according to some study, the second most abused woman in this country online. So I know that. But I do not agree at all with this idea that all power rests with white women. What I have found in my experience, and as Barbara Smith says,

is that there are women who are arrogant and do not wish to know about our lives. But some of the biggest breakthroughs in my lifetime have been made by caring and brave white feminists. We would never have cracked a female genital mutilation or honor killings or any of these big, big, terrible tragedies and cruelties among some people around the world and in the West without brave white women deciding in their hearts, in their heads, that they had to do something. I mean, like the journalist, the late Sue Lloyd Roberts, like the policewoman who found the killers

of a young Kurdish-British woman who was murdered by her father and her male relatives. These white women have been incredibly important in our fight. And I will not, I hate, I hate making these kinds of generalizations. As a middle-class Asian woman, I have more power than a poorly educated white, you know, young woman. Power isn't so simply divided. Ruby? I didn't say it was. I did at the start. I said, as generally speaking, sometimes you have to speak in generalities and not to condemn. But that's a reflection of the society we live in. Are you telling me that we're not a white dominated society? Yes, we are. Never have I written that there are no good white women or no good feminists who are white and that they're incapable of doing good things and that we're incapable of working with them. That exists at the same time as what I talk about in my book and what I talked about in that essay. You know, you're bringing up Barbara Smith and identity politics

and what, you know, she was part of the Combahee River Collective and what that collective, which is a black feminist, lesbian, Marxist collective, and what, you know, they were very adamant that their lives, their economic conditions could not be explained or improved by focusing only on their class or only on their race. They had to also focus on their gender. They also had to focus on their race and on their sexuality. No, absolutely. But she says now that the whole thing has been terribly distorted, that there has been a kind of narrowing and that coalition of interests. You know, what are white women supposed to do?

Can I just ask you both to what degree you think the patriarchy and men benefit from disagreement between women? I think that that's exactly the problem. And it's not just with feminism. It's in terms of race politics. In race politics, I followed the entire coalition response to racism, which was we had an anti-racist alliance of white, black, brown, and we were a political force to be reckoned with in the 80s. And now we are all splintered and we are unable and we were unable until recent, until Black Lives Matter, which is changing things for the better, I think, bringing us back together. It's in working class politics. Working classes were of all races in this country. They racialised it, used identity politics,

splintered the working class. I don't want to see feminism weakened. I think men benefit when that happens. And that's why in my book, women of every background are featured. Men benefit from this. Really? Like, I take exception to this. You know, we live in a society that has been structured, founded, built, maintained, perpetuated

by whiteness. And this is something that white people can opt in or out of. OK, so I'm not saying that it's, you know, it's preordained and biological, but we're talking about political concepts here. And to say that white women and, you know, women of color disagreeing is benefiting men. Women of color have not seen the same benefits from feminism in the West that white women have. So if divisiveness means that we're asking to be not treated, you know, as subordinate, I don't get where this is coming from, this idea that we're splitting the, you know, the feminist movement. If the feminist movement has never seen women of colour as fully equal to them, then there's not a movement to split. If I'm going to work alongside white women and then be like, yeah, we've got to do this, let's smash that glass ceiling,

but then I only see white women going through the glass ceiling. There's no sisterhood in that. Ruby Hamad in conversation with Yasmin Alibi-Brown. I thought that was really interesting. And at the end of it, I was left with loads of questions. So perhaps we could try and get them both back on at some point before the end of the year. That would be really interesting. Now, earlier in the programme, you heard the advice of our 2020 Power List judges. During that programme on Tuesday, Alice Larkin, the Professor of Climate Change at Manchester University, made very plain that she simply didn't fly anymore. And also what cropped up during the course of the programme was the cost of rail travel, which in the UK at least can really be pretty high. Last week, the first hydrogen fuel train in the UK took its maiden journey. There's still quite a lot of work to do here, but I talked on the programme to two of the women at the forefront of this project.

It's a really interesting one. They are Helen Simpson and Chandra Morby, Joint Innovation and Projects Directors at the company Porterbrook. They both have the same job title but have slightly different specialisms within their roles. Here's Helen. My favourite part about my job is the innovation and development of new technologies and trying to get those onto trains. And Chandra has a real passion for project management and delivery of critical projects. And Chandra, how did you meet Helen? Well, we actually met, first of all, because we were neighbours,

not realising that we were both chartered engineers. So it's quite a funny story. Did you really meet in the street? Well, yes, in the back gardens, actually. So eventually we ended up working at the same company. And after we'd both had children, we were both struggling working part time because we felt we weren't really able to give the job the focus it needed. So we decided to team up as a job share and apply for jobs, various jobs, which we got. And we've been doing that for about 15 years now.

Right. Okay, fantastic. Helen, tell us a bit then about the science behind this. How does a hydrogen fuel train work? Well, there are three main components that you need. And on this project, we've worked closely with the University of Birmingham, who had pioneered some early development in hydrogen fuel cell technology. The three parts you need are somewhere to store the hydrogen, so there's some hydrogen storage tanks. The second part is a hydrogen fuel cell, and the third part is some batteries. And then there's a lot of complicated electronic control system to make the three things integrate together. And what happens is the hydrogen

fuel goes into the fuel cell, and it's combining hydrogen with oxygen from the air to make pure water and electricity. And it's that electricity that goes into the batteries and powers the train. OK, Chandra, is this entirely clean energy? Well, that's the idea is that it's zero emissions. There's no diesel burnt, for example. And so it's just pure water is the byproduct. OK, I only ask the question because I've got an email here from a listener who asks, can you get someone to explain the science behind this? When hydrogen burns, it makes water vapour.

This is a greenhouse gas. And when it cools, it makes rain. One consequence of climate change is too much rain in some places as well as droughts in others. Why is it safe to pump vast amounts of water vapour into the atmosphere? So the output is water. Greenhouse gas emissions are caused by carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, other methane gases, so hydrocarbon gases. And that's what's causing the climate change emergency. So what we're trying to do here is emit water vapour.

It does fall as rain, but that's not the trigger of climate change itself. Right. And here we're trying to showcase that rail transport in the future could be powered by a completely green zero emission power source. Right. It was your maiden journey last week, Chandra. How did it go? Well, it was very exciting. It needed a lot of planning to get the train onto the track and a big team worked very hard to make that happen. And Helen was there with lots of VIPs and I'm sure Helen can tell you

exactly how it went on the day. Helen, any incidents? No, it was fine. There were a few technical last minute things that always happen on this type of project, but the team absolutely pulled together and we managed to go between a little siding that we work out of near Long Marston in Warwickshire, all the way through to Evesham and got a top speed of 50 miles an hour, which was amazing for the team because the train is a prototype at the moment. Right. So you cross the border from Warwickshire into Worcestershire for the trip. And 50 miles an hour actually strikes me as reasonably quick. But how fast do so-called normal trains manage?

Well, what we're looking at is whether hydrogen is really the solution for routes that aren't electrified, particularly for speeds up to around 75 miles an hour. So we think the main use of this technology will be on more rural routes where it's expensive to electrify the railway or difficult in some way and this would be a real technology of the future that's going to allow us to have a completely zero emission railway. But I understand that the batteries required are they at the moment Chandra pretty bulky? Yes that's right so because we were making a prototype train we were able to use kind of all the space we needed. So the next step is to move the design into something that can be productionised and that will fit into what we call the space envelope, as in the gaps that we have.

The space envelope? Oh yes, that's a technical term. Yes, so as in the shape and the size of something that you need to fit it into. So we've got to find all the space on the underframe and then we've got to work out a way of making the design fit into that gap. Right. And that's the next step that we're working on now. Right. So what's your timeframe? So what we're doing is we're repackaging all that equipment that Chandra talked about so that it fits underneath the train and therefore there'd be more space for passengers upstairs and that's eventually what the trains would look like and as a passenger you wouldn't see any difference it would just look

like any other train to you traveling around. We're currently working with the University of Birmingham on the next stage of repackaging all that equipment it will fit underneath two of the vehicles on this particular train and we're hoping in the next couple of years to get that into a production design and into a build phase for looking at rollout after that into passenger service. Right, brilliant. And I mean, as we were talking about the cost of train travel on the programme, is there any reason, Chandra, why this would be a more expensive form of rail travel? Well, you'd have to work out all the pricing points, which we don't know at the moment exactly, because it's still in the prototype stage. But in terms of the cost of the fuel, that is a key thing.

And as I know the government is really keen on promoting the hydrogen economy and where we're going with that, then I think in the future we might see hydrogen as a very cost-effective fuel. Chandra Morby and Helen Simpson, who are joint directors of what is really a truly fascinating project involving a hydrogen train. Now, Essex girls have been the butt of any number of ridiculous and fairly offensive jokes and misconceptions and preconceptions over the years. The Oxford English Dictionary defines an Essex girl as unintelligent, promiscuous and materialistic. Collins adds devoid of taste to that pretty toxic combination. But the novelist

Sarah Perry wants to alter all this. She's just written a book in praise of the Essex girl, aimed, she says, at profane and opinionated women everywhere. I talked to her and to the food writer and political campaigner Jack Munro, who's from Southend-on-Sea. Here's Sarah on the appeal of the Essex girl. I had been thinking about my own Essex identity for a little while because I think in common with loads of people from Essex, I was very sick of the stereotypes and the jokes about Sharons and Tracys. I sort of ignored it for most of my life.

And then a couple of years ago, I gave a lecture on radical political women and realised that I could sort of feel that I had companionship and an identity if I embraced the Essex girl instead of trying to pretend that I wasn't one. So that's kind of how the book started. All right. Had you been in denial about being an Essex girl? Oh, totally. I had, I think, a snobbish and unsophisticated response to the jokes. And most Essex girls, certainly ones who grew up in the 80s and 90s, will be familiar with having been looked up and down with total contempt

when you say that you're from ethics. And there'll be immediately unrepeatable jokes, and they'll ask if you wear white stilettos and so on. And so, like many of us, I sort of stopped admitting to it. I would sometimes say that I came from London and I did live in London for 11 years, but I certainly wasn't from there. And then I started to look into it and thought, actually, this stereotype of women who are too loud and irritating and don't dress correctly and don't speak correctly, maybe those are all extraordinary things. Maybe if you don't care about your reputation and you don't dress correctly and don't speak correctly, maybe those are all extraordinary things.

Maybe if you don't care about your reputation and you don't care about annoying people in power, maybe you're capable of doing extraordinary things. So I went on the hunt for Essex girls to admire and found more than I could fit into one sort of quite slender volume. OK, just name one woman whose name we should know. Everybody should know about Anne Knight, who is from my hometown, Chelmsford. She was born at the end of the 18th century, and she was a Victorian woman, as Victorian women were, and not as we think them to be. She was a Quaker, an abolitionist, a political radical.

She travelled very widely. She had a very big social conscience, and she was a real radical. She travelled very widely. She had a very big social conscience. And she was a real pain. She would turn up to dinner parties and if people started saying dreadful things about politics or were unsupportive of abolitionism, she would bring out pamphlets and kind of wave them at them and ruin the dinner party with her politics.

So she was the best kind of irritating ethics woman. Yeah, our kind of woman, by the sound of things. And Jack Munro, there's a streak of the radical in you, isn't there? Apparently so. And what do you make of the Essex girl trope thing? Well, I went to an all-girls school in Essex and we were kind of brought up to feel as though we should detach ourselves from the Essex girl stereotype as far as possible.

We were basically taught to drop our accents in drama classes. We were taught to speak nicely, stand nicely, pronounce our teeth. And that's something I carried with me right into my early career when I hit sort of the limelight as a single mum writing recipes so if I look back at like my early interviews and I've got a real kind of plummy accent because I'm still holding on for kind of shame of being from Essex and I just I've got I've got to a point where I'm comfortable and confident in myself enough now to just be like you know what this is who I am this is my accent this is how I talk People want to write me off as thick or unintelligent or whatever

because how I talk belies the place of my birth and they're not people that I want to talk to. I think I'm proud to be from Essex and to be part of a history of women with, you know, bold ideas. Yeah, I mean it's an intersection of

class and misogyny, isn't it, this actually, this Essex girl? Absolutely, and it's sort of one of the last bastions of stereotyping that we're yet to kind of reclaim, isn't it? People still make the Essex girl jokes, even now. They say, where are you from? Essex. Oh, have you got a pair of white stilettos? And I'm like, no, I don't actually. But even if if i did what difference would it make well quite um well sarah i mean you you also write about women who are honorary essex girls in effect and one is kim kardashian who on the face of it is all um well is anything but substance but in fact she's achieved rather a lot of unexpected things

well i think this is the important thing about it all. And just as Jack so rightly said, we are trained to reject the glamour and the sexualisation and so on and to be prim and proper and to be as anti-ethics girl as possible. But there is nothing to prevent a woman from being, like Kim Kardashian, fantastically glamorous and nakedly materialistic and kind of practically actually naked much of the time, and also having a profound social and political conscience. And one of the things that people don't know is that Kardashian has

personally petitioned the President of the United States for clemency for black women that have been wrongly imprisoned. She has done more than anybody else in the public eye to remind people about the Armenian genocide in 1916. It is quite possible for her to be, in effect, kind of the epitome, the archetype of the

ethics of, and also have a great intelligence and a desire to kind of disrupt things. That's right. And I think that's what I've come to understand, is that you don't have to choose. No, well, you don't.

Jack, I guess we just like women in particular to fit in a box and to stay in it. Yes, that's absolutely true. People have very narrow definitions of how women are supposed to, expected to behave. And I think one of the things that makes people uncomfortable about Essex girls is that we don't necessarily want to sit in that nice, pretty, neat, little, quiet, well-spoken box. We're like, well, we are who we are. And so say all of us. Jack Munro and Sarah Perry on the programme this week. On Monday,

Sangeeta Maiskar will be presenting Women's Hour. She'll be discussing autumn fashion and much more on Women's Hour on Monday morning. Enjoy the rest of your weekend. 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 somebody out there who's 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.