Woman's Hour - Quarterlife crisis, Family Courts, Northern Soul

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

A pilot scheme to allow journalists to report cases from three family courts in England and Wales is to be extended to almost half of the courts. From the end of January, coverage of cases at 16 more family court centres in England will be permitted. This means 19 of the 43 centres in England and Wales will be part of the Transparency Pilot. Families and individual social workers will be anonymous under the scheme. Krupa Padhy talks to Louise Tickle, a journalist who specialises in reporting on family courts and leads a project for the Bureau of Investigative journalism supporting other journalists to do the same, and Angela Frazer Wicks, Chair of the Family Rights Group and a parent with experience of the family justice system.Popular psychology tends to define a quarter-life crisis as the confusion, stress and anxiety individuals in their 20s and 30s feel about their goals, beliefs and relationships as they seek direction in life and look to find their place in the world. Satya Doyle Byock, a clinical psychotherapist based in the US is the author of the new book Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood and she joins Krupa to talk about young people's struggles with the push and pull of meaning and stability.Northern Soul is commonly associated with Northern England and the 1970s. But mother and daughter duo Levanna and Eve are turning this on its head. Through Levanna’s viral dance videos on social media and Eve’s DJing at their events in Bristol, they’re bringing Northern groove to the South West, all whilst introducing a new generation to the genre. They speak to Krupa about the release of their new album, Wonderful Night.Shere Hite was a pioneering feminist sex researcher who published The Hite Report: A National Study of Female Sexuality in 1976. The book was seen by many as radical, changing prevailing notions about female sexuality. It laid out the views of 3,500 women on sexuality and the female orgasm, but it was derided by some, including Playboy, which dubbed it the "Hate Report". Shere went on to write and publish several more books, but endured intense and lasting criticism in the US, and eventually moved to Europe and renounced her American citizenship in 1995. She died in 2020. Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated director Nicole Newnham felt that despite how influential Shere had been in life, that she has since been forgotten. So, Nicole produced the documentary, The Disappearance of Shere Hite, which is in UK cinemas from 12 January. She joins Krupa to discuss it.Presenter: Krupa Padhy Producer: Rebecca Myatt Studio manager: Duncan HannantPresenter: Krupa Padhy Producer: Rebecca Myatt Studio manager: Duncan Hannant

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

BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello, this is Krupa Bharti and you're listening to the Woman's Hour podcast. Hello and thank you for being with us this morning. It's January, that time of the year when we might be reconsidering life priorities and our goals for the future. It might be a particularly unsettling time for younger adults experiencing what some call the quarter-life crisis. We're going to talk to a psychotherapist who says that she has heard it all. Satya Doyal-Biok writes, I quote, from subtle doubts to unrelenting panic, there is undeniable epidemic suffering among young people in their late teens, 20s and 30s. That tug of war between seeking stability and finding meaning

can of course manifest at any point in our adult lives. Have you encountered that moment? What happened? How did you feel? How did you resolve it? You can text the programme. The number is 84844. On social media, we are at BBC Women's Hour.

You can email us through our website and you can send us a WhatsApp message or voice note. That number is 03700 100 444. All of our terms and conditions can be found on our website. Also, in 1976, sex educator and feminist Cher Haidt sent out anonymous surveys to thousands of American women to learn about their sex lives. What resulted was a book, The Haidt Report, that revolutionized the language and conversation around female sexuality. A new documentary sheds light on her life, her work, her battles, and reflects on why she's being forgotten. And from the 1970s, we rewind back to the mid-1960s and a music and dance movement called Northern Soul. It swept across the Midlands and the north of England.

Now, 60 years later, Bristol finds itself home to one of the UK's leading Northern Soul scenes and a mother-daughter duo are at the forefront of that. We're going to introduce you to dancer Levana McLean and her mum, DJ Eve Arslett, who are releasing their new album today. And on that, have you ever paired up with your mum or dad or your son or daughter and excelled together at a hobby or business project?

What worked? What didn't? What did you love or dislike about working with one another? Our text number, once again, 84844, or find us on X or Instagram at BBC Women's Hour. But first, a pilot scheme to allow journalists to report cases from three family courts in England and Wales is to be extended to almost half of the courts. From the end of January, coverage of cases at 16 more family courts

in England will be permitted. This means 19 of the family courts in England will be permitted. This means 19 of the 43 centres in England and Wales will be part of the transparency pilot. Families and individual social workers will be anonymous under the scheme. Louise Tickle is a journalist who specialises in reporting on family courts and leads a project for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism supporting other journalists to do the same. And I'm also joined by Angela Fraser-Wicks, chair of the Family Rights Group

and a parent with experience of the family justice system. Welcome to you both. Good morning. Good morning. Angela, I'll start with you. What is your reaction to this news? In principle, I think it's fantastic that we're going to see a wider rollout. I think that it's only when we start to shine a spotlight on what's happening within the family courts that I think wider society begin to get something of an understanding of what families are facing day in, day out within the court system.

So the exposure is really important. Louise, what does this mean, this extension specifically mean for journalists in terms of what they're allowed to report on? In the past, what has happened is that if you go to a family court, which journalists are entitled to do, you have no guarantee that you'll be able to report anything at the end of that hearing, because there's a ban, a statutory ban. What this means is that you can go to your editors and say, I've been speaking to this person, which you're now allowed to do under the new rules because before it was a contempt of court. This case sounds really interesting and I should be able to report a lot of the detail, even if it's anonymous. And you stand a much better chance of

being allowed to go and shine a light on some of the really quite extraordinarily draconian powers that are exerted in the family courts. It's important to understand though that there are strict rules to follow. There are. The condition on which this pilot operates is that journalists are, we are required to take extreme care to protect the identities of the family members involved. And that goes way beyond just changing their names. A lot of care is taken at the end of court cases to try and work out whether there are any very specific identifying characteristics, which we need to be restricted from publishing. And often, in fact, journalists will go further than is required of them if they feel that's necessary.

But, you know, we are very experienced in doing this when we report on sexual assault cases, on rape, on youth crime. All of those have very strict identification bans. So this is not something that is a difficulty for us. Angela, I wonder from your perspective perspective how positive it's been having journalists in court? From my own personal perspective I think what I'm really looking forward to getting is some really in-depth feedback from the children and families who've been involved in the pilots that have happened so far and are going to happen further I think that's going to be one of our greatest challenges because families, by the time they've been through family courts, are often completely traumatised and probably don't really want to talk about what's just happened to them. So I think the evidence that we're getting back

is that children and families' identities are being protected. Everything that I've seen reported in the media has been done incredibly compassionately and sympathetically. But for me, it's about really getting those voices and making sure that actually children and families are finding this beneficial, because obviously they're the people that we want to help. So they're the voices that I think we need to hear before we can sort of decide definitely, yes, I know that this is making a difference for them. And just to clarify, we've got this extension now in play, but does that mean we haven't had that feedback yet from families? I think that we're struggling to get that, but I think that's, as I say, understandable.

It's very difficult to get families to trust someone that they don't know, they've never met, to share their experiences. But it's something I sit on the President's Transparency Implementation Group and that's been my focus from the beginning and will continue to be my focus on how we can gain that really meaningful feedback without causing any further trauma or distress to the children and families involved. Louise, I'm keen to reflect on what we've learned so far.

Can you give me a sense of the kind of stories journalists have been able to report on and how that's been for them? When people end up in family courts, it's usually at the worst point in their lives. It's very difficult cases to do with serious domestic abuse, to do with alleged rape, to do with whether a child can be safely looked after by their parents or not, whether they're being abused. It can be that a child is so in difficulties and emotionally and psychologically disturbed that the local authority asks for them to be deprived of their liberty,

which is very distressing for everybody involved. So these are extremely fraught cases. And as Angela says, people are at the worst times in their lives and very fragile in many cases. But just picking up on what she said about feedback, the project that I lead for the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has recognised that it is very, very important to understand whether it does make a difference and what kind of difference it makes to families. And so we have sent out a questionnaire to cases where journalists have reported under the pilot, where people have agreed to give us feedback. And we have even had feedback from parents where the case has not gone in their favour.

Generally speaking, I would say that the feedback is positive and people feel protected by having a journalist in court, which is often what I'm told when I'm asked to go to court, that having somebody independent outside who can scrutinise and importantly explain to the public what has happened in court is seen by many families as a level of protection from the powers that are exerted effectively otherwise in secret. That's really, really interesting. So then my next question, are journalists coming to court? That is why I'm so glad it has expanded because the original three courts were Carlisle, which is a very long way away, and not much media there, Cardiff and Leeds.

Now, a huge effort has been made to go to those courts by various journalists, but family court cases are often long. They're involved, they're complex, they're expensive to send journalists to. So what I'm really hoping is that more will go. There has been a good spread of reporting from all those cases sorry from all those court centres um including my colleague Hannah Summers who went to Carlisle for a week-long fact finding and that's a serious investment of time for an editor actually reported from that but with with you know nearly with nearly half of the family courts in England and Wales now available to go to. It is much easier.

You talk about the length, the expense. So from your experience, what is it that journalists need in order to report better from these courts to make it work better? Well, first of all, you need not allowed or rather a family member is not allowed to go to a journalist and talk to them in any level of detail about their family court case. That is a contempt of court. And that's how journalists start to find out about what may be going right or wrong in a story. And it's what would prompt your interest to go. So that has changed under the pilot and it's incredible. It also means that once a transparency order has been issued by the court, you can quote what a family member says. You can quote what anybody who wants to talk to you about the case says, as long as anonymity is preserved. So that's a crucial first step. The other thing is that under the pilot rules, we are allowed to have,

well, we are entitled to have access to certain documents which explain a case, and we're entitled to quote from them. And that's very important because family cases are complex. And if you don't understand the detail, it's easy not to understand how to report it accurately. So for accuracy, it's vital and pilot orders give us those rights. Practically speaking, Louise, just staying with you on this do you think though journalists know what to do in order to get this access the practical steps involved because they're just as important? Journalists are nervous of going to court generally because it is a specialist area and there are always rules and there are rules in

this system as well. The first rule is that you actually have to have a press card. Not all journalists do. If you're freelance, you might not. You might not be part of an organisation that can issue that. You have to understand that you might need to stage your reporting. You might not be allowed to report straight away. You have to understand how to read an order. A transparency order is quite a simple order for a legal person to read, but it's quite daunting if you're a lay person or even a journalist who's had some basic legal training. And you may still have to stand up in court and argue your case for wanting to include certain details that perhaps a local authority might not want you to include. I have had to

stand up many times and say where a local authority has said, we don't want you to report our name. I have had to argue that it is in the public interest for a state body to be identified and that it is unlikely that that would contribute to identifying a family.

So it can still be daunting. But the important thing about the pilot is it switches the presumption. So you're on the front foot rather than on the back foot. Interesting. Angela, listening to Louise there, I wonder whether you have any concerns that you want to highlight? It's less concerns and more sort of what I'm hoping for from the pilots and this transparency is that wider society gets a much better understanding of what's happening within the family justice system and within the courts? I think that, as I did myself before I became involved, I'd always assumed that we were only ever removing children as a last resort to protect them from great harm.

I had no understanding of the fact that we were often removing children from victims of domestic abuse, from mental health sufferers. And the worst that I tend to come across is from parents who were once children in care themselves. And I think that because there's such a lack of resources in the wider system to provide the support, these parents need to be able to safely parent. We're left with no other option at the end. By the time it gets to court, we're often seeing that the court feels it's not within the child's best interests to wait any longer for those support services to become available. So the child is removed. And I think

if we're going to put greater pressure on the wider system as a whole to invest in these very valuable and much needed resources, we have to be able to show why they're so badly needed. And I think we can do that by really shining a spotlight on the power imbalance that families face by the time they get to court, when they've quite often been asking for help for several years and that help has not been available. And I think if the only voices we hear are families like myself who've been through the system, people can ignore us because they think that we're simply bitter because we didn't get the outcome that we wanted and we can be ignored. And I think that this allows everybody to be able to see that this is not just happening to one or two parents, that this is actually happening across the board. And we need much greater resources in the support services to keep children safely within their families wherever it's possible to do so.

And Angela, I must stress, as you've just mentioned there, you have your own experience of this. I do, yes. My eldest two children were removed and permanently placed for adoption back in 2004 because I could not prove to my local authority that I could keep my children safe from my abusive ex-partner. And then in the end, when I managed to leave my ex-partner, I couldn't prove to the courts that I would never get into another abusive relationship in the future. So my children were then adopted based on the risk of future emotional harm, which obviously was traumatic for all of us. But there were no refuges. There was no support for me to access at the time. I've since gone on to parent my 12-year-old daughter who has no local authority involvement and I'm reunited with my eldest son who had a battle to reconnect with me. So we're often using risk as a reason to permanently sever relationships, not just from parents but from

the wider family, when actually I think that there's much more we could be doing to protect children, but also to protect those really important bonds with immediate family and wider family for those children, because I think there's a lot more to be done than just mitigate risk. And I do wonder, Angela, what difference do you think it would have had in your specific case if there had been journalists there? I think it would have been great, as Louise said, to know that there was someone else in my corner, that there was someone else. I had a legal career before I came and became involved with children's services. So I assumed I would be able to navigate everything. I would understand what was happening, what was being said.

And I absolutely didn't I had no clue I felt completely powerless whenever something was recorded that I didn't agree with if I tried to challenge it I was argumentative I wasn't cooperating and I just felt completely unseen and unheard and it wasn't until I began working with the family rights group that I found a voice and I think what this is going to do is it's going to give families that voice and actually be able to hold the wider system to account for decisions that are having lifelong ramifications for children and families.

Louise Tickle and Angela Fraser-Wigsby, thank you both for joining us here on Women's Hour. And if you'd like to get more insight on this development, please do go to BBC News Online, where our colleague, BBC reporter, Stantra Berg, has written an extensive piece with more details on this. Now, we've all heard of the midlife crisis, but what about the quarter-life crisis?

Popular psychology tends to define a quarter-life crisis as the confusion, stress and anxiety people experience in their 20s and 30s about the direction of their lives as they look to find their place in the world. Well, Satya Doyal-Bayok is a clinical psychotherapist based in Oregon in the US and the author of the new book, Quarter Life, The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, which comes out in the UK on the 18th of January. And she's joining me now. Welcome to the programme. Thank you for having me.

Good to have you with us. Now, tell us more about these struggles that quarter lifers are facing and the questions that they are asking themselves. Well, it runs the gamut from practical to existential. People in this stage of life typically have really not been raised for what's ahead of them. So there can be a range of symptoms, depression, anxiety, high stress, but also very deep questions of meaning and purpose of what am I doing here? What are the goals of my life? And also how to achieve them. In exploring this, you reflect on your own experiences during this period, and you talk about feeling unprepared for life beyond education. Do you think that's a common

thread? Oh, I think it's extremely common. We really culturally don't have a clear sense of what we are raising people to become other than students in academia and then members of the economy. But often education even isn't really preparing us for jobs in the economy. It can be a very abstract affair, often moving through grade school and university all the way until graduation. And then we're often really sort of released into the world, both without a great deal of practical skills, things about how to cook for ourselves, how to change attire and take care of getting around in the world. Certainly finances are often not taught clearly. But then there's also a lot of questions, again, of just who am I? What do I want to become in the world? How do I build healthy relationships and communicate with partners? And so we're really raised in a sense for academia, and then not that much else. Yeah. These are, of course, questions that people will be asking at any stage in their

life. So my next question is, how does a quarter life crisis compare to a midlife crisis? Well, they can be very similar. My work and what I talk about in my book, Quarter Life, is really trying to speak about this as a developmental stage of life. So I talk about quarter life beyond the crisis. I'm exploring this stage of life that is around, you know, the ages 20 to 40. It's kind of a long span, but it's an unexplored area between adolescence and midlife. It's an area of life that is very frequently represented in pop culture. You know, most of our celebrities are in quarter life. The

people we celebrate, athletes we celebrate are in quarter life. But psychologically, we don't spend a lot of time really understanding what's required because we think of this time of life as being, in a sense, a stage of which people are asking big questions. And so what I'm trying to offer is that those big questions that we are sort of accustomed to people asking in a midlife crisis are happening much earlier, and that it's not just a crisis that might last a month or two or a year, but it's a stage of life in which people are navigating, again, both questions of stability, practical questions of survival, and also very significant questions of meaning and purpose. You talk about figures in the kind of mainstream, celebrities, pop culture, athletes. But of course, you stress in your book that not everyone's life experiences are the same. Not everyone will be able to afford higher education or a mortgage. Might these individuals still experience a form of the quarter life crisis?

Oh, no question. I don't think it is specific to any one demographic. This is, again, it's a stage of life. And so everyone at any income level, any place in society is sorting out both the externals of how to be a part of society and find work and date and build families and hopefully, you know, find stable housing or good education. But they're also, again, wondering sort of what we're doing here and what adulthood is going to look like for them. So it really, it doesn't localise in any one specific group. And it's certainly not by any means just those who are known to us as celebrities in some way. Yeah. Let's break down some of the models that you offer us in your book. You talk about the stability types, or you're a meaning type. What those terms mean? Yeah, so this is some of

my framework that I lay out in the book, that it's a spectrum of sort of how we might be able to find ourselves in terms of the work that we need to be doing to gain wholeness in our adulthood, and just to help frame some of the questions we're asking. So I speak about two broad types of people, stability types and meaning types. And I talk about stability types as being, in a sense, those that we tend to think of as succeeding in adulthood in some way. There are people who often have a plan. They have a checklist of what they anticipate doing in their life. And they feel pretty comfortable moving along that track, whether it's through university and getting a job. They have a sense of career. Maybe they know they want to get married and have children and they pursue those things.

But very often stability types do end up having a crisis of meaning. And we've known that in the midlife crisis, but it's coming much earlier for many people. And so they end up really seeking questions of meaning and purpose and need to then learn what this other side might be considered sort of shadow folks for stability types, what meaning types know. And so meaning types, of course, are sort of on the other side of the spectrum. They maybe are less likely to be lawyers or folks in business and less likely to have a clear plan and might more be artists or philosophers or creative types,

or just folks who are questioning social goals a little bit more directly and a little more dreamers, less likely to be really comfortable jumping on board of the social script and moving forward that way. I'm sure our listeners at home are starting to think about whether they're a stability type or a meaning type. Now you've introduced that model to us. You explain in your writing that the quarter-life years encompass the bulk of female fertility. I wonder how that and other factors impact how women experience this period differently to men, if at all? Well, it's very significant. You know, it really is. Most of the gender roles that have transformed over the last many decades have their greatest effect on the quarter life years. These are the years in which women are choosing to have children or not, or finding themselves with family. These are the years in which those big questions of

how to balance family and career are most prominent and really most of a struggle. They're the years in which any social supports that don't exist are most impactful for women trying to juggle these things. So I think what we have really benefited from enormously, I can say for myself, I've certainly benefited from the activism of the last many decades to open up opportunities for women. But that breakdown of very rigid gender roles also comes with some costs that we've yet to really clarify about what roles we're all supposed to be playing then when that division of labour and that clear structure of expectation has broken away. Do you think people of this age group have always struggled in this way? Because I look back to my parents' generation who had one option,

get married, get a job, crack on. They didn't overthink and they often call us overthinkers. I wonder whether you think people of this age group have always felt this way. I do. I think that there's layers, which I try to explore in my book, around the timelessness of this stage of life and the expectations in the stage of life, as well as inevitably every generation has things that they're struggling with differently. But we often look into the past as having been simpler times in certain respects, certainly for some demographics more than others. But it's not as though folks these days are trying to overthink.

It's very difficult to set aside the kind of overlapping catastrophes, the amount of information we have, and also, again, the shift of gender roles and expectations, where everyone is really expected to move through education on some level. Everyone is expected to both create family and career. Everyone's expected to bring in money. And so there's an enormous amount of pressure. But this is a timeless stage of life. You know, I talk about it as being very related to what Joseph Campbell explored in The Hero's Journey and the monomyth and mythology, which is that young people have always set off and left home to find themselves. That's really the basis of so many of our stories. And that's happening in these quarter-life years. How do we leave home and discover who we are?

Let's talk solutions. If someone's listening at home and thinks, I relate to this, I'm going through this, what would you say to them? Well, this is where it gets interesting because this really is a personal journey. And so it's hard to offer really distinct, specific out and really allowing some focus to be drawn into personal questions, you know, career questions, bringing attention to symptoms, depression, anxiety. I'm inviting people to really allow inquiry during this time of life and not think that you're just supposed to push through

and focus on, you know, making money and sort of putting the blinders on. I really want to invite all of us in society, really at all age groups, to allow there to be questions for this time of life without it being a source of ridicule and pressure for people. So, of course, I'm a therapist. I invite and encourage people to go to therapy. And, of course, I'm a therapist, I invite and encourage people to go to therapy. And of course, I lay out in my book more specifics around really, if you find yourself being a stability type or a meaning type, how do you pursue the other side? You know, how do we find the goals of both stability and meaning to be part of this stage of life? Are you a stability type or a meaning type? Do get in touch, 84844.

Thank you so much, Satya Doyal-Bayok, joining us from Oregon in the US on her new book, Quarter Life, The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, which comes out in the UK on the 18th of January. On to something very different. I've got two guests in the studio who are desperate to sing out loud. I'll

introduce them to you in a moment. But what you were hearing there was a nice bit of Northern soul. You just heard Tainted Love by Gloria Jones and Cause Your Mind by The Vibrations. It's a genre traditionally associated with Northern England and also the 70s. However, for the last two years, a mother-daughter duo have been turning this preconception on its head. LaVanna McLean and her mum, Eve Arslett, are the founders of Bristol Northern Soul Club, and their dance nights sell out every time. Whether it's Eve on the decks or LaVanna's dance videos on social media, the pair have become figureheads in leading the genre into the 21st century,

all whilst bringing some northern groove to the southwest and today is a very exciting day for them as their new album wonderful night is out now levana and eve both join me here in the studio desperate to dance i can tell you don't want to be sat down do you that little montage was like i was i was gonna you wanted more you wanted more as if you don't get enough well congratulations on the album. Very exciting. Thank you. Eve, let's start with you. How would you describe Northern Soul for people who aren't aware of what it is?

Gosh, that's a tough question. So Northern Soul is predominantly black American soul music from the sort of 60s era. And a lot of the songs that didn didn't make it the more obscure stuff it became sort of interesting to the the people in the north of England and they started playing these records collecting these records putting on events and it just was just an amazing scene the northern soul scene was you know playing this gorgeous music and people were dancing in a freestyle way you know enjoying themselves this music and you were dancing in a freestyle way, you know, enjoying themselves to this music. And, you know, it is really special.

How did you get into it? Well, I was a mod in the 80s. And so mod was kind of 60s music. So I was listening to retro music in the 80s. And I was looking for records one day at a record stall and this guy said, oh, do you like all those records? I said, yes, I do. And he goes, well, I'm going to a big event up north. He goes, do you want to come?

And I was like, yeah, sure, like this. And it turned out it was an Edwin Starr concert all nighter at Hinkley Leisure Centre. And it was a huge big sports hall. And there was probably, I don't know, a thousand people in there and I saw all these guys just dancing and high-flying kicks and everything and I was just mesmerised, that was it. You were hooked?

Yeah, I was hooked. What about you, Levana, how did you get hooked? Well, I mean, obviously Eve is my mum, she's an original 80s soul girl, so yeah, I think my first experience of northern soul before I even knew it was northern soul was I think occasionally you would play songs in the car I think Etta James seven day four there was this lyric that went like when the girls come home and I just remember sort of a little memory of that and sort of singing that in the car you'd always explain the stories of the lyrics to me but it wasn't until I was 16 when I started exploring

my musical influences. I mean, I was always into music, but I sort of wanted to delve deeper into kind of music history. And it wasn't long before I found Northern Soul and sort of asked Eve to take me up to a Northern Soul night. And very much like when you went to Hinkley, it was it was that moment when you walk into the Northern Soul event and you're just like, that's it. I've seen your videos you are smooth on the dance floor honestly it's like you're sliding around you're feeling the music how does it make you feel when you are dancing I I love dancing I've I've always been a mover me so I'm always like you know I can't stop dancing and and um yeah I think I've definitely found my love in

Northern Soul because um you know it's it's just one of those scenes where everyone is so passionate about the music and you go dancing all night at the weekend and I just thought you know I've never seen anything like this and never experienced anything like this and um yeah I think that's what made me fall in love with it. You introduced the music to us a moment ago but what is the difference between Northern Soul and Motown just explain the history a bit more to us and other similar styles. well I mean Motown was one of the the bigger labels which and a lot of that is is regarded as northern soul um but I think northern soul is really good at seeking out um more obscure stuff and and there are other genres you've got to remember that northern soul spans 60 years now it started sort of around 1964 1965 and there's stuff even nowadays released that you could class as northern soul you know

and there's some great music that comes out you know even like a couple of years ago there was um you know running away by the sacred souls that that is is an out and out northern soul record so it can be any kind of genre northern soul is not a genre as such it kind of picks out other genres like so it might be a little bit popcorn a little bit of r&b motown disco funk and um yeah i mean all of it is you know um it just chooses the best from each yeah it chooses the best you've both given us your favorite tracks lavanna what are we going to hear from you so for me the i mean it's so hard to choose your favorite track but this song um the the key memory i have of this song was when I was going up to my first all-nighter and it was on the cd that we were playing um and I just remembered that as this

song came on there was this massive sign over the motorway for the north and I just thought that was so bloody cool but this is uh um the tempest someday nice eve what about you um well it's it's hard it changes every day of course you know I get a craze about a record and I'll play it a lot but at the moment I'd have to say it is Toast to the Lady which is something that we've put out on a single it's a song which takes me back to the Stafford

era which is in the 80s when they played a lot of that sort of luscious popcorny kind of ballady stuff and you know for me what really draws me to Northern Soul is a lot of the Heartbreak records. And, you know, if you listen to the story and the lyrics in this,

it's about him toasting a lady that's just about to break up with him. And it's like, you can hear in his voice how that changes, you know. Actually, the toast of the lady is a really bittersweet thing because he's celebrating the fact that she's breaking up with him. That's just, you know, actually the Toaster Lady is a really bittersweet thing because he's celebrating the fact that she's breaking up with him. That's just, you know, devastating, isn't it? You're desperate to sing, clearly. I love it. I love the passion. I love the passion.

I want to talk about what you're doing now. And I want to bring this message to you. This is Robin Lees, who says, our next door neighbor's son in the 60s and early 70s in Kent was a Northern Soul DJ in Hull. I had never seen so many 7 inch singles in my life when he brought his suitcases home. I bet there were some classics in there. Tell me how Northern Soul leaves the North

comes to Bristol, leaves Motown all of that and makes Bristol its home. How does that happen? Gosh so obviously you know know, I've been into Northern Soul for 40 years. And, you know, it's never left me, you know, I've, you know, always listened to it over the last 40 years. And I became a DJ about 20 years ago, and I was DJing a lot of Northern Soul and funk in Bristol. And at that time, 20 years ago, in Bristol, no one had heard of Northern Soul. So I was playing mainly funk music

because you can dance to funk music kind of anyhow you like, really. But things started to change. Like about sort of five years ago, we started playing Northern Soul occasionally and we were getting asked a lot for it. So we felt there was a mood change in the air. I think a lot of kids had started to hear about it whether it's to do with sort of algorithms and stuff I think if they if

they liked a Northern Soul song then obviously they were going to get fed more of that through the algorithm and we were finding that the kids were requesting Northern Soul we thought this is really yeah so like you know no Beyonce it was definitely but you say kids who's coming through those doors who's joining you on these nights know, the Northern Soul has always been one of those scenes where you can you there's all walks of life. I mean, one of my friends in Bristol's described it. You know, one of our regulars at the Northern Soul Club said it's it's one of the most diverse and interesting group of people. And now more so than ever, especially in Bristol, we're just getting so many different types of people from all over that come to the club. And it's really, really, you know, some of the people that you meet, you know,

you just never would have thought were even into Northern Soul, but they are, you know, it's really, it always surprises me. Always. I've been watching your videos. They are so impressive. And you dance beautifully. And you've also danced with Pharrell at the Brits back in 2014. You've also more recently choreographed a dance routine for the new Chicken Run film. Tell me more about this. So back in 2014, that's where it all started for me. I uploaded my first video in November 2013.

So I've just it's sort of just been the 10 year anniversary. But since then, it's you know, it's kind of just been this amazing journey. I've managed to be involved in so many amazing Northern Soul projects over the years. And yeah, just, I've been really sort of enjoying getting creative with the videos and getting creative with, you know,

ways to promote the music. Because it's, I mean, it's a beautiful scene. And, you know, I just want to be able to share the joy that Northern Soul brings to a lot of people. Yeah. And you do your videos everywhere on the street, in the bedroom, everywhere, you name it, you're dancing. Even here later, watch this space.

I want to ask you about what it's like to work with one another and we did ask our listeners to send in their examples of working with their parents or their children. This message says, me and my son go winter camping uh for the for the last 10 years we go to iceland in march with a few of his friends for the second time i'm 57 and mark is 36 we are like mates looks like you're like mates as well we've always been super close haven't we yeah i think we've always had a close relationship but um obviously you know the the videos because

eve films my videos so um sort of since then we've we've always had a bit of a working relationship and i think i i mean i love it because you know you know that your mum is always going to have your best interests at heart and um it's great when we're djing together just to sort of have that vibe you know i do a lot of that we do vibe off each other a lot and we're we're very in sync i think the thing is, like, I'm very creative and I come up with all these ideas and Lev will just go, yeah, and then she'll build on the idea. And before we know it, we're out doing something crazy. Dream duo.

Yeah. And, you know, those conversations that you have with your parents which end up just sort of, like, rambling on. Like, sometimes we'll just be in the kitchen talking for hours and that's sometimes how we come up with our best ideas. Yeah, the kitchen is always the place, isn't it? This message says, I'm a voice director and voice actor and I run a recording studio. During lockdown, we were crazy busy working on the animation Chuggington for CBBC.

I couldn't get my usual sound engineering, but my daughter was just about to finish her degree in audio and music tech in Bristol. So she had just moved home and was totally thrown in the deep end. And between us, we smashed it. I love working with her. And now she's a fab sound designer at a studio in Bristol. And we are back up and running again at our studio.

There you go. You're inspiring some wonderful stories. That's amazing. Tell me about the new album. So the new album is out today. It's really exciting. Me and Eve got the opportunity to delve into the catalogue of Charlie Records.

They reached out to us and asked if we wanted to compile an album. And yeah, we sort of spent like a few weeks going through their back catalogue and discovering new tunes and tunes that we'd forgotten about and putting them all together in this LP. Yeah, and we want the our the LP to be very different to to what currently is out there you know and it's it's very much our taste um it's very expansive so again it ranges from like a sort of funk record through to sort of like really moody R&B on there and um you know we we love the ability because our sets are

pretty much like that as well, aren't they? We kind of tend to go in all different directions and I think that's what that album does, is it gives you a taste of everything. I want to come. Oh, you're more than welcome. I'm sold, I'm sold. Your new album, A Wonderful Night, is out now.

But for now, thank you so much, Laverna and E, for joining us here in the Women's Hour studio. Great to have you with us. Thank you, thank you so much, Laverna and E for joining us here on the Women's Hour in the Women's Hour studio. Great to have you with us. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Cher Haidt was a pioneering feminist sex researcher who published her groundbreaking book, The Haidt Report, a national study of female sexuality back in 1976. Many of you will know of her work. It laid out the views of 3,500 women who anonymously answered questions on sexuality and the female orgasm. Her book was seen by many as radical, challenging, prevailing notions about female sexuality. Jenny Murray spoke to Cher back in 2006. Let's take a listen.

As a human rights advocate, I would suggest that if men have orgasm every time, more or less, and women have orgasm only one third of the time, that somehow there is an issue of equality there. And I think that we should just not be afraid to say, I'm not afraid to say that. Cher Haidt speaking to Jenny Murray there. Well, Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated director Nicole Newnham felt that despite how influential Cher had been in life, she's since been forgotten. So Nicole set out to make the documentary

The Deterference of Cher Height, and she joins me now from the west coast of the US to tell me more. Nicole, thanks for staying up or waking up to join us here. I'm so happy to be here. It's super early for you. Thank you. Let's start with you telling me more about Cher Height and what her life was like, especially those early days as a student. Yeah, well, she had moved to New York City in the late 60s and she found work as a model, but she was also enrolled in a graduate school program at Columbia University. And she experienced an

enormous amount of sexism and classism, actually, at Columbia University. People were hostile to her questions about sexuality and also just didn't really even believe that she was doing her own work. It was pretty extreme. At the same time, she was trying to pay the bills by doing modeling and she was coming into contact with the kind of up and coming feminist movement, the second wave feminist movement that was kind of blowing up in New York City. And so all of those things sort of came together in a conversation that she had with fellow feminists about Masters and Johnson's latest book, which in their previous book, they had said that women could not have orgasms through intercourse.

But in the second time, they said, well, actually, they can. It's just indirect. Rather than the first book, they said that orgasms required clitoral stimulation. And in the second book, they said that women should be able to orgasm through indirect stimulation through intercourse. And Sharon, her friends talked about that and realized that it was pretty wild that a lot of optimism that if women's truths were discovered, then good things could be done to help women reach equality and for men and women to have better relationships with each other. And that grew into the Haight Report, which was- Well, it's groundbreaking. It changed the conversation, didn't it? And considering that, I wonder why you feel like she's disappeared. Well, you know, I was really struck when I read her obituary in 2020 and the headline said,

Cher Haidt, she explained how women orgasm and she was hated for it. And that was the beginning of my journey on this film, because I thought, how can it be that somebody who made such a positive contribution to society was hated for doing so? And then I thought, you know, wait a minute. Nobody ever talks about Cher Haidt anymore. And the more that I and the young women who I worked with on the film explored this, the more we realized she really has fallen out of conversation. She's not taught in curriculum. She's not remembered for the work she did. And furthermore, you know, that her work was still shocking, people's response to what she was suggesting, which was that we could change things and make things better. And I think people who don't have

an interest in seeing change really ended up kind of gathering together and attacking her, you know, personally as a means of suppressing her message. That patriarchy that you mentioned came across very clearly in the documentary, the battles, the mountains she had to climb to be heard. Going through that archive, what was that like? Oh, it was incredible. Cher had taken care to see that her archive went to the Radcliffe Schlesinger Library. And when we contacted them about this documentary, further to your previous question, they were really happy to hear from us because nobody had been requesting the material for a long time since it had been acquired. And so we were some of the first people to go through it in real detail. And it was incredible because she had written her thoughts about her life from very early on, sort of all the way through on the backs of cocktail napkins and opera programs. And she would just put a page in her typewriter at the end of a long day of modeling and type up

what she thought of the modeling industry and the beauty standards that women were being held to and all of these things. And so we were able to create sort of a contempor view of Cher herself as she was, you know, kind of making her discoveries and creating her work and help to humanize her and bring back a three-dimensional portrait of a woman who had really been kind of reduced to a two-dimensional caricature. For those who don't know about the Height Report, and I called it groundbreaking earlier, just explain to us what she learned about women's sexuality and what she shared. Well, the biggest bombshell, of course, was this idea of women needing clitoral stimulation to have an orgasm.

And one of the things that I found amazing in watching the archive was that she was engaging male interviewers on nightly television shows about clitoral stimulation in the 1970s. And I just don't see that kind of thing being discussed on television now, you know? So that was really incredible. But she was, I think one of the most radical things she did is she asked women in this incredibly comprehensive survey over 100 questions to respond to her anonymously, whichever questions they felt comfortable asking questions about their lives that also included their emotions. emotions you know what do you want out of sex how do you feel when you have an orgasm do you what do you what does it take for you to to to feel fulfilled um what are your wishes your dreams your fantasies things that people just really hadn't ever asked women before and you know 3 000 women replied for the original height report and reading it when i you know stuck it from my mother's bedside table when i was 12 years old and read it, I felt like I was going through a portal into a world of female sexuality that I otherwise didn't have access to.

And for many women at the time and women since, it's been that way. It's like a massive circle of 3000 aunties sort of like, you know, telling you if you're a younger woman, what they're really experiencing. And she didn't judge people. She just kind of mirrored it back and then wrote her own observations about it. There was criticism of her methodology, wasn't there? There was criticism of her methodology. You know, she was doing something new. She was, you know, sending out this this long questionnaire that was requiring narrative responses for people to just say whatever they wanted and whatever length they wanted. incredibly thorough, meticulous job that she set out to do. But she did do things that, you know, differed from the sort of what's considered to be the correct way of getting

a random sample. And so she was very criticized by that and for that. And her response was usually to say, you know, I'm developing a new way to get at the truth. And when Freud did that and he had a sample size of, you know, three Viennese women, he was taken seriously. You know, I think a lot of people have adopted some of the techniques and methodologies that she's used in social science since. And qualitative methodology is taken much more seriously now than it was then, you know? Yeah, yeah. Her relevance to the younger generation of women feminists now, what are your thoughts on that? Well, I think the relevance is really enormous. I think one of the things that I really wanted to show in the documentary was not only the

way in which, you know, she was eventually sort of silenced and censored and, you know, pushed to the point where she decided to self-exile to Europe from America, but was also to show the way that she and the feminist movement that she was involved with at the time in which, you know, she she really had so much fun and joy and creative work pushed back, you know, because at least in the United States here, we're in pretty dire times in terms of women's rights, especially in regards to bodily autonomy and the things that Cher was addressing. And I thought the project of the height report itself and people just saying, it's okay to challenge the status quo. It's okay to talk about it was very inspirational. So that's been the response that I've gotten from, you know,

young women around the country as I've, you know, around the US as I've shown the film is that they see her as sort of an icon for the time. And a lot of the things that she was very criticized for beyond the methodology were the way she dressed, the way she carried herself, the way she, you know, talked very openly about sexuality. Those are all things that young women today, you know, can embrace. And they see her, you know, as a badass and as a trailblazer. And so I think it's really important that we don't lose the stories of the trailblazers who came before us and the wisdom and the knowledge and the actual impact of, you know, her work. I know that your previous documentary, Crip Camper, starts in 1971. That period is a particular time of history that interests you. I wonder what else you're working on at the moment.

Well, I'm working on two projects and they're actually both about women, about trailblazing women. And one is set in the 1600s and one is actually also set in the 1970s and 80s, which I admit is a time that really interests me. I think it's a time when there was an open dialogue in society about what kind of change was possible. You know, it's a time that the disability rights movement and you know the second wave feminist movement and the height report came out of and I think it's a time we really need to kind of look back to you know for inspiration now Interesting, thank you so much for joining us Nicole Newnham there

the director of the new documentary The Disappearance of ShareHeight good to have you with us here on Woman's Hour I just want to wrap up with a few of the many messages that you our listeners have been sending us on the various subjects that we have been discussing on the program this message says i'm a 22 year old male and was speaking with my mom about exactly this yesterday the quarter life crisis i am transitioning from university to work as well as reaching a critical age in my sporting career. My priorities are changing

and I regularly question my self-identity. There are so many life-changing decisions to make and I've been struggling to choose what to do. I know I can change my mind, but big questions still consume so much headspace. Thank you for sending that in. Another message on the same subject says, quarter life, whatever next?

It's just life for goodness sake. Why label everything a total nonsense? A few here on the subject of Northern Soul. Richard says, Northern Soul, Try Peanut Duck by Marsha G. Fab. Another message here says, I love the enthusiasm, but don't understand Northern soul. We have this music in the London clubs in the 60s. It was called soul music. My husband imported the records from the States. Perhaps the North discovered it late. We'll leave you with that question because that is it from Friday's edition of Woman's Hour. But do tune in for tomorrow's weekend Woman's Hour from four with me,

where we bring you all the highlights of the week just gone. But for now, do enjoy the rest of your day. Thanks for listening. There's plenty more from Woman's Hour over at BBC Sounds. Will you please welcome the 2023 BBC Reith lecturer, Professor Ben Ansell. I don't think anybody expects to be asked to do the Reith lectures. So it's an enormous honour, but it's an enormous responsibility. Hello, I'm Anita Arnand. In this year's BBC Radio 4 Reith Lectures,

Professor Ben Ansell explores our democratic future and what we must do to protect it. Democracy is our legacy from past generations and it's an obligation of ours to secure for future generations. It's up to us. That's the 2023 Reith Lectures. Listen on BBC Sounds. 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.