Woman's Hour - Weekend Woman's Hour: Red Lipstick, Domestic violence and terrorism, Gentleman Jack

Episode Date: May 18, 2019

We explore the origins and enduring appeal of red lipstick with beauty journalist Rachel Felder and Florence Adepoju the founder of the lipstick brand MDMflow.What do women voters think about the two new political parties: Change UK and the Brexit Party? We hear from Jane Green a Professor of Politics at Nuffield College, Oxford who is also co-director of the British Election Study and Deborah Mattinson the founding partner of research and strategy consultancy, Britain Thinks.The journalist and author Joan Smith tells us about the links she’s found between domestic violence and terrorism. Three women, who all have a parent who has transitioned tell us about their experiences.Joanne Ramos on her debut novel, The Farm about a luxury retreat where women are paid handsomely to produce babies. Sally Wainright tells us about her new BBC One Sunday night drama Gentleman Jack about the Victorian landowner Anne Lister. Anne Choma the author of The Real Anne Lister tells us about the coded diaries which revealed her lesbian relationships.As part of a series of interviews on complex mental health we hear from Hannah who has been diagnosed with Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder or Borderline Personality Disorder.Presented by Jane Garvey Produced by Rabeka Nurmahomed Edited by Jane Thurlow

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 welcome to the weekend edition of the programme. This week we look at the coded diaries of Anne Lister, 19th century Yorkshire landowner and industrialist. She wrote in code about her love for other women and she is the star of Gentleman Jack, the new Sunday night drama on BBC One. Also today, the experiences of people whose parents transitioned. Looking at photographs of when she was he, it's very different family dynamic and I guess I did look at my friends' families and think

well why didn't I have that? Why didn't I have a conventional mum-dad nuclear family? Also this week, Joan Smith on the link between terrorism and domestic violence. And we look at the power of red lipstick. It makes women feel strong. It makes them feel more beautiful. It makes them feel put together. One of the people I interviewed was Paloma Picasso, who had her own great red lipstick.

And she told me that she was actually quite shy and she wore it because when she put it on, people assumed she was confident. That's all coming up in this edition of Weekend Woman's Hour. Now, there is still turmoil at Westminster. We know now that the talks between the Labour Party and the Conservative government have broken down. And we still don't have any clear idea of when we're actually going to leave the European Union. And the UK will be taking part in the European elections next Thursday. Two new parties are fielding candidates in those elections, of course, the Brexit Party and Change UK. So will women be tempted to vote for either of those two new parties? Jane Green

is a professor of politics at Nuffield College, Oxford, and she's co-director of the British Election Study. Deborah Mattinson is founding partner of research and strategy consultancy Britain Thinks. How have women taken to the two new parties? To be perfectly honest, it suggests that they haven't taken to them very much at all. Thinking about Change UK, I think people are just a little bit bewildered. And most people in our focus groups haven't really heard of them. They haven't cut through.

They haven't cut through at all. They just haven't noticed them. Brexit Party is slightly different. I think that most people obviously have noticed them. Women don't like them very much. So I think just to be really clear here, obviously, there are some women who will support the Brexit Party. Well, many, many women voted for Brexit. Indeed, indeed. But what we see, and this comes through in both the polling and the focus groups, is that the appeal is

essentially male and actually slightly older men as well. And that is also true of Nigel Farage's personal appeal. Jane Green, what do you think about that? The fact that for a start, let's deal with Change UK. Deborah says they're just not cutting the mustard. Nobody knows who they are. Do you agree? That's certainly consistent with my reading of things. And I'd very much agree with what Deborah said about the Brexit party, too.

What we know about men and women, one of the kind of, you know, really consistent differences is over time, women tend to take a little bit more time to kind of you know decide what they think about politics so they might express greater uncertainty about the political you know choices on offer to them that doesn't mean of course that women know less or that women participate less in politics it might also mean that there are more men with a greater tendency of expressing certainty when perhaps you know perhaps, perhaps that's not even well-founded. So, you know, it's a very interesting dynamic. Now, if you get a party like Change UK, which has struggled to cut through,

which isn't polling in high numbers, which doesn't have good recognition, then it doesn't surprise me that Deborah's finding that it's the women who are kind of expressing the greater amount of uncertainty and reservation about making up their minds about a political party they just haven't seen enough of yet. Is anybody saying they want to see more of it? I mean, is anybody saying I feel as though they could be the party for me, but they haven't given me the information I need? I think people are saying that they're very fed up with mainstream politics. I mean, in our polling, we're hearing 83% of people saying that they feel let down by the entire political more to older men on average, which was, of course, the same about UKIP. And it's also the same about preferences about no deal. So that sort of all packages into kind of a set of attitudes

and beliefs that we know, you know, tend to be held by older men. If you were kind of asking the question on the other side, what kind of politics might appeal to the kind of younger female cohorts, then you'd look to the politics, you know, that we saw in 2017, where we saw more younger women moving towards Labour, on average. And therefore, you might say that a party like Change UK, or indeed, like the Greens or the Liberal Democrats might be the kind of party that would be appealing to those kinds of voters. We know, for example, again, that younger women tend to be more likely to be anti-austerity, to take more liberal positions than is certainly true of older women. So it could be that, you know, a party like Change UK could have the potential to cut through.

But if they're not cutting through enough in general terms, then they're not making that breakthrough amongst potential voters who are women. Nigel Farage, he's a polarising figure, but he's an incredibly effective politician. There's simply no getting away from that. What is it that some women appear not to like about this man, Deborah? We did a big survey on what kind of leaders people wanted to see about a year ago. And what we found was quite a distinctive gender gap where women were much more likely to value collaboration and listening skills in a leader, whereas men were more likely to look for stridency and certainty. Isn't that a bit hackneyed, the suggestion that ultimately women are simply a little bit nicer? I mean, it seems like a sweeping generalisation.

I don't think it's nicer, but it's more collaborative. And I mean, Luna, let's face it, collaboration in our politics is what's missing at the moment. In a sense, our politics is set up in a way that doesn't allow for collaboration, which is why we're not able to get a deal on Brexit through at the moment. You know, everything is very adversarial.

But yes, I mean, you know, that is borne out by the evidence that that is what women are looking for. Go on, Jane. I was just going to say, myself and Rosie Shorrock, co-author, we've done some research on what is the gender story behind the Brexit vote. And in our research, we found that men who thought that men were discriminated against rather than women being discriminated against, these men were thinking they were discriminated against. They were more likely to vote for leave and they were more likely to vote for leave on the basis of that perception of there being some gender discrimination against men. But also they were more likely to vote for leave if they thought there was discrimination in favour of ethnic minorities. And in a sense, what we found is, you know, quite a small but

very interesting and we thought quite important finding was that it's the men who are perhaps having more of a sort of grievance or resentment-based vote in terms of their support for Leave. And, you know, they're very consistent with support for the Brexit party. We know that Farage was incredibly powerful for UKIP before, you know, really a pivotal factor in the winning of votes for UKIP. And so, you know, he has that potential, he as a person, but also those kind of issues and perceptions

and standing perhaps being seen to stand for men who perceive that you know society has changed in a way that they're not entirely comfortable with and of course you know we're not talking about all men there we're talking about you know a small proportion. There is no getting away from the fact that some of those men are right in their perception that women assuming their place in the world has detrimentally affected them to one degree or another we found that more men who were older and in the workforce were more likely to hold that view and also younger men not yet in the workforce so you know you might see you know that generation of older men who are not used to seeing that kind of working environment having to confront those changes and go further i think it's older men who basically look at the modern world and don't

very much like what they see. Let's talk about turnout, because in the past, very few people have actually bothered, relatively speaking, to turn out for the European elections. What would be, it was 34% turnout, by the way, last time, five years ago. Yes, it's pretty much always in the mid-30s. Well, what do you think it will be this time, Deborah? I think it's really hard to tell. You know, this time, unusually, these European elections are going to actually be about Europe, whereas generally European elections, like local elections, are mainly an opportunity

for the electorate to place a protest, to stick two fingers up to the incumbent government or to congratulate them. This time it will be about Europe. And it's quite hard to see how that will play out. But the group of voters who would be most likely not to turn out, i.e. the people who didn't want to have elections in the first place because they voted leave, have been, going back to Nigel Farage, have been given a reason to vote with his very clear offer to place that protest. So I think perhaps the turnout will hold up as it is and not drop.

Deborah Mattinson and Jane Green. Now to the writer Joan Smith, who's a journalist as well, chair of the Mayor of London's Violence Against Women and Girls Board, probably best known for her book Misogynies, inspired by the response to the serial killer Peter Sutcliffe. Joan's new book is called Homegrown, how domestic violence turns men into terrorists. serial killer Peter Sutcliffe. Joan's new book is called Homegrown, How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists. So how did she spot the link between domestic violence and terrorism?

In 2016, when Mohamed Lawesh Bulel drove a truck onto the Promenade des Anglais in Nice, which was a horrific attack, and he killed 86 people and injured about 500. He had been an abuser in his own family for years and he'd abused his wife, his children, his mother-in-law. In 2017, when we had four fatal attacks in London and Manchester, I noticed that all of the attacks were carried out by men who had this history. And because I sit on lots of committees at City Hall and I meet the police regularly, I raised it. And a very senior officer said to me, I've been sitting in meetings talking about terrorism with experts for

about 20 years, and nobody's ever mentioned this before. So he went back to Scotland Yard, and they have a database of convicted terrorists and also the ones who've killed themselves. And it's several hundred people. And he went back and said, what data do we have? And the answer wasn't, we don't have it because nobody has ever asked the question before. That's very worrying though, isn't it? Nobody has even asked the question before. It is, but I mean, people are, it's not just me, other people are beginning to ask the question. But I think it's because people think of terrorism as not really like the other male violence.

And that's why I wrote the book. I wanted to say that violent men are violent men, whether they're right-wing extremists or whether they're Islamists or whatever they claim to be their motivation. Underlying that is how violent they are. But, you know, clearly not every man who commits domestic violence becomes a terrorist. What do you suppose prompts those who do to adopt a political or religious ideology for which they are prepared to kill. That's true. Most men who abuse women aren't going to become terrorists. But I think that there's a cohort of men who already actually enjoy violence.

And, you know, they're living in an atmosphere in the home where there's a lot of anxiety, fear. They live with distressed, upset people. They're actually injuring their own families, the people they're supposed to love. And then they encounter an ideology which says, yes, that's fine. You know, you have a grievance. You have reason to be angry with the world. One of the things I noticed when I was doing the research, because I had to base it on, you know, publicly available material, is how many of these men actually carried out an attack after their wife or their partner had thrown them out. So Darren Osborne, who is the right wing extremist who

drove a van into worshippers coming outside a mosque in Finsbury Park in 2017, he had shown no interest in politics at all. He was a career criminal. He had over 100 criminal convictions, including one for actual bodily harm on his partner. Six weeks before that, she actually threw him out and he was living rough for a time. And suddenly he started ranting in pubs about how he wanted to kill Muslims. The same is true as Mohamed Moulawesh Boulal, who I just mentioned, that his wife finally managed to get him out of their apartment. And I think there's something about these men, you know, the rejection is such a wound to their vanity.

And suddenly this identity is dangled before them. You can become a warrior, whether it's neo-Nazi or Islamist. There are, of course, some women who indulge in domestic violence and some who become terrorists. Would you make a similar connection there? There's one particularly awful case which got a lot of publicity last year where a mother and her daughters

were sent to prison for preparing acts of terrorism in London. And it's a very famous case because it looked as if they were preparing some kind of attack on the British Museum. And in that case, the mother had actually abused her daughters when they were teenagers. And one of these girls actually ran away from home and called Childline.

You know, the girls were sending out signals that something was very amiss in the home. And I think those signals on the whole were missed. And in the end, the younger daughter, who was only 17, she was groomed online by a British jihadist who was in Raqqa, I think, in Syria. And he was basically kind of trying to persuade women to go and join Islamic State. And he promised her marriage and they went through an online marriage ceremony and all this kind of thing. So you can see that in that case, you know, women do sometimes do this, but the girls are very, very vulnerable to that kind of message. You write a lot in the book about ACE, Adverse Childhood Experiences,

where a child may have grown up with domestic violence. What impact might that have on a youngster maybe being drawn into a gang or a radical, possibly terrorist organisation? Yes, I mean, I talked to a small number of experts when I was doing the book and doing the research and um the police now in london and under police forces are very very conscious of the impact of adverse childhood experiences and they see it in boys getting

involved in gangs because a gang is a kind of alternative family we know the effects on children one of the effects on on boys if they're growing up in a household where there is a lot of violence, they tend at first to reject it. They tend later on to start identifying with the abuser because it's just out of self-preservation. of children who have grown up with abuse, children who haven't, and combat veterans. And the boys who have grown up with abuse, they have the same response to violent images as combat veterans. And that makes them something called hypervigilant. And hypervigilant individuals live in a state of very high arousal, where they see threats coming at them from all, you know, things that you or I would not be frightened by, they are. How has your theory been received by the police, the intelligence agencies, who you said hadn't really looked at it before? Well, the senior police officer I first spoke to about this,

he came back to me and said, you know, I went back to the yard and I asked what data we have and we don't have it. And he said, but, you know, intellectually, we think you're right. Now, David Anderson QC, who was the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, I heard him being interviewed a few weeks ago. And he said that it's beginning to look as though the right wing extremists, as though they do have this background of domestic abuse. So I've looked at those, but I've also looked at the Islamists.

And it's coming up. It's horrible, but it's fascinating. So the man who committed the Westminster Bridge attack, Darren Osborne, the Finsbury Park attacker, the Manchester bomber Salman Abedi, and two out of three of the London Bridge attackers all had this background of a history of beating up women. And I think the thing is that male violence doesn't stay in neat categories. So, you know, we know that rape often occurs in a context of domestic violence. And I think the mistake is to separate these men off and think that they're completely unrelated to other men who commit violent acts of one sort or another. That's Joan Smith and that book is called Home Grown. Now you're about to hear the views of three women, all children of a parent who transitioned. Katie Shurdley works in

online communications for a startup in Leeds. Katrina Innes is a features director at Cosmopolitan. Kath Lloyd is author of When Dad Became Joan, Life With My Transgender Father. She works part-time as a stress coach. Katie's biological parents separated when she was really young and she lived alone with her father. Here she is telling Tina Dehealy how old she was when he transitioned. I don't think I ever knew any different because she knew from being about four or five years old and she dressed and everything during her relationship with my mum and it wasn't really until I was in my late teens that she actually

had any operations but she always identified as female as far as I can remember. Did you talk about it? Absolutely everything she was very open she didn't shy away from any of the gory details that I think some people would do if I I had questions, she would ask me because she wanted me to be informed so I could inform people that were assuming things that were wrong as well. Katrina, what was life like growing up for you? So, lovely. Good. I had a very bohemian, fun childhood.

My mum was a feminist writer and my dad's a bright mum. We lived in this kind of topsy-turvy, upside-down house where we told each other we loved each other about four or five times a day. That's no bad thing. Yeah, we had a great time. And then I would say, I suppose a little bit like Katie was saying, my dad was always slightly in gender neutral clothing. She's very eccentric as a person.

So she was always wearing velvet trousers and this amazing style. So there wasn't really a big ta-da transitional moment, which I think a lot of people expect. Kath, I want to come to you next. Hi. Did you have any inkling before? Nothing at all. Nothing at all. He had very sort of back in the 1980s, very alpha male hobbies. So sailing, running, mountaineering, rock climbing, DIY, gardening, a big beard. And so it was an absolute total shock to me and to everybody.

What about your mother? Did she know? Well, my mum knew 10 years before. 10 years before you knew? 10 years before. So she'd had to live with that on her own, keeping it a secret until my dad was ready to come out. That's a lot for you to take on. Yes, because it started to make me think about how real was our life as a family. And so I had a lot of questioning to do.

And then at the end of the conversation, when I left, I was told that I wasn't to tell anybody. I could tell my boyfriend, who's now my husband. But other than that, I couldn't talk to anybody else about it. Katie, how did it affect the parent-child dynamic and the roles that you were supposed to play? I feel it was a little bit flipped because I looked after her significantly I mean she looked after me as well obviously she provided for me she gave me clothes and a roof over my head and food and everything but she was also very vulnerable emotionally until she had the network of friends as a support group all she really had was me and my granny, and my granny didn't live with us.

She, you know, was two towns over. So it was just me and her 99% of the time until she felt brave enough to go out and present to the world as female. She eventually did join groups in Bradford and I think Sheffield as well, met a load of other trans people, and at that point it became more of her looking after me again because she had the friends, she had the Facebook groups, she had people she could ring and talk to when she was feeling something I can't sympathise with because I'm not transgendered.

Kath, did your relationship with your parent change? Well, I feel it was quite strained prior to that because my parents were always wanting to know where I was, how long I was going out for, what time I was going to come back. And then when I went off to poly, it was always ring us when you come back and I turned up the once and it was a huge kerfuffle this was before I knew and my mum answered the door and sort of said well what are you doing here why didn't you call and I immediately felt like turning around and just walking out and then I eventually sort of walked into the house and

eventually my dad came down the stairs he was sort of pleased to see me but very surprised very shocked and it was all very very strained so then when I found out and then I was told that I couldn't tell anybody it seemed to put added stress and strain on our relationship. Your parents stayed together? Yes, and they still live together now as companions. So, yes, it's worked out right. Did you experience, and this is to all of you, any feelings of loss or grief,

losing this idea of the role they play in your life? Katrina? It's funny because later down the line, because at the time of it all happening, I was just very, very focused on the fact that my dad was still here and she was living. I think once you love someone, you kind of see beyond their physical appearance. So I didn't actually notice much of a change to how she looked for a very long time and all people around me noticed obviously but I could see her eyes and I could hear her voice and that was the person that had always been with me and then almost later about I'd say about 10 years later I began to look at old photos of us as a family and I felt this great loss then and I felt very guilty about that actually but then I kind of read into it and I felt very guilty about that actually.

But then I kind of read into it and read that it's all right to kind of feel that loss. But it was much later down the line that I looked back and thought, gosh, my family was massively changed in those three years. Katie? I pretty much agree with Katrina, to be honest. I didn't obviously feel much at the time because I was so young when everything happened. And because she basically identified as female my whole life, I didn't notice much until she started going on to hormones and having surgeries. But again, looking at photographs of when she was he, it's very different family dynamic and I guess I did look at my friends families and think well why didn't I have that why didn't I have a conventional

mum dad nuclear family how have your respective experiences defined who you are now Kath sometimes I find it quite difficult to make a decision about things because I like to see both sides of the story. It has led me to understand me and my body and how to listen to me and my body and helping people with their stress and anxieties. So it's helped me tremendously. Katie? I think definitely it made me more accepting of other people than my peers who would have been brought up in a conventional mum-dad household. So I think I'm less judging of just people you see. Katie Shurdley, Katrina Inez and Kath Lloyd talking to Tina Dehealy. On Monday's show we have Shakespeare's sister with us in the studio. They'll be playing live as well. And on Tuesday, I'll be talking to Bowel Babe. That's how she's known on social

media. It's Deborah James, who has talked in some detail and really explicitly about bowel cancer, about the symptoms, about what it's like to live with the condition and about how she is now. So Deborah James on bowel cancer on Tuesday's edition of Woman's Hour. And in the next couple of weeks, we'll be talking about female sexuality. Now, there were all sorts of things that were thought to be absolutely certain about female sexuality. We were always told that, in fact, women have a much weaker libido than men, that men, for example, are more likely to struggle with monogamy than women. Is any of that true? What do we all feel about that now? We'd love to hear from you,

whatever your circumstances and whatever your sexuality. Do contact the programme via the website bbc.co.uk slash womanshour. Now, The Farm is a debut novel by Joanne Ramos, a former investment banker in the States. The farm in question is a place called Golden Oaks, and it's a luxury retreat where women get the very best of everything. There's just one catch. They've got to dedicate themselves to producing the perfect baby for a life-changing amount of money. But that baby is going to end up with somebody else. The trigger was a small article in the Wall Street Journal, and it was about a surrogacy facility in India. And that's all the research I really did,

in the sense that once I got the idea of a surrogacy facility, the what-ifs started brewing. We should say at this point that commercial surrogacy has now been made illegal in India. Yes. But there is no doubt that it was happening. It was happening, and again, I didn't do research. But since the book has come out, I've Googled it a bit. And there are facilities in Thailand that have been shut down. A friend

of mine told me that he has a friend who used one in Russia. I don't know how above the ground they are, but they exist. And they're likely, aren't they, to increase in popularity? What do you think about that? Maybe deeply, well, it is deeply unsettling for many of our listeners, but what do you think? You know, we become more and more comfortable, I think, commodifying more and more parts of our lives. And I can see it happening. Even a luxury facility, I just don't know

that it's that far off, if it doesn't exist already quietly somewhere. Your own family history, I think maybe allows you to have more insight than most into the sort of women who might be tempted by this line of work. Yes, I was born in the Philippines, we moved to Wisconsin when I was six. And in my town then, which was a small town in Wisconsin, the late 1970s, in the wake of a lot of auto manufacturing closings, there weren't that many other Asian families in my town. But my father's family lived in a town about 20 minutes away, and they were part of a small but tight Filipino community. So I did grow up having both, feeling very different but also being part of something bigger.

And then you flash forward after a career in finance and writing for The Economist to my 30s when I'm having kids in New York City. And it occurs to me that the only Filipinas I know day to day in the parks and playgrounds that had become my orbit were Filipina housekeepers, baby nurses, domestic workers. And it just reinforced a feeling I've had since college, really, that what separates my life from theirs and my kids' lives and opportunities from theirs has as much to do with any luck than merit. This idea of the American meritocracy is really quite hollow if you examine it at all. Well, you, of course, at least saw these women because of your own heritage. Yes.

Presumably, you might well have been in a minority and even acknowledging their existence. Yes. And it was funny because, especially my daughter, I have three children. She doesn't look that much like me. And so several times I was pushing her around in her stroller and people would ask me if her mother was Indian. And I would say, no, I'm her mother. And so I feel I was often confused for some of these women. And maybe because I'm chatty or maybe because we share a cultural heritage, I think it's both. They were very open with me, and a few of them became my friends. And so I would hear these stories about the dormitories that some of them live in, renting beds by a half day to save money. A number of them left children back home in Manila or elsewhere in

the Philippines to earn money in New York by taking care of other people's kids. So it's that sort of thing that made me want to write this book. And any one of us, me included, or people listening now who have employed someone else to look after their children, we're in this. We're part of this conversation, whether we're happy to acknowledge it or not. And many of us would consider ourselves woke folk who like to be generous employers, to be decent. But we only go so far, don't we, actually? I think that, you know, it's funny you say that. I've been thinking a lot about how friends I know, and myself included, because I have had women help me raise my kids, we like to say, oh, they're part of the family. No, they're not really.

But they're not, right? When it comes down to it, they're not. And that, I think that statement is a story we tell, at least I'll speak for myself, that I maybe have told myself to make myself more comfortable with it without examining it more. There'll be plenty of people squirming. There was one particular part of the book where it's, well, there are any number of characters, I think four significant voices across the novel. But one is Ate, who is a Filipino lady who has devoted her entire professional life in the United States to raising other people's kids. She was known as the baby whisperer. They did not know that Ate stood all night over the crib in the darkened nursery, holding a pacifier to the baby's lips. When the baby fussed, she lifted him to her drooping chest and rocked him until he was drowsy but not yet asleep. Then she'd put him down again, night after night this way, until the baby was accustomed to eating

only during the day and falling asleep by itself at night. But her employers never knew. They didn't even know she was awake, did they, during the night? No, I had a few friends who are still baby nurses and they would tell me what they would call their secrets and the things they would do to get the babies to sleep.

And their point was, if you can get babies to sleep early, the parents love you. And then you stay with that family and then you move on. And discretion is everything in these roles, isn't it? Did you, in your research, did you come across people who were willing to tell tales on the people who'd employed them? Yes, and it was less, it wasn't even research. It was just when I was in the parks with my kids and I would sit on the bench with a nanny or someone who became my friend who was a nanny and they would tell me these stories. And, you know, the stories range.

I have one friend who told me how her long-term employer helped her buy her first apartment because she'd been with the family for so long. hear stories from other people who felt like they were never seen, or it's that going into work and having to sense if your boss is in a good mood or not, because someday she wants to chat with you about your kids, and some days she needs her own space. But the nanny is the one who has to navigate that every day. And that was a story that really resonated with me because I realized I work at home, and I have had people helping me in the past. And did I ever do that? Were there moments when I didn't feel like talking that I exuded impatience, but other moments when I wanted to chat with her? And what did that, what position did that put her in? Yeah, it's a very, very fascinating area. And I know that the book has been very favorably

reviewed. Some people have picked up on a kind of moral ambivalence at the heart of it. But actually, you would say, I think, that you are fairly ambivalent about this trade, aren't you? Well, it's also that I, and I think this is why I had foreign narrators, I had no interest in writing about saints or villains. I wanted to examine where we are today. And I think that we all play a role, sort of as we've just spoken about, we all play a role in it. And I don't know that even Mayu, who's the character who runs this farm, she's a complicated, I tried to make her complicated. I didn't want to take a stand. I wanted readers to walk away and think to themselves, if this makes me uncomfortable, why?

Joanne Ramos, her novel is called The Farm. Gentleman Jack is a new BBC serial for BBC One on Sunday nights. It starts this Sunday at nine o'clock. And it's about Anne Lister, a 19th century Halifax landowner and industrialist. And she's played by Sir Anne Jones in the show. Now, Anne lived at a place called Shibden Hall, and she kept coded diaries about her lesbian relationships, which were only revealed in the 1930s. Anne Lister did travel

very widely. She inherited the house and the business. And back in the day, she was wearing clothes that might have been thought of as more fitting for a man. Anne Chomer was on Woman's Hour this week. She's the author of Gentleman Jack, the real Anne Lister. And the great Sally Wainwright was in that conversation too. She wrote the TV show. She was an extraordinary human being. I mean, she's known primarily as a prolific lesbian diarist. But when you get to know her, as I have done over the last 20 years, the thing that jumps out at you most is just how clever she was.

She was a phenomenally intelligent woman. She was remarkably physically fit. She was a polymath. She was a great traveller, a great scholar. She was a great linguist. She became an industrialist. She signed her own coal mines. She studied the engineering behind coal mining.

She didn't just pay other people to do it. One of the really fascinating things about her for me is that people have said, oh, she was rich, she could do all these things because she was rich. She wasn't rich. She'd been in quite a modest estate and she had to make it pay. She was always struggling to find the next five pounds. The other great thing I love about her more than anything is she had such a positive attitude to life. Her life was for living. She had this brilliantly

curious mind and she was always doing about 10 things at once. She was a real force of nature and she's really inspiring in that sense. Anne, there were an awful lot of diaries that she'd written over the years. What's the story of how they came to be hidden, then found and then the code translated? In a nutshell, they were found behind a panel at Shibden Hall by the last ancestor of Shib called John Lister. He discovered the journals behind a panel and with his friend Arthur Burrell set about trying to crack the code. They eventually did do that and discovered what the contents of the code was. As soon as they realised that it contained sexual content of love between women, the diaries were hastily put back behind the panel.

And in fact, Arthur Burrell, John Lister's learned friend, he wanted John Lister to burn the diaries, but he refused and he recognised the value of this amazing document of Anne Lister's life. Sally, why would you say her writing about her lesbian relationships is so significant? Because she did code it. It's significant because it's the first record that lesbian relationships existed between women. It's the only record of that level of affection between women because it was never illegal. It was beneath illegal. It was illegal

for men. And so there are court records that men had sexual relationships. But because it was not illegal for women, there's not even court records. So when it was revealed what was in the code, it's the only record that that level of intimacy actually existed between women. And who were her lovers? And how open was she about what was going on? I know the writing was coded, but people must have known.

Yeah, I mean, they did know. Her first lover was Eliza Raine who she met at the Manor House boarding school as a teenager in York and from then on she had subsequent relationships with Marianna Lawton who was the main love of her life really and then Isabella Norcliffe before that so she had various lovers in her life not as many as people like to think she had. You sometimes read that she had scores of lovers but she didn't in actual fact you could actually count on one hand the significant lovers that she did have she never veered from who she was and she stood proud against a world that was often cruel about the way she looked she was careful enough

to exercise and behave in a way that didn't countenance any kind of bad thoughts about her. She was very, very careful to exercise discretion and she behaved in a very discreet manner with the women that she was with. What impact did learning about her have on your understanding of the history of Yorkshire, your home county? It changed my attitude. I mean, I've always been a keen historian. I've always loved history. I've always been passionate about the past. It certainly changed my attitude

towards my hometown. I mean, I grew up as a teenager who wanted to work in telly, so I couldn't wait to leave. I wanted to go and live in London because I thought that's where it all happened. And then when I discovered Ann Lister, my hometown suddenly became magical to me in a way that I could never have anticipated. And how did she view her gender? Because I know she was often mistaken for a man and she certainly dressed in a very masculine way, not particularly acceptable at that time. Yeah, she was misgendered a lot.

And I think I write in the book that she, you know, once when she was travelling through France, that she was mistaken for a man three times in one day. What makes Anne Lister really modern is that she was debating notions of gender fluidity 200 years before anybody else was doing it. So she would often write in her diary something like, you know, she was neither man nor woman in society, or she'd see herself as like a connecting link.

So I think she had a very, very healthy self-esteem about who she was but she was having these these debates within herself you say in your book and that she inherited Chibden Hall because she was a lesbian why do you say that I think I've kind of pushed the boundaries there and I wanted to be a bit brave about what I was saying, because I think Anne Lister and her Uncle James and her Aunt Anne, they had a very, very unique, groundbreaking relationship with each other. And I think my understanding is that they had a a great understanding of her lesbian sexuality. That, in fact, they had conversations with each other and she'd say, you know, I'm never going to marry. And he said, yes, I understand that. And she would often say things in the dowries like, you know, if I was other than I was, I wouldn't have got the estate.

I pushed myself in the book because I wanted to come down and say that Anton and Uncle James were very, very understanding of who she was and that there was nobody else really there that could have inherited the estate. Sally, Sir Anne Jones plays Anne and I know you worked with her on Scott and Bailey. Why did you think she would be the right person for the part? Well, to begin with, I couldn't imagine who could be because there's just so much to her.

There's so many facets to a character. It was really hard to... Which is unusual for me. Normally, I have someone in mind. And I think, initially, I imagined Saran is... She's a very contemporary-looking woman, and I think that was partly why, to begin with, my mind hadn't gone to her.

And in fact, ultimately, that was the thing that's made the performance most exciting, that she does have this very contemporary quality. I think what Saran's got in common with Anne Lister hugely is a physical energy, a mental brilliance.

I mean, Saran has ideas popping out of her head all the time. And she's very charismatic, of course. She's got this huge personality and that's so Anne Lister. Sally Wainwright and Anne Chomer with Jenny on Woman's Hour this week. Now, all this week, we've been talking about mental health as part of a season across the BBC.

On Tuesday we heard from Melanie, a woman we're calling Melanie, about her diagnosis of disassociative identity disorder. You might know that as multiple personality disorder. And on Wednesday Heather discussed her diagnosis of bipolar. So if you'd like to hear those items, go to those programmes via BBC Sounds. On Friday's edition of Woman's Hour, 29-year-old Hannah appeared on the show. Now, she had contacted us when we asked to talk to women with a mental health diagnosis other than anxiety and depression. Her official diagnosis is Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder, or EUPD. That's also known as Borderline Personality Disorder. Now, Hannah is a second year fine arts student, and six months ago, she finished three

years of intensive NHS funded therapy which she says has absolutely changed her life. Jo Morris met Hannah at her home. Hannah's partner Jordan was there as well. Jo asked her if she'd heard of borderline personality disorder before she got her diagnosis. I hadn't and I can remember when I got diagnosed with it, I thought that they'd just made it up. And it wasn't until I went back to my eating disorder specialist and she asked me, what have you got? And I told her I've got borderline parasite disorder. And her head dropped and she just looked at the floor.

And I was like, what? And I didn't really understand. I was like, what is it? I could tell by the look on her face that it was like this was not a good outcome. Borderline has this really horrible stigma attached to it even within the NHS there is this common cliche that oh you don't want any borderline patients because they're really difficult to treat and that reason of them not sticking with the program and them dropping out and coming back in and also their behaviour being so erratic and unpredictable. What's this you've got? This is a picture of me and my mother.

We're at a garden party. We're dancing out on the lawn. How old are you in this photo? I'm about 15, 16 in this photo. And you're dancing and holding hands? It was a really hot summer's day. Can you remember how you were feeling in that photo? Everything at this moment in time felt really extreme. I think

even in this photo where we're dancing it felt like an extreme inflated. So what was going on at home when this was taken? For a long time I told people that my parents broke up when I was 14, 15 and and then I realised I was 11 so I still feel like at this moment in time the fact that my parents had broken up still felt quite raw that it was still like it had only just happened but I think that was because the sort of the ripple effects of that breakup were still rippling through the family. And I think I was taking on more responsibility than the family home. So in some ways it felt like it had got worse. And I guess as I was getting older,

my mental health was just getting increasingly more complicated. Do you think you were ill at this point then? Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. At this moment, this is when it should have been caught. I was self-harming really badly at this point. If I'd have gone in to hospital, I would have been put into some sort of child services, but nobody saw it.

The themes that I talk about in my art now, currently, are all to do with the parent-child relationship and its transference into intimate adult relationships. The first thing I did was I did a portrait of me when I was 12, a self-portrait without a mouth, because I just felt like I didn't have a voice. I felt like I didn't have a voice to talk. Did you show anyone?

Yeah. But it's funny that, because my art has always been a route that I've been allowed to be as expressive as I am. My parents never seemed to... They always really embraced that and really sort of supported me doing my art. Although they would never sort of take it on as like, oh, this is a bit interesting.

So how old were you, Hannahannah when you were finally diagnosed i was about 1920 when i got the diagnosis and how long until you got treatment how long were you waiting for until you got the therapy that you've had about five and a half years so that was a long time to wait yeah what because why did it take so long um the first two years are definitely my fault. You know, if you pull yourself out of it, you're in disappointment, that's pretty much it and you have to start all over again. But it's very difficult for people with borderline to sort of be consistent and stay at something

and kind of go the whole course. So I kept pulling myself in and out. And then by the time I'd sort of started to get my head around that I really kind of had to stop doing that because nothing was moving forward in myself and I couldn't sustain something I then went on a waiting list and I was on that waiting list for three years. A long wait. Yeah three years is a long time. And how bad did things get during that period when you were waiting? Coming up to the last three months before I went into that therapy, I didn't leave the house at all.

I was sitting in the kitchen looking at a bare wall for sometimes seven hours a day, having dissociative episodes, not able to eat. I wasn't showering, I wasn't getting dressed, I was sleeping and I was just having really sort of confused thinking The therapy that I was taking

was only free in the whole country and I was with the principal psychotherapist taking transference focused psychodynamic psychotherapy which is a bit of a mouthful, but... It worked for you? It was amazing.

It focuses on the transparencies, so you kind of live through all of your issues through the therapist. So you kind of go through the situation with the therapist, but you go through it in a healthy way. It's really transforming. This is Jordan, who's been my boyfriend of the last year and six months I think a big thing for me was that it felt like he was always sort of conscious and sort of aware of like how I might be or how I might be feeling I think there

was like one moment that always really stuck out to me. I came into uni and I was wearing a woolly jumper and you were like, are you OK? You're wearing snuggly clothes today, are you feeling OK? We'd talked about it in therapy before, about how if I'd went into therapy and I was wearing my joggers, I guess in a very more toned-down version of the self-harm, that you're letting other people know that you're in a certain mindset by the way that you look and the way that you present yourself.

And that would never be picked upon by anybody in my family. It was like the first time someone had noticed something about me just by looking at me. I know it sounds so small and so subliminal, but it was like... It doesn't actually sound very significant yeah because the only person that would have picked up on that apart from you would have been my therapist and so you kind of were the first person in the real world that would have saw how I was doing emotionally seemed quite overwhelmed at the little things that I had done where for me it was almost quite a shock

because it was almost like this is you know just day-to-day normality bearing other people in mind and having concern for people one of the things we know about borderline personality disorder is that it does have an impact on relationships how has it impacted yours at the start of the relationship we used to talk about mini grenades sometimes yeah if hannah was happy there would be times that she would throw a mini grenade yeah which is basically an attempt to cause chaos or some sort of drama push me away it would get really really hard when hannah would do that you know trying to sabotage the situation yeah is that hard though not to take that personally yeah it is yeah it's very hard to take it not take it personally at times you. You have to literally sometimes sideline your emotion

to be like, well, wait a minute, let's just put that aside and actually see from, like, a neutral perspective why Hannah has done that. And then you can still be angry. I think there's been plenty of times where I've been like, I am really angry at you, but we're going to try and work through this because that's what we're both needing now. Jordan and Hannah talking to Joe Morris.

If you'd like information and support with mental health, then please do go to the BBC website, bbc.co.uk slash actionline. That address is also available on the Woman's Hour website. And all three of this week's interviews about mental health, as I said, are available on BBC Sounds, which is the place to go for the Woman's Hour podcast as well. You probably know, actually, that red, quite a bright red, vivid, is the best-selling lipstick colour,

and it has been forever. How has it become associated with sex appeal, with power and with glamour? Well, Flo is the founder of the fashion brand MDM Flo, and on Thursday she cooked up red lipstick in the studio. Rachel Felder is the author of the fashion brand MDM Flow. And on Thursday, she cooked up red lipstick in the studio. Rachel Felder is the author of Red Lipstick, an ode to a beauty icon. When I was a teenager and I started wearing lipstick,

the look at the time was muted and nude. And you were supposed to look like you would just come off a beach. And you were supposed to have narrow, quiet lips and be sort of quiet in general. And none of those things applied to me. And I was very into English punk rock music. And I would see people like Suzy Sue from Suzy and the Banshees

and that's who I wanted to be. And I think for a lot of young women, they start wearing red lipstick in a similar way. They see someone iconic to them, like Madonna, for example, and it makes them feel like they can do it. So Flo, what are you up to at the cooker? So I'm currently melting down the base and simultaneously mixing together a few different red pigments to make your perfect red.

What is the base? So the base is a blend of oils and waxes in the base that I made and it's got castor oil in there, beeswax, carnauba wax, so very natural waxes to give a quite creamy formula. And how different are the reds that you could put into it? Because that's the problem isn't it? Deciding on the right shade. Yeah there's an endless amount like because you can mix together different red pigments, you can mix red with other pigments. So a lot of people like blue toned red lipsticks or you create yellow base or you can make it more orange. So, yeah, it's literally limitless. Red lips, Rachel, go back a very long way.

What was used before lipstick was invented? Let's say Cleopatra, Queen Elizabeth I. So Cleopatra, for example, ground up beetles to make a quite bluish red. And it was very expensive to do that because you needed thousands of beetles. And her subjects also reddened their lips, but their lip colouring came from red ochre, which has a quite rust tone. Her red lipstick denoted power, affluence, and the ability to be able to afford that lip colouring versus something else. And Queen Elizabeth I?

Yes, Queen Elizabeth I. She used ceruse, which was heavily lead-based, and she was obsessed with reddening her lips. And of course, with her colouring, it looked rather spectacular. And what were the first red lipsticks, the 19th century ones, actually like? Oh, well, the first one was invented by Guer something elusive and mysterious. It took that out into the open because before lipstick was physically in a tube, you applied it in your boudoir. It was this very seductive, quiet thing, secret thing. And then in 1915, a more conventional

metal tube was invented by Morris Levy, but that was a push-up. And then in 1922, James Bruce Mason invented what we would know as lipstick today. And that's traditionally called the bullet. And he had fought in World War I, so the shape was inspired by World War I bullets. Now, Flo, the lipstick you've got on just looks perfect on your skin type, the shape of your mouth, everything. How do you decide which one is the best for you? I think it's a really personal thing. There's a lot of people who would disagree and think that there is a science to what works, but I think when you wear a colour that you personally have an affinity to, you have a confidence that makes the look come together,

as opposed to someone else prescribing, especially when it comes to bright lipsticks, especially reds. It is about you being confident and you personally loving the colour that you're wearing. Then there's obviously other tips and tricks you can do. So, like, I've got a lip liner on, which helps kind of give my lip a certain shape and I think better suits the shape of my face as opposed to the colour.

What is the colour that you've got on there? So I've got a supreme red lipstick but with red lipsticks there's not different colours have different names across different brands so there isn't really a universal name for colours as well so this is I it to me it's a supreme but to another brand they recognise it as another term now different women go for different types it seems to me rachel marilyn monroe how did she make a decision about what she wore oh she was obsessed with red lipstick she kind of always wore red lipstick i'd like to add something to what flo said i tell all women to wear to have a wardrobe of red lipsticks and i personally cocktail a lot people always ask me what red

lipstick I wear. And I skirt that answer typically, because in my journalistic beauty writing life, I don't like to endorse things. But the truth is, I have a wardrobe and I cocktail. So Marilyn Monroe wore a Max Factor red that she loved, and it was created for her. And of course, she was in an era when movie stars wore red. Elizabeth Taylor, who's also featured in my book, always wore red. And for some years, she had a rule on set that she could be the only person on the set who wore the red lipstick. No one else. How easy would you say, Flo, it is to make your own at home?

And how is this one coming along? Yeah, I think it's coming along quite nicely. It's quite a deep red. In terms of making it at home, without the scientific background, it's quite difficult to create it in the way that I am. But you can quite easily melt down lipsticks that you already have, like different reds, perhaps part used, and then make your own kind of custom shade out of that

just just one other thing rachel why is lipstick red lipstick often so associated with making women feel good in secret in afghanistan during the taliban given to women survivors in concentration camps what is it about it there was a camp camp in Germany that the British Red Cross brought in cartons of red lipstick as they liberated the camp. It makes women feel strong. It makes them feel more beautiful. It makes them feel put together. It makes them feel empowered. It gives off a confidence. One of the people I interviewed for the book was Paloma Picasso, who had her own great red lipstick. And she told me that she was actually quite shy and she wore it because when she put it on, people assumed she was confident. Rachel Felder and Flo, and if you'd like to know more about the history of red lipstick and tips on how to wear it,

there is now an article on the Woman's Hour website, bbc.co.uk slash Woman's Hour. Penelope, now let's start with Janice. Janice says, when I was a teacher before having a difficult class, I'd apply lipstick as it empowered me. If the other staff saw me putting it on, they'd say, right, Janice has got a difficult class. It was amusing, but it worked, she says. On the other hand, hashtag BBC Balance, here's Penelope. Many years ago, a woman on a cosmetics counter convinced me I could get away with red lipstick.

Walking down my local high street, feeling quite self-conscious, I encountered a work colleague who greeted me with, Hello, Mrs Lipstick. I have never worn it since. Penelope, thank you. You can email the programme whenever you like via our website. Much discussed, the website, isn't it? But it's marvellous, honestly.

Now, on Monday, we've got Shakespeare's sister live in the studio. They're going to be performing as well, I should say. And you can hear from Sarah Hargreaves. Sarah's in charge of the Internet Watch Foundation, the body set up back in the 90s to take down child sexual abuse images online. But as she'll explain on Monday,

things really have changed since the relatively innocent 1990s. Have a very good weekend. Hope you can join us live just after the news at 10 on Monday morning. 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 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.