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Intelligence Squared
Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse
00:53:47
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- [00:00]
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- [01:47]
Shahida Bari
This episode is brought to you by Amazon Business. We could all use more time. Amazon Business offers smart business buying solutions so you can spend more time growing your business and less time doing the admin. I can see why they call it smart. Learn more@amazonbusiness.com welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer mia Sorrenti. In January 2021, novelist Kate Moss launched the WomenInHistory social media. She received thousands of nominations from around the globe of women whose achievements have been overlooked by history. In today's episode, Kate sits down with broadcaster Shahida Bari to share some of these incredible stories in her new book, Feminist History. For every day of the year, she celebrates the extraordinary activists, writers, scientists, politicians and others, some of whom are household names and others who deserve to be better known. Let's join our host Shahida Bari now with more. Hello and welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm Shahida Bari, academic and broadcaster and our guest today is Kate Moss. Kate is an award winning novelist, playwright and writer of history and memoir. She's the author of 14 novels and short story collections including the multi million selling Languedoc trilogy set amongst religious wars in southwest France. She's also the founder director of the Women's Prize for Fiction, which celebrates its 30th anniversary this year. More recently, she founded the Women's Prize for Nonfiction and the global WomenInHistory campaign. She's also a trustee of the British Library. Her new book, which we'll be talking about today, is Feminist History for Every Day of the Year. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. Kate thank you. It's lovely to be here. Well, we're very glad to talk to you. I'm very excited to talk to you about this new book. The book is a kind of almanac, almost a series of potted histories of usually a single woman's life, sometimes slightly different for each day of the year, interspersed with illustrations and also short essays from you. Tell me how this book came about.
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Kate Moss
First of all, one of the things to say is it's been an utter joy to write, although it was incredibly difficult to narrow it down. To which woman or women were you going to put on each day of the year? And in the shorthand in the publishing company, it's been known as the FH366. You know, just trying to narrow it down. But it came about for a really rather wonderful reason, which is I, a couple of years ago, set up a campaign during COVID called Woman in History. And it was because I wanted to do something joyous and celebratory while we were all locked into our homes and feeling so gloomy about things. And so I simply put out on Twitter, which was a lovely thing in those days, and worked a question. I simply said, if anybody would like to share the name of a woman from history they think should be better known or somebody they'd like to celebrate, let me know. And within days I had thousands of people who'd responded from all over the world. You know, a young man from Italy saying, did I know the extraordinary Jewish Italian scientist Rita Levi Montalcini? A young woman from China saying, did I know the Chinese poet Ding Ling? And out of this it made me think. I have worked in, in and around women's issues, celebrating women's voices, trying to tell a 360 degree story of history for all of my life. I'm in my 60s now, but many of the women that I was being told about, I hadn't heard of. And so that led to me asking the question, what is history? Who gets to write it? Who decides who matters and who doesn't? And are there reasons that women so easily disappear from history? And I wrote a book out of that and then did a one woman theatre tour in the UK in 2023. And in that tour, every night, teachers, librarians, parents, carers came up to me and said, we wish you would write a book that is also quite focused towards a slightly younger readership and has more women and girls who are doing things now. And I thought, well, actually that, you know, if a teacher tells you to do something, a librarian tells you to do something, you take it seriously. That's where feminist history for every day of the year came from. And it's for everybody. And it's a book to dip in and dip out of, but it still has at the heart of it two things. One is who gets to write history. And the second thing is, I suppose, a message about every single one of us has a voice and every single one of us has power to try to change things, however overwhelming the big history seems to be. So what I've discovered so far is that every time somebody gets their hands on the book, the first thing they do is look up their own birthday to see who their birthday twin is. I don't know who yours is.
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Shahida Bari
Well, who's yours? I'm interested in who you.
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Kate Moss
Well, you see, I was in charge of the book, so I confused my birthday twin. My birthday is the 20th of October. I'm a little bit older than her, is Kamala, and I'm very proud to share a birthday with Kamala Harris.
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Shahida Bari
I'm Irene Khan, who was the first Asian woman and first Muslim Secretary General and was Bengali like me. So that was a marvelous connection. But also I hadn't heard of her. So that's rather remarkable, isn't it, that I, a Bengali woman, hadn't heard of her. So that was very fascinating. I'm interested in your remark that you know all of your life and you said you're 60 something and of course you don't look it, but all of your life you've been trying to write this 360 degree history of women's life in fiction and nonfiction. And I wonder what has prevented that from working in some ways. And you know, this kind of project of feminist revisionist history that many of us have been engaged in for, I think, you know, 60 odd years since at least second wave feminism, if not first wave feminism. Why are we still doing this? Why now, in a way, this book, why now?
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Kate Moss
Well, firstly, I think it's working. I think we are in very unusual times at the moment where all of us who study history and read history and think about the patterns of history can say repeatedly, look, history is a pendulum Things get worse and they get better and they go backwards and they go forwards. But what is very significant about now, of course, is that we're in a period of what we might call techno feudalism, where the hands of a tiny number of men really are over the ability to disinform, misinform, spread propaganda, if you like. And although propaganda and things have always existed, the ability to mass produce that out into a global community is unparalleled. Which means that part of that is a deliberate, I would say, attempt to sow discord. Because divide and rule always works. It always works in every period of history. If you can divide people who should be allies and partners, then you can ride a coach and horses through the middle. And that is what we're seeing at the moment. So I'm very interested in, and this is one of the tones of feminist history for every day of the year is trying to reclaim a positive look on things and an active look on things. Because when you breed disharmony and despair, you breed inaction. Whereas what we need to do to change things, everybody, male, female, anybody, everybody who believes in equality, that believes in a person, should be judged for what they do and they say, not for what they look like or where they come from. We are hugely in the majority, but yet that is not the impression that's given. So over the last 40, 50 years, there has been an attempt to simply tell all of history. I wouldn't say it's revisionist history, because when you study this, you see perfectly that in almost every period of history, many of the very famous women that I have in the book were extremely well known in their day. But it's the writing of history subsequently that has left them out, not the living of it. So if you think that we are looking into millennia, really, of the tools of writing and expression being mostly in the hands of men and mostly in the hands of quite a narrow band of men. The fact that we've made so many inroads in 60 years is a miracle. So it's not why now, it's that this is a continuous story. The only thing that I think makes not just my book, but many other books in this area particularly important now is that the pressures on young people are extreme because of technology and social media. The misogyny inbuilt into all of those things, the misogyny, I'm afraid, of AI and who is controlling all of those kind of aspects of our lives, and consequently reminding people that women have always been there, have always done everything, that everybody who has Made a difference, has probably had to fight for it, has probably not had a load of people saying, here are the doors, open up the doors, in you come. It is important to remind people that every right we have has been fought for by somebody. And we are living in a time where certain rights for women are being rolled back by countries that one would not have expected to do that. And therefore it's just about sharing the history. Sharing the history. You know, it was very interesting for a feminist of my age. The biggest issue for me when I was a baby feminist and learning about, you know, this discourse was green and common. I went there often. I didn't ever live there. I went there at weekends and joined in some of the bigger embrace the bases. And it was fundamental to that period of feminism. When I speak to young women and girls today, most of them haven't heard of it. So history is cyclical and people have short memories. So feminist history for every day of the year, one of that is a kind of a memory building exercise, saying you don't realize that actually 50 years ago if you were married, you would have had to give up your job or you would have had to have your husband's permission to buy a washing machine. And young people brilliantly go, that can't be true, not in the uk.
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Shahida Bari
Well, it is. I mean, I wondered on that note, maybe it's quite interesting to ask you this. I wondered who the book is for in one way, because it is wonderfully accessible. Accessible sometimes feels like a backhanded compliment, but I don't mean it in that way. Accessible. This is not simple or reductive, it's just very readable. But also, I mean, these are potted histories, so we know that. If I, if I know, if I wanted to find out more about Irene Khan, I would need to look her up in a more comprehensive way. But this is enough to pique my interest. So I wondered if this is a book for young people, particularly the people you were just describing.
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Kate Moss
It absolutely is. It's intended for a YA audience and above. And the potted history element is important because it's. Everything about systemic and sustained change comes from deep roots and conversation. So the idea of the book is very much, you know, you know, I made the joke, but it, it is what's happened every time that people turn to their birthday or sometimes the day of the week that they're interviewing me. And it's supposed to say, the power to research this is in is up to you. I'm saying, here are 366actually, there are more because I've snuck in people, you know, several days, have two people or three people, or an ent, you know, like the women's March in Pretoria and in the 50s, you know, in South Africa. But by and large, that's the way that it works. So that someone will read and think, I never knew about her. I never knew about that particular moment. I never knew about this piece of history, and I'm interested. So it's not about. It's not a history lesson. It's a kind of tickling of the. You know, the taste buds almost, if you like. And it is intended for a younger audience because. Because there are great demands on everybody's time. There are, of course, brilliant things with technology, as we're proving doing this conversation now, and wonderful things about social media and connectivity and all of this. They're also very challenging things. There is a clear, clear evidence at the moment that people's attention spans are shorter than they used to be. It's very interesting as somebody who's been in publishing for more than 40 years, novels, but not mine, but other people's novels. Novels are getting shorter. Short stories are becoming more popular again. And so the idea of having a book where each day, it's a potted history that you can dip in and you can dip out of, it's a book that you carry with you as a companion, not a book that you sit down and read from start to finish. And that's why I'm very much looking forward to being out and about. And I'm doing quite a lot of visits into schools.
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Shahida Bari
Wonderful. Yeah. And the 1st of January, we start with Mary Shelley. I'm a fan. I'm assuming you are, too. Why did you start with Mary Shelley?
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Kate Moss
I started with Mary Shelley because. Partly because this book is aimed at a younger readership, although we know that much older people in their young people's parents and teachers and carers and so forth are going to be engaging with it, too. But Mary Shelley was a kid. No, she wrote this extraordinary novel when she was a teenager, and it appeared without her name on it in the first edition.
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Shahida Bari
Frank.
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Kate Moss
There was something really glamorous somehow about it being published on New Year's Day. It is. I mean, I have another person in the book, Margaret Cavendish, who truthfully, is the first person to write a piece of what we would now call science fiction. And that was in the 17th century, you know, 1666. But Mary Shelley is often seen as the creator of this new genre, a kind of Gothic dystopian. Science fiction world. But I also love the story behind the story of Frankenstein, namely that she, with her husband and friends were, you know, had fled England and they were in Europe and it was known as a year that the sky turned black. And that was because there was a volcano erupting and nobody saw the sun for the whole summer and it rained all the time. And there was a challenge that everybody should make up a ghost story. And for me, that tells the reality of what it means to be an author, that you don't know what will stimulate your imagination, you don't know what is going to come of it, but you just start telling a story.
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Shahida Bari
Yes, Mary Shelley begins the compendium, as it were, but there are lots of women I didn't know. Irene Kahn, I just mentioned Dorothea Pullinger, 28th of January, founder of the Women's Engineering Society and set up the Women's Industrial War Work program during the Second World War. Chiaki Mukai, I picked out 6th of May, first Japanese woman to go into space. What kind of research did you have to do? How did you do your research when you were uncovering women that you hadn't heard about before?
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Kate Moss
Well, I mean, I had a great resource from all the people all over the world who had been in touch with me through the Woman in History campaign. I mean, thousands and thousands and thousands of people. I also, I mean, there was a practical issue to it. It was the most complicated book I've ever researched in my life. And I have done some big research.
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Shahida Bari
Big historical fiction novels.
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Kate Moss
Yes. You know, the Cathars, the Huguenots. I'm now writing about the Normans. You know, I spend a lot of time in archives. But the thing with this kind of book is that it is a celebration. I wanted it to be global. I wanted it to be all periods of history. I wanted it to be all types of woman. So in different fields. So the scientists, the artists, the people who've changed the world in practical ways, but also the people who change our lives, the quality of our lives, through their music, through their art. I had to have somebody for every day of the year. And it's quite extraordinary how certain days, everybody was born on that day. So then I thought, well, who am I going to choose and where am I going to put the other one? So it became this absolute nightmare. I'm terrible at spreadsheets and things like that. It's not my strength, but I ended up having to do these. It was like some extraordinary mathematical problem. And obviously, so some of the decisions are governed by that, when I think, well, we haven't had a living woman for a while or a living girl, and I want one. And so at that stage, I would start to do some research into. I would speak to my young nieces, for example, and say, just, you know, are there any people that I wouldn't have heard of that you really, really admire? Because, you know, when they say to me, Taylor Swift or beyond, you know, I know, you know, I live in the. In the world. But sometimes they would say, somebody that I didn't know, who did they suggest? Well, this is going to be really embarrassing. I've got. One of the essays I have is Boys Can Be Feminists Too. And we'll probably come back to that because it's extremely important part of this. But the extremely famous actor that everybody's always talking about, whose name is now completely gone out of my head, you know, Pedro Pascal. Yes, thank you. It sounds absurd that he had passed me by, but he had. Yeah, you know, just. Just because that's not particularly necessarily where my focus was. So one of the things I say in the book is very much that we should be listening to the older generation and we should be listening to the younger generation.
- [20:23]
Shahida Bari
Right.
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Kate Moss
In fact, in other words, that what we are seeing at the moment is a time of shouting and opinion and a loss of listening and wisdom, because knowing things is not understanding things and understanding things is not wisdom. So that way of listening up and listening down to different generations, as well as beyond your obvious own community was also part of how I put the book together. Have a wonderful young editor and deputy editor at my publishers, who are a completely different generation to me, and they were terrific.
- [21:02]
Shahida Bari
Tell me about the essays which you've just mentioned. There is this essay, Boys Can Be Feminist to youo. So that to explain to anybody who hasn't yet looked at the book, the calendar entries are interspersed with essays, very short essays, but essays nonetheless, on a variety of topics. Warrior queens, for instance, Boudicca, Joan of Arc, etc. An essay on Giselle Pellico on.
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Kate Moss
Yeah, there's an essay on shame. On shame is obviously very fundamental to being able to position that story about. Because her. I mean, obviously it's a translation, but her very powerful comment when she came out, it is not for us to feel shame, it is for them to feel shame. And that essay is very much. Because every young person, I'm afraid, girls particularly, but boys too, and people who are defining differently in terms of gender, every single one of those people will have come up against trolling and bullying and people who are trying to shame them for whatever reason, for their body image, for what they think, you know, whatever it is. And it's important, therefore, that essay to say some of this, not all of it, but some of this is in your own hands. If you refuse to be pushed into the shadows, if you refuse to be made to feel ashamed, and you turn that venom, I suppose, that emotion onto the people who are trying to belittle you, then you will. It won't solve all the problems. It won't stop people being horrible online to you, if that is what's happening, but it will give you a sense of power. Because powerlessness is an enormous issue in girls and women in particular, being silenced. The idea that you can't do anything, you can't say anything, whatever you do will be held against you. And the truth is that not everybody will like you. There is still a thing, I think, for girls and women, that if you do all the right things and you explain yourself well enough, then everybody will agree with you and like you. But that isn't true. So once you understand that some people just don't want to agree with you, they don't want to listen to you, and that's okay, then you can take back some of the power. So the essay on shame is very important because it's an issue that comes up time and time again when you talk to younger people. And that's very important. And the essay about boys can be feminist, too is back to my earlier comment about how a deliberate policy of divide and rule, so separating people that have a lot in common in order to drive a coach and horses through the middle. It has always worked. And everything about putting women back into history is not and never has been about taking brilliant, wonderful men and boys out of history. It's about, as the great Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to run for the presidency, Democratic nomination to be president of the United States States. She said, you know, if they won't give you a seat at the table, bring your own folding chair. So everything about putting women and girls back into history is about getting a bigger table. It's not about reducing anybody else. And I think that it's a very effective thing to say, oh, you know, I grew up with this. Feminists don't like men. Or, you know, it's. It's, you're all anti men. That is a lie put about in order to try to keep people divided. Truthfully, everybody, whoever they are, who believes in equality, in fairness, that's the f Word really not feminism, fairness, who, whatever age they are, whatever background they come from, we all have much, much, much more in common. And so really it's everybody who has an interest in allowing anybody to be who they want to be and have the opportunities that they believe they deserve for themselves versus the relatively few people who unfortunately are very powerful at the moment who believe that certain people don't matter as much. So, you know, I'm married to a man, I have a son, I have a grandson. All of my life has been about expanding the way that things work, not shrinking it. And so that I say is very important. And it calls out some of the men who do wonderful things and should be praised and called out for doing it. You know, divided we fall. It's as simple as that.
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Shahida Bari
On that note, you've made a very, it seems to me, deliberate decision to include trans women in this collection. So we have an entry on Laverne Cox and the athlete Caster Semenya, who has been, might be categorized as intersex by some, although I think she identifies as.
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Kate Moss
She doesn't use the word for herself.
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Shahida Bari
But she identifies differently.
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Kate Moss
She would be probably in medical terms be described as intersex sex.
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Shahida Bari
So tell me about your thinking about that. What, what consideration I'm assuming you had to give to that, bearing in mind the times we're living in.
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Kate Moss
Yes, it's. One of the people in the book is somebody called Eleanor Reichener. Eleanor Reichenr was arrested in London in the medieval period. And when she went to trial, it became clear that she had been physically born a man, had lived her life as a woman. So what we, somebody we would call a trans person. Now I do not get involved in these discussions in terms of, again, what I would say is a deliberate attempt to divide people over this issue who would 10 years ago were not arguing about it. The only thing that has changed in many of these debates about trans issues is I would suggest that the anti feminist Christian right in America realized that it was a possible fault line for women uniting and feminism. When you look back 10 years, when you look back at the people who introduced the legislation in the uk, this Conservative Party, nobody was paying any attention to this. So if you like, in a way it has been a deliberately inflamed and manufactured argument which nobody can win in now. That's what's happened. And people who are very, very, very vocal on all sides of things have been pitted against one another. My feeling is in a book like this that I am celebrating extraordinary women, girls and everybody, people who define differently from history and the present day. I am not making a judgment of whether I think I agree with people's politics, agree with what they do. Some of the people in the book are deeply unlikable, but they did something that made a difference. And that is a key thing about history, for example, that you have to put everybody in and then allow people to make their own decisions. But there is an important issue here that because this book is aimed at a younger demographic, it is an extremely important issue for this demographic. And therefore honoring and respecting their priorities is part of this. In the same way that I would hope that for women of my generation, the big debate within feminism was pornography. An earlier generation, it was equal pay. For this generation, it's trans rights. I think that. That every single human being should be treated with dignity and respect and that that is utterly unnegotiable. Everything else is about politics and society and common sense. And I invite everybody who reads the book to just be interested in those individuals in the book. One of my. One of the women that I most admire who's in the book is a woman called Pauli Murray. She was a freedom rider. I'm sure listeners will know that the Freedom Riders, Rosa Parks is probably the most famous. So they were people or black Americans, mostly men and women, part of the civil rights movement, who would ride in the wrong, quote, part of the bus during the racist Jim Crow laws in America, which treated white citizens completely different from black and brown citizens. And Rosa Parks was very famous in the Montgomery, Alabama bus protest. But Pauli Murray was actually arrested in 1940, so a good 15 years before Rosa Parks. When she was released, she didn't take it lying down. She went to law school. She became one of the most senior and most respected black voices within the law. People like Ruth Bader Ginsburg say that without Pauli Murray, much of civil rights law would not have happened. But. And she later in life became an Episcopalian priest. She was the first black female Episcopalian priest in America. However, nobody knows her. My contention would be the reason they don't know her is because she described herself as an in betweener. Probably now what we would call a non binary person, but possibly we would call a trans person. Because again, this is the point that this doesn't really matter what people are called. And consequently, that was seen as quite challenging. Challenging for the civil rights movement to have a figurehead like that. And she has, I think, the best quote in the book, which is, I have lived to see my lost causes found.
- [30:42]
Shahida Bari
It's Marvellous. That quotes.
- [30:43]
Kate Moss
Yes, it's just marvellous. So, in other words, I've put amazing people in the book and it's up to the readers to decide.
- [30:51]
Shahida Bari
You've also put difficult people in the book. Again, that's been a deliberate choice. You've chosen some women who you say we may not like or agree with. So, for instance, Marie Stopes, 2nd of October, pioneer for contraception and sexual health, but also a campaigner against abortion and pro sterilization for certain people and a history of eugenicist thinking. Talk us through your thinking about including women with more problematic views or difficult views.
- [31:21]
Kate Moss
It's back to the same word, fairness, that if your project, as mine is, and many of ours, is to put women back into history, you have to put them all back. If it's about the people who were there, the women who were there, and the significance of what they did, you cannot pick and choose and only put people in that you agree with. This is the problem of the time we're in at the moment, that people have forgotten how to debate with people they don't agree with. It's entirely possible to respect and admire and be grateful for certain things that people have done. Mary Stopes is a very good example of that. It was transformational for some women's lives. The other side of her beliefs are awful and I don't agree with them at all. But both things are true, that she made a significant difference to many women's lives and she had some terrible views that I absolutely wouldn't agree with or subscribe to. But we allow men to be complicated and complex and contradictory. We have all the men in history, the sinners and the saints. We have to, as women, be brave enough to put back all the women into history. Another good example would be Florence Nightingale, who was incredibly significant in nursing. She wasn't the only one. Mary Seacole was equally significant. She was a brilliant mathematician and statistician. She in fact invented the pie chart. I mean, I could do without the pie chart, to be honest, but I mean, good on her. Her letters wrote about how frustrated she was about being a woman, how she wasn't allowed to do things. She was sanitized into a. The sort of woman that the British Empire wanted to admire, which was the lady with the lamp. She was, so far as I've been able to understand through anything I've ever read written by her, really furious all of the time about the furthest from a maternal nurse that you could possibly imagine. She also had appalling views on race really terrible views on race, and they weren't typical of the time. People at the time were like, whoa, Florence, that's. That's really going a bit too far. The point is that did she do things that transformed women's lives? Yes, it was that she and Mary Seacole, between them, helped create an alternative way for women to support themselves in a profession and be paid for it. That wasn't being a governess. So you have to put her in. And of course, there are women from many different countries in the world for whom some people will see them as terrorists and others will see them as freedom fighters. But that is history. And I think that until we get back in all of these issues, whether it's the trans rights issue, whether it's questions of saints or sinners, whether it's the case of ethnicity, we have to get back to a place in history where we embrace the complicated and the contradictory. Otherwise it cannot be called history at all.
- [34:17]
Shahida Bari
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- [34:57]
Kate Moss
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- [35:03]
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- [35:04]
Kate Moss
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- [35:12]
Kate Moss
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- [35:29]
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- [36:26]
Shahida Bari
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- [37:20]
Kate Moss
See Ford.com BlueCruise for more details.
- [37:30]
Shahida Bari
Tell me about the illustrations. Sophie Bass, I think did the work. So each month has a kind of page like this. You'll see a guitar and a quill and a trainer, I think a Star of David and various things, a real and then there are illustrations throughout as well. So how did you work together? Did you work together on this?
- [37:50]
Kate Moss
Yes, we did and with the publishers that because this is a book to dip in and out of and. Exactly. And it's, you know, such a lovely thing you said about accessibility. So that there is pleasure in the book itself, not just in the words on the page. We wanted to have images that represented certain trades and professions and some of the women obviously it's why you can see, you know, tape measures in some and you know, sort of building tools in another or a space helmet. But also of course there are, there are some photographs in the book and there are some images of people that are very important but for whom we have no images. So I would say, you know, one of the most important, possibly the most important Afghan writer is a woman called Rabia Balki who was a 10th century writer and very, very fundamental you know, writing and hugely respected writer in her time. And what we know from many sources is that when the Taliban went back into Kabul in August 2021, one of the things they did was start to erase images of her from walls. Her image hold, you know, very particular image of her was seen as a, you know, a woman writing. And so many of these priceless, very early paintings and her tomb have been destroyed. So there's nothing that we can put in the book, but Sophie, from all the descriptions, can do a drawing. And so that was the other thing. Particularly when I go back into much earlier history, you know, the first women doctors, all of these kind of things. Obviously Sophie has had to animate those and bring them to life because we have no records. That's the problem with women's history, is that there has always, until relatively recently, been the idea that unless something is verifiable from original sources within an archive, then you can't legitimately include it. But if women's evidence of women's work and contributions is not being kept and therefore is not in the archive, but we know common sense tells us that they were there and these things were happening, you have to find a way around that. You have to find a workaround. And so that's part of the point about the images as well, that you can suggest and imply and bring to life women of the past for whom there is very little documentary evidence.
- [40:12]
Shahida Bari
I wanted to ask you about sports because I think we've indicated that you're not always selecting one woman per day. Sometimes you're selecting an event or an occasion. So, for instance, the 27 July entry is the first women's cricket match. And it struck me that sports women were a particular feature of your compendium.
- [40:36]
Kate Moss
Yes, I put. It's ironic because I. I was hopeless at all sports. I now, I, you know, I. I love running now and cycling and all of these things, but I was. I was the last person to be picked for every team sport for all of my school career. It, you know, scarred me forever. But I've always liked watching football. And so therefore there is an essay on women's sport and there are certain sports women. Through the book, my interest started with Lily Parr, who is the most prolific British striker, male or female, that has ever lived. And it was an illustration of how women in history happens. My question to myself was, how does it happen that women disappear so easily? And of course, there are many answers. Some is just benign neglect. Some is the people writing the history don't know any women, and they don't Put them in or they don't care. But there's also the more sinister stuff, as we've seen in Afghanistan, which is deliberate erasure. There's also what you might call spite and jealousy, and that is the story of women's football. Because when I was growing up, when I would watch football with my dad on the television and I would say, why there's no women's football? And my dad, in good faith would say, well, it's because nobody wants to watch it. But when you learn the history of Lilly Parr and women's football during the First World War, where women's football was something that kept the nation going while the men were away at war, almost all the munitions factories in the uk, in England definitely were staffed by women and they all had their own football leagues. And Lily Parr was a superstar, actually. Superstar. When the men came back from more, the men and women continued to watch women's football and the FA didn't like it. They had no control and they didn't want it. And on boxing day in 1920, there was a famous match between the two biggest sides. Dick Kerr ladies and St Helens and Lily Palmers and Dick Kerr ladies. And there was a gate of something like 55, 000 people watching that women's room. And it was men, women, boys, girls, everybody. It wasn't just women watching. And so the FA the following year did two things. They said, firstly, we do not consider football is safe or appropriate for females. These are the women who've been working in munitions factories and frankly, we have children, but football was dangerous to our femininity. And secondly, they said that any football club that lets the women play on their pitches will be banned. In other words, the FA banned women's football and killed it stone dead. And that was still in place in the 70s. So I. The story of women's sport is not that women have never played sport or people, men, women, everybody didn't want to watch it. It was a deliberate jealousy and lack of control. And so these stories, again, when you tell that story, people go, but that's. That's terrible. And I say, yeah, it's really terrible, but look what's happening now. And that has happened because women have continued to say, but we want to play sports too. And now we are in a time where women's sport is. It's not yet on a par, but compared to my childhood, it's a new world. And so I feel that it's a really powerful story because in this very fractured and disjointed world. One of the reasons that it's easy to divide people is because there are no longer shared common narratives. But one of the shared common narratives that does still exist is sport. And so I think sport is very important in community and in cohesion and in showing that we can all make a difference simply by supporting the lionesses. The nightmare is obviously because the lionesses did so well this summer. My essay is already out of date and I will have to update it in the reprint.
- [44:32]
Shahida Bari
Yes, and Scottish audiences and other audiences might be a bit resistant, but there's lots for them to. There's lots for them too. You were talking very enthusiastically about Lily Parr and you mentioned Kamala Harris earlier too. But I wondered if you. You had a particular favorite entry.
- [44:51]
Kate Moss
Oh, well, yes, I have a silly favorite entry and a sensible favorite entry. My sensible favorite entry, I think, is Pauli Murray. I read her autobiographies, two volumes of them. I looked at the pattern of her life, the way that she never stopped fighting for justice and fairness. And she was not somebody that I knew before I embarked on all of this. She was somebody recommended to me by, in fact, an American woman, I think a woman. It was hard. I couldn't tell from the name in my woman in history campaign. So she was a, for me, a new not discovery. So she would very much be one of my top, top 10 in the silly category. It would have to be Josephine Cochran, because I just love this story of a woman, middle class woman in Chicago, late 19th century, has clearly just had enough, like a lot of us have, of clearing up after other people and leaves her kitchen and goes to a shed at the end of her garden. She, she was an inventor. And with, with the immortal words, I suppose if no one else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I'd better do it myself. And she invented the dishwasher, which is pretty much the machine that we have today. And she set up her own company, Cochrane Garrus. Garrus was her unmarried name and was this powerhouse. But I just love the idea and how appropriate that the dishwasher was invented by a woman who just had enough.
- [46:27]
Shahida Bari
You were talking earlier about the younger generation. In fact, throughout our conversation you've been talking about the younger generation and, and you were talking about the causes that were on your mind as a young feminist. You were talking about pornography earlier. And I wonder what you think are the causes or the cause on the mind of young people now.
- [46:53]
Kate Moss
I think. Well, at the moment, I would say very strongly the two are Trans issues and environmental issues. I have a lot of environmental campaigners in the book, you know, but going right back to the great Rachel Carson, you know, Silent Spring and her writing that changed the whole pesticides policy really globally, but America in the first instance. So I would say those are the two that come out, particularly when I go to schools. And that's. It's just very interesting. Yes, that's very interesting because, you know, you're. You're much younger than me. But. So the issues of my coming of age in feminism were absolutely pornography. But also, we were all very, very focused on nuclear war. We were frightened. We thought that at any moment there would be another Hiroshima. And. And it's not that young people are not alarmed about the state of the planet, but the focus is different. It's about the environmental holocaust that is going on. Climate change, global warming. And so I see it within the book as my job to say, did you know that global warming was first identified by a woman who has been written out of the history books? But it was Eunice Newton foot, who in 1836, wrote a paper about what we would now call greenhouse gases. So, in other words, I think I want to respect what are the focuses for campaigning and issues now, and also introduce things that are of very significant importance to people in other parts of the world, to global majority country, you know, all of these kind of things. That's why the book is global. Obviously, it is skewed in that I only speak English and French, and so I am reliant on other people if I'm trying to write about a person from South America or whatever. But I have done my best to include people from all sorts of global communities because everybody has different priorities. This place is something else that I say in the book, and I hope people will embrace, if not necessarily enjoy, which is that we have different priorities. And that's okay. If somebody is not speaking out on one issue, it doesn't mean that they're a terrible person. It might mean that their priority is just not the same as yours. And again, in the book, within all of the book, is a plea for people to respect other people's priorities. The example I give, which is deliberately not political, is I put all of my fundraising efforts and support efforts in the medical side into Parkinson's because my beloved dad lived with Parkinson's and died from Parkinson's. It doesn't mean that I look at people who support cancer research and say, well, you're terrible because you're not supporting Parkinson's. I respect that. Their priority has come somewhere else. There are things that we all need to react to. Genocide in Gaza, you know, deliberate starvation in Sudan, femicide in Afghanistan, of course. But in a broader sense, honoring other people's priorities is a very important thing. Do something. Try to make a difference in the way that you can make a difference. Some people are best on the stage speaking, some people are best behind the scenes. The great American librarian, Dorothy Porter, who very quietly, completely decolonized librarianship in America by before her, she worked in Washington for 40 years. All books by black authors were either in colonization or slavery. And she just gently redid the whole library so that they were in biography and environmental science and in literature and in history. In other words, fairness. Just treat people fairly.
- [51:11]
Shahida Bari
Yes, My last question, I was just thinking at the beginning of our conversation, you were asking questions about what is history and who writes it. And I was reminded of that passage in Persuasion, in Jane Austen's Persuasion, where famously, Anne Elliot says, men have every advantage of us in telling their own story and the pen has been in their hands. She says, and I was thinking about what it means to be a novelist writing this kind of work and how enthusiastically you've spoken, actually, and how passionately you've spoken on the essays that you've been writing for this compendium. I wonder what it felt like for you, as somebody who primarily writes fiction, to allow yourself to write openly in this way about ideas and causes that matter to you.
- [52:06]
Kate Moss
That's a really astute question because actually, until I wrote, it's not really a memoir, but until I wrote a book called An Extra Pair of Hands, which is my own story of being a full time carer for now 17 years. And I was asked to write it by the Wellcome Trust, who were looking for people with lived experience of key social issues of our time. So not clinicians and not professionals working in these areas. And because I have talked about being a carer and how that impacts how I run my life and, and everything, they approached me and it took me a long time to decide whether to do it because I don't normally put myself on the page. I see my role as creating imaginary characters to tell stories and also to make space for other women to tell their stories. But it felt very, very important because carers are everywhere, hidden in plain sight. There are 8 million of us in the UK, if we all down tools, you know, the amount of money that you'd have to pay if carers were paid would be probably equivalent to the NHS budget. That and Care for me is a feminist issue because the vast majority of carers are women. And waiting for that book to come out, I did feel utterly sick with anxiety about. Not anxiety about nerves, about. About being so myself. But of course, in the end, you have to be bold enough, or I suppose, to tell the truth of your experience if you want to shine a spotlight on an experience that you feel matters for other people. And so, having written that book, then when I wrote Warrior Queen's and Quiet Revolutionaries, I used the research into my own great grandmother's story to describe that. And with feminist history for every day of the year, I'm very much saying, here I am, an older feminist saying to all of you, you can change the world, guys. Don't let them make you feel that you can't speak or that you've got to be someone you don't want to be or that it's all just too hard. Everything that's worth having is going to be hard at some moment. And I've got loads of things wrong. And there'll be lots of people in the book that people don't like, and I'll get lots of letters saying, why didn't you put such and such in? But it doesn't matter. The point is that the thing that will save us all, as it always has been, is talking and words and communication. And provided we keep talking to each other and listening to each other, then I kind of learned to put myself more into the picture. And maybe that's just age. Maybe it's just age. You know, I'm a granny now. But it's not to do with feeling. I have a different stake. It's not that. It's more that I've had great times and I've had terrible times. And you know what? They're all part of the same story.
- [55:16]
Shahida Bari
Thank you so much, Kate, for joining us today. That was Kate Moss, author of Feminist History for Every Day of the Year, which is available now online or at a bookshop near you. I'm Shahidabari and you've been listening to Intelligence Square. Thank you for joining us. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts.
- [55:56]
Kate Moss
And Doug. Here we have the limu emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their.
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Kate Moss
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Kate Moss
Cut the camera.
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- [56:23]
Kate Moss
Excludes Massachusetts Prime Big Deal Days.
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Kate Moss
Del brioche al visconde del vizcocho y.
- [56:44]
Shahida Bari
Alconde de los cuernitos. Mi embro de Prime Juan.
- [56:52]
Kate Moss
Prime Big Deal Days Sie te hocho de octobre.
- [56:55]
Shahida Bari
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Kate Moss
Scalding hot.
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Shahida Bari
Take it before I do. A mid century modern cabinet from Wayfair that doubles as a wine bar. Do I have to say it? It's a hot take. Get it@wayfair.com and enjoy that free shipping too. Wayfair.
- [57:53]
Kate Moss
Every style, every home.