Every Woman Who Can Be Spared Is Needed Now WRNS. Pathé News, Ministry of Information short
Women’s roles would continue to change in the post-war years, but for now everyone could celebrate a vital victory and a return to peace. The Story of British Pathé II: The Voice of Pathé
I’m thinking of a particular moment immortalised at the start of Homer's Odyssey ... Professor Mary Beard on the Public Voice of Women, Oh Do Shut Up Dear, BBC 2014
The Metamorphosis repeatedly returns to the idea of the silencing of women in the process of their transformation. ibid.
They [words like whine, moan] underpin a contemporary idiom that acts to remove the authority, the force, even the wit or the humour or the irony of what women have to say. ibid.
We haven’t yet learned how to hear authority in a woman’s voice. ibid.
AEthelflaed: The Lady of the Mercians … Power and high education and intelligence. Michael Wood, King Alfred and the Anglo-Saxons II: The Lady of the Mercians, BBC 2013
A history of women as a whole has been erased everywhere. ibid.
The key to her warfare was fortress building. ibid.
In the medieval world women are adored but also prompt loathing and disgust. Robert Bartlett, Inside the Medieval Mind II: Sex, BBC 2008
The cult of virginity exerted a powerful grip on the minds of many medieval women. ibid.
I’m going to meet the women at the top of the tree – at Charles II’s court. These women were intimately connected with the king. Dr Lucy Worsley, Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls I: Act One: At Court, BBC 2012
Women like Barbara were able to exploit his human weaknesses – she could hope to win as much power as any male government minister. A royal mistress like Barbara could take on the political establishment. ibid.
The mistress was embedded in the very heart of the court. ibid.
The rise of the career mistress brought with it endless intrigue. ibid.
On 29th May 1660 King Charles II returned from exile to reclaim his throne. Dr Lucy Worsley, Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls II: Act Two: At Home
A woman was defined throughout her life by her marital status. ibid.
From 1694 there was a new tax on marriage – the government introduced stamp duty on every single ceremony. ibid.
The inns and pubs of Fleet Street, even the Fleet Prison itself, became venues for a shady phenomenon – the Fleet Marriage. ibid.
It could be highly dangerous for a woman to speak out in the seventeenth century. ibid.
This was the age of the professional housewife. ibid.
Hannah was one of the first women to earn a living from writing: The Cook’s Guide by Hannah Woolley; The Ladies’ Directory; The Ladies’ Delight; The Gentlewoman’s Companion or a Guide to the Female Sex. ibid.
Being labelled as a witch was a real danger. During the civil war the country had just witnessed the largest witch-hunt ever: between 1645 and 1647 over 250 women were investigated in East Anglia alone. ibid.
This obsession with female sexual pleasure sounds incredibly modern. ibid.
In the seventeenth century every family had to come to terms with the dangers and difficulties of childbirth. ibid.
The Midwife’s Oath ... Not to exercise any manner of Witchcraft, Charme, or Sorcery, Invocation ... ibid.
By the end of the seventeenth century male doctors were pushing the midwife out of her traditional role. ibid.
The Monarchy was back in business. The Restoration was a turning point in British history – it marked the end of the medieval and the beginning of the modern age. Dr Lucy Worsley, Harlots, Housewives and Heroines: A 17th Century History for Girls III: Act Three: At Work and At Play
The lives of women in the late seventeenth century ... Some of them have such modern attitudes. ibid.
Nell Gwyn ... a mistress of Charles II. ibid.
Nearly 600,000 people now living in London, making it bigger than Paris. ibid.
Covent Garden built thirty years earlier became the home of London’s reopened theatres. ibid.
From China it was tea and porcelain. ibid.
For a growing number of women it wasn’t just a case of looking the part they had to act it too. For all the new freedoms that women enjoyed their behaviour was still very tightly prescribed. ibid.
The Gentlewoman’s Companion; Or, A Guide to the Female Sex: Containing Directions and Behaviour, in all Places, Companies, Relations, and Conditions, from their Child-hood down to Old Age: Viz. As, Children to Parents, Huswifes to the House … ibid.
Women’s knickers haven’t been invented yet. ibid.
Samuel Pepys, whose behaviour now seems pretty shocking ... Following women down the street and literally having a squeeze. ibid.
Rochester: he called it A Ramble in St James’s. He described the park of night teeming with men and women of all ranks, all of them up to no good ... Buggeries, rapes and incest. ibid.
Plagues, Dutch attacks on the fleet and the Great Fire of London were the consequences of this immoral age. ibid.
Once in jail the women were set to hard labour beating hemp. Members of the public could even come in and watch them, stripped to the waist and whipped. ibid.
The world of the Restoration play house. After eighteen years of closure under the Puritan regimes, theatres weren’t simply re-opened in 1660 they were totally reinvented. ibid.
The female roles must now be taken by women. Previously the girls had always been played by boys. The first generation of women to take to the public stage became stars. ibid.
This year a great British institution celebrates its centenary ... Defenders of our green and pleasant land. Lucy Worsley, Cake Bakers and Trouble Makers: 100 Years of the WI, BBC 2015
Members once again threw themselves into work on the home front. ibid.
Victorian moral reformers argued that music halls linked to prostitution were part of an exploitation of women undermining the morals of the nation. Rude Britannia II: Presents Bawdy Songs & Lewd Photographs, BBC 2010
Mary Wollstonecraft – in 1772 this novelist, historian and thinker, produced the first book on female liberation – A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Ian Hislop’s Stiff Upper Lip: An Emotional History of Britain I, BBC 2012
For a woman it was all too often a prison. Painters showed the Victorian wife bound by law, by convention, by religious teaching. Even by the clothes she wore. Jeremy Paxman: The Victorians: Home Sweet Home, BBC 2009
Marrying well for the female was the career of the eighteenth century ... Female expectations were rising too. Amanda Vickery, At Home with the Georgians: A Man’s Place, BBC 2010
There’s a revealing demonstration of just how much women relished administrative power in the novels of that great chronicler of Georgian domestic life drawing-room politics – Jane Austen. ibid.
All of high society was here ... Was she a suicide mission or was it simply a stunning stunt? ... The cause had gained a martyr. Amanda Vickery, Suffragettes: Forever! The Story of Women and Power I ***** BBC 2015
That saw women fire-bomb buildings. Assault. Or commit acts of terrorism across the country. ibid.
A fight that is centuries old. And a fight I believe that is still going on today. ibid.
300 wife fairs ... Wives fairs were technically against the law ... The woman was the property of her husband, so why should he not sell her like a piece of meat? ibid.
Rape in marriage was not made a crime until 1991. ibid.
A petition: These women were Levellers, a radical political movement that argued the new Republic of England should be democratic. ibid.
The worse crime a woman could commit in the eighteenth century was the murder of her husband. ibid.
1958 until they were legitimately permitted to sit in the House of Lords. ibid.