The ancient Greeks believed a woman's womb wandered through her body and made her ill. Medieval Europeans believed a woman's orgasm was necessary for conception. And the Victorians believed masturbation would drive you to madness. Sex historian Dr. Kate Lister — host of Betwixt the Sheets and author of Flick: A History of Sexual Pleasure — joins me for a tour through the wildly strange, often infuriating history of women's sexuality. For most of that history, women were believed to be the more sex-crazed gender. What can we say, girls will be girls...

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On this episode:

• Isabelle Roughol - Host
• Kate Lister - Guest

• Read & comment at broadhistory.com
• Email me: isa@broadhistory.com

Jump to:

• (00:00) - AUDIO 07 Kate Lister
• (01:37) - Intro
• (03:06) - "Girls will be girls": women as the emotionally unstable, hypersexed gender
• (05:36) - Why is women's sexuality so much more policed th an men's?
• (07:40) - The medicalisation and pathologizing of sexuality or the Victorian terror of masturbation
• (11:30) - The wandering womb
• (13:16) - Women as baby-crazed, emotional beings
• (15:20) - Are we talking about the menopause too much?
• (16:31) - The first woman to describe a female orgasm (she was a medieval nun)
• (21:30) - "Sex means putting a penis into something"
• (24:08) - Why lesbians have been relatively left alone
• (27:31) - The invention of privacy
• (30:02) - Victorian middle-class morality and the angel in the house
• (33:42) - Empire and the racialisation of female purity
• (36:34) - "Go and ask your mother"
• (40:59) - Where does a sex historian find sources?
• (42:39) - Why researching the history of pleasure matters
• (46:22) - The final question
• (49:12) - Conclusion

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Paris, 1897. The Bazar de la Charité blaze killed 118 women and girls. Where were the men?

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On this episode:

• Isabelle Roughol - Host

• Read & comment at broadhistory.com
• Email me: isa@broadhistory.com
• Watch & comment on Youtube
  

Jump to:

• (00:00) - Intro
• (00:35) - Member shout-out
• (01:55) - Upcoming guests
• (03:04) - This week's story
• (04:25) -  Tuesday, May 4th, 1897: A fire at a Catholic charity sale.
• (08:13) - Cowardly Gentlemen and Working Class Heroes
• (10:43) - The "Knights Jitters"
• (11:54) - Heroes and martyrs in a political storm
• (14:32) - And women in all that?
• (16:41) - Did the behaviour of men cause more women to die?
• (17:56) - An intimate tragedy
• (18:46) - Outro

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Don't work but don't get married and don't count on a living pension. This is an audio read of The gender pension gap of 1539, or how women got screwed by the Dissolution of Monasteries.

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On this episode:

• Isabelle Roughol - Host

• Read & comment at broadhistory.com
• Email me: isa@broadhistory.com

Jump to:

• (00:00) - The Gender Pension Gap of 1539
• (01:17) -  The gender pension gap, or how women got screwed by the dissolution of monasteries.
• (02:37) - Dissolution 101
• (04:01) - The (near) impossibility of marriage or work
• (06:00) -  Pay on your way in, get paid on your way out
• (08:20) - Sidebar: What happened to "Jillian Heron the idiot"?
• (09:57) - The making of a pension gap
• (11:25) - Sidebar: How do we know all this?
• (13:56) - Sidebar: Could you live on £2.67 a year?
• (15:00) - "Many a young nun proved an old beggar"
• (18:06) - Outro

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Julia Cooke, author of Starry and Restless, joins me to bring back three women who were household names in their day — Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Mickey Hahn — pioneering journalists who covered wars, crossed borders, and revolutionised literary nonfiction decades before the men usually credited with inventing it. We talk about why these women's fame didn't survive them, the challenges of resurrecting female legacy, and what it meant — then and now — to want both a roaming career and a life with people you love.

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★ Support this podcast ★
On this episode

• Isabelle Roughol - Host
• Julia Cooke - Guest

• Read & comment at broadhistory.com
• Email me: isa@broadhistory.com
• Watch & comment on Youtube
  

Jump to:

• (00:00) - AUDIO 04 Julia Cooke (corrected)
• (00:08) - "Women have no history"
• (03:56) - On the value of understanding the whole arc of a woman's career
• (07:09) - They were exceptional but not an exception
• (09:43) - Meet Rebecca West
• (12:27) - Meet Martha Gellhorn
• (15:43) - Meet Emily Hahn
• (18:09) - Writing about war the way no man ever had
• (20:13) - Superstars in their lifetime, disappeared in journalism history
• (23:25) - Fame Without Legacy
• (24:06) - "Women have no history"
• (24:53) - Motherhood, domesticity and ambition
• (29:39) - Making a home abroad
• (31:26) - Virginia Cowles, Julia Morgan and women who leave no archives
• (39:45) - Why men should read women's historyw
• (42:36) - Closing Thoughts
• (43:13) - Outro

Click here to view the episode transcript.

In the 1970s, Wages for Housework demanded pay for cooking and cleaning without any illusions about making it in the workplace. What if work was never our liberator?

On this episode:

• Isabelle Roughol - Host
• Emily Callaci - Guest

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🇬🇧 Buy the book in the UK: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/9178/9780241502907
🇺🇸 Buy the book in the US: https://bookshop.org/a/79408/9781541603516
(Affiliate bookshop.org links support Broad History and indie bookstores.)

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Click here to view the episode transcript.

Chapters:

• (00:00) - 03 Wages for Housework (Emily Callaci)
• (01:31) - Addressing housework in the women's right struggle
• (02:50) - Two workers for the price of one
• (04:00) - "All work is shit"
• (07:51) - Not wages for housewives
• (10:43) - Biographies of 5 campaign leaders
• (11:20) - Selma James
• (13:48) - Mariarosa Dalla Costa
• (15:38) - Silvia Federici
• (17:49) - Wilmette Brown
• (19:58) - Margaret Prescott
• (22:21) - Welfare
• (26:53) - How far did the movement go?
• (29:32) - The care work of the climate crisis
• (32:39) - How housework got remarketed as care work
• (36:48) - How the campaign ended
• (38:45) - The long tail legacy of Wages for Housework

"We raise them like saints, then hand them over like fillies," she said of 19th-century girls. Her best-selling novels were an indictment of arranged marriages and the female condition. At home in France, her contemporaries – Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac – considered her a giant of literature. In England, she outsold Hugo and inspired the Brontë sisters. Today, we don't read her. She's fallen out of the literary canon. If she's known at all, it's for her private life, a scandalous reputation that pop culture has overblown.

A new biography of George Sand by British academic and poet Fiona Sampson reveals a thoroughly modern woman, who was centuries ahead in claiming nothing more and nothing less than the freedom to be a complete person.

Creators & Guests

• Isabelle Roughol - Host
• Fiona Sampson - Guest

🇬🇧 Buy the book in the UK: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/9178/9781529924336
🇺🇸 Buy the book in the US: https://bookshop.org/a/79408/9781324074915
(Affiliate bookshop.org links support Broad History and indie bookstores.)

Click here to watch a video of this episode.

Chapters:
Click here to view the episode transcript.

Forget the cliché that women suddenly joined the workforce in the middle of the 20th century. They've been active in the economy as long as there's been an economy and not anecdotally.

Guest: Victoria Bateman, economic historian and author of Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power.

🇬🇧 Buy the book in the UK: https://uk.bookshop.org/a/9178/9781035415779
🇺🇸 Buy the book in the US: https://bookshop.org/a/79408/9781541606067
(Affiliate bookshop.org links support Broad History and indie bookstores. Everyone wins.)