Hello I'm E. Foley - and I'm B. Coates - and we
are the authors of What Would Boudicca
Do? Everyday problems solved by history's
most remarkable women. And our book is
about the achievements of women from the
past but practically put so that they
solve the problems of today. And one of
the big themes that came out of our book
was that a lot of the women that we
cover were a little bit difficult let's
say, they had a reputation for being a
bit tricky, for not being as quiet as
they perhaps should have been and we
found this very inspiring. And recent
events obviously, it's been in the news
quite a lot, this idea of should women be
conciliatory and nice all the time? Yeah
and one of the things actually that
really struck us while we were writing
our book was that we didn't want to be
sugarcoating difficult women from the
past. Our book's not a book of fairy tales,
it's about how complex and unpleasant
some of these women were. Some
of them were bad mothers, some of them
were big boozers,
some of them were bad feminists. Yeah, bad
feminists, absolutely. So the first one we
want to talk about is Rosalind Franklin.
We write about her specifically for
being difficult. She was a pioneering DNA
scientist who was sort of picked out by
her family as a young child for being
kind of 'alarmingly clever' which is quite
an interesting way to put something that
should be a compliment. But for her
family it was alarming. Anyway in the 1950s
she joined the research
institute at the King's College
University to work on trying to sort of
decode DNA and immediately I think a
really difficult relationship emerged
between her and the two men she was
working alongside. It wasn't a happy lab.
It wasn't a happy laboratory and as we know
actually from recent things about women
in science - there was that story
recently wasn't there about women make
men cry say they're gonna fall in love
with them... Oh yeah the scientist who,
wasn't he a Nobel-winning scientist said
at one point that women in labs fall in
love and cry too much. Anyway so
that's what we're working against. But
Rosalind she was definitely a
difficult woman and within her lifetime
I think she was a radiographer and she
died sort of at a very early age
of ovarian cancer and so before she was
given the recognition for the part that
she played in this massive breakthrough
which her two male colleagues won
the Nobel Prize for. So
actually though history's a kind of
bitch and you can't get over it, she was
recognised later on. Her name now adorns
several university institutes and so yes,
so she was somebody who we wanted to
celebrate as being a difficult woman
who is since recognised. Because she
probably wouldn't have been as a good at
her job if she hadn't been a bit
pushy.
So the second one we want to
talk about is Rosa Parks who was very
famous for standing up for herself and
for not, well, for staying sitting
down in fact. So Rosa Parks was part of
the bus boycott that happened in
Montgomery, Alabama in the '50s civil
rights movement protest that was
actually organized by Martin Luther King.
And this all came about because
segregation on public transport meant
that black and white passengers had to
sit separately and Rosa worked very
closely and carefully with the NAACP to
come up with a way of drawing attention
to this and how unfair this was. And one
day when she was riding home on the bus
from work she was asked by the bus
driver to stand up, her whole row of
black passengers were asked to stand up,
so that a white passenger could sit down.
And Rosa refused to stand up and the
punishment for that was kind of arrest,
potential violence, it was a very brave
thing to do. When the bus driver told
her he was calling the police she said
'You may do that.' - in a very elegant way
It was just an amazing protest because it
was quite you know quiet as it were. She
then suffered you know threats and you
know difficulties, her family were
targeted, she went through an awful lot
while this boycott went on that
eventually meant that the rules were
changed, the law was changed, it went to
the Supreme Court, buses were
desegregated. So that first act of hers
was the thing that kicked it all off
which is why she's known as the mother
of the civil rights movement. And she you
know, she goes to show exactly that
you know not staying in your place and
not accepting the boundaries that people
put on you, for a greater cause, can be
exactly the right thing to do. So yeah, go Rosa.
The final woman we wanted to talk
about was the legendary poet Sappho. We
talk about her and backing
yourself. And one of the reasons
that we came on her was it's all about
that belittling inner voice that
we all have which is quite often
reflected by the voices we hear from
outside. So that voice that says you're
not good enough, that self-criticism
and how do we kind of shush it. And so it
might seem strange to pick Sappho about whom
we know very little but in a way that
sort of that was part of the point for
us. She's somebody who in her own
lifetime was a sort of literary legend.
She was named by Plato as one of the ten
Muses. She was the only
female poet to have a spot in the Great
Library of Alexandria. But then by the
Middle Ages almost every scrap of her
work had vanished. And there were
various reasons for that to do with the
dialogue that she spoke but also because
she was, you know,
she made the kind of establishment,
particularly the church
establishment, very frightened. There was one
man who said about her, it was
a cleric who called her 'a sex-crazed
whore who sings of her own wantonness.'
But then about 20 years ago
- we know about her
reputation because still even in the
Middle Ages people were talking about
her as this amazing poet - and then in the
last couple of decades lots of these
papyri have been found which are
fragments of her poetry. What's really
amazing about that is this voice that
sings through from millennia ago. And
there's a very famous fragment called
fragment 31 in which she writes about
desire. What's very interesting about
that one is she's talking about stuff
that we would totally recognize, the
knee trembling, kind of blood
thrumming in her ears. But she's not
frightened of that, she sort of owns it.
She's very happy to be emotionally
incredibly intimate and raw and show her
vulnerability. And actually even when
she was applying that to you know
there's another poem where she writes
about old age and her knackered knees and
again she's really happy to talk about
that in terms of like being very raw,
owning her emotions, not being kind of
put in a box where you don't discuss
that sort of stuff that makes you look
vulnerable. And so yeah that's Sappho
on backing yourself. So yeah, that's our
book. What we wanted it to be was a sort
of inspiring look at women from the past
and showing us what we can learn from
them to deal with the problems that we
face now and we hope you like it.