Fighting Women

Maaza Mengiste, Christina Lamb, Julie Wheelwright join Eleanor Barraclough to look at women's experience of fighting from Ethiopia's war with Mussolini to modern day Sudan back to Amazonians and British and French colonial troops in Canada. And academic Shawn Sobers discusses his research into the years Haile Selassie spent living in Bath after he escaped from a war-torn Ethiopia.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefields by Christina Lamb looks at rape as a weapon in war. Maaza Mengiste's novel The Shadow King is set during Italy's 1935 invasion of Ethiopia. Julie Wheelwright's book is called Sisters in Arms: Female warriors from antiquity to the new millennium. It includes the discoveries she made whilst researching one of her ancestors. Shawn Sobers from the University of the West of England is a filmmaker and photographer whose work can be found at http://www.shawnsobers.com/

Producer: Torquil MacLeod