2. Normal Women...are angels

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The woman's power is for rule, not for battle, and her intellect is not for invention or creation. but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision. She sees the qualities of things, their claims and their places. Her great function is praise. It's 1864, and you're listening to Victorian polymath John Ruskin give a public lecture entitled Queens of the Garden. At Manchester Town Hall, it's all about how a woman should behave.

She must, as far as one can use such terms of a human creature, be incapable of error. So far as she rules, all must be right or nothing is. She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good, instinctively, infallibly wise. Not for self-development, but for self-renunciation. Wise not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side. Wise not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride.

but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, modesty of service. The true changefulness of woman. I'm Philippa Gregory, and my new book, Normal Women, looks at nine centuries of women's history in England, from the Norman Conquest in 1066 till the present day. I'm interested in normal women making history in everyday lives. And today, we're going to look at the women who tried to be the strange phenomenon that was known as angels in the house.

With me, our musician, actor and writer, Geri Halliwell Horner, the woman who in her 20s broke the glass cage and gave us girl power, and is now an author of books about girls breaking the mold. the Eugenia Lavender series, and her new book, Rosie Frost and the Falcon Queen. With me, too, is Kate Moss, best-selling novelist and author of both Warrior Queens and Quiet Revolutionaries.

and also of an extra pair of hands, a story of caring and everyday acts of love. In this episode, normal women are angels. Let's begin by asking...

Is any of Ruskin's definition of women true? Kate, let's start with you. Well, it was very much what was happening at the time. It was the Coventry Patmore poem, the idea of the angel in the house. And there was a great deal of hypocrisy in Victorian society, which, you know, there were fallen women who could be saved.

And there was the angel in the house who was perfect and Madonna-like. And of course, everything was coming out of Florence Nightingale and nursing. She was very much... sold as the idea of the lady with the lamp, the silent maternal figure floating through the Crimea.

The real Florence Nightingale was about as far from that as you could possibly be. When you read her brilliant writings, and they are, they are about how frustrated she is, how stifled she is. She was an incredible mathematician, but she was only allowed to be this... silent, quiet figure. It's that idea that the angel in the house is the one thing in the Victorian period that a woman is allowed to be.

And the idea of a real flesh and blood woman who could be nuanced and different, could be impatient and cross and determined and have agency, was being very much eroded by that idea of silent perfection. Geri, do you have any impression of women being elevated to this sort of saintly status? It's such an interesting topic because it wakes up.

in a conflict if I'm really honest the perfectionism it wakes up because we all want to be good we all want to be the best of who we are and but obviously through my own experience you know no one can live up to those perfect ideals. It's exactly what Philippa's doing with this brilliant podcast and her book, is that there are...

as many types of women as there are types of men. But the idea that there's only one type of woman that's allowed is very pervasive and very difficult. And if you fall short in any way at all, then you're beyond the pale. And that's what's happening. Do you put those on yourself, though? Look, you're both very, very successful women. So we can all put, I know for me, I can put that perfection standard on ourselves to be this perfect deliver in our own sense. Oh, I think we carry it.

But we don't always realise what a huge ask it was of Victorian women, as we can hear in the poem Kate mentioned earlier. more fleetingly than breath from glass or truth from foolish memories. Her heart's so touched with others' woes, she has no need of chastisement. A gentle life's conditions close like God's commandments with content and make an aspect calm and gay where sweet affections come and go. till all who see her smile and say how fair and happy that she's so.

That's the poet Coventry Patmore writing about his wife, his beloved first wife, Emily, in the long lyric poem, The Angel in the House. His poem described and popularized the angel image of the wife. But I think the invention of the lady, the angel of the house, happens earlier than most people think at the restoration of the monarchy in the 17th century.

All the royalists came home with the returning king, Charles II, and there was a great desire that the king should be back on his throne, that fathers should head the household, and that all the women who had marched with the armies held out in besieged town. preached freedom and been the lords of the castles, should get back into the parlour, workplace, church and kitchen and obey God, the King, their husbands and fathers, all of them, all at once.

It was easy to push working women back into work at home. The guilds and marketplaces gradually closed against them. But how to persuade upper-class women to retire from the world of politics, civil defence and running estates? How to persuade them that home was the best place for them, the only place for them? They had to be frightened out of the world of work. Books poured out of the newly licensed presses, telling women how dangerous the outside world was, that it was filled with sin.

that women who wanted to be married had to be perfectly behaved and an even bigger leap. Nobody wanted a wife who was loud or ambitious or sexy. or even independent, working and earning her own money. Ladylike behaviour was a modest, quiet, apparently idle life at home. All a lady could do, all a lady should do. was make her home a little refuge for her hard-working husband, a spiritual nursery for her children, and a little beacon to the world.

Conduct book writer Richard Braithwaite told Seventeenth-Century Wives, Conform yourself likewise to a nuptial state, and preserve your honour without stain. Contest not with your head for preeminence. You came from him, not he from you. Honor him then as he cherisheth the love he conceives in you. A domestic fury makes ill harmony in any family. The rougher your cross, the richer your crown. The more that injuries press you, the more shall your patience praise you.

The conflict is but short and momentary, the triumph glorious and impaled with eternity. I mean...

The more the injuries press you, the more shall your patients praise you. It's literally saying put up and shut up. Women's silence and restraint was preached by almost every novel of the 18th century. They sold women a vision of themselves, a female nature which was highly spiritual. overly emotional and completely dependent on a man. To marry a gentleman and revere him was the highest ambition of the young lady, as writer Sarah Stickney Ellis explained.

To be permitted to dwell within the influence of such a man must be a privilege of the highest order. To listen to his conversation must be a perpetual feast, but to be permitted into his heart... to share his counsels, and to be the chosen companion of his joys and sorrows, it is difficult to say whether humility or gratitude should preponderate in the feelings of the woman thus distinguished.

and thus blessed. By the end of the 18th century, it was pretty well understood by everyone who read the advice books and devoured the new novels that glamorise dependent and fearful heroines. that ladies are so vulnerable to attack and so sensitive to unpleasant sights and sounds that they'd better stay in their homes for their own safety and happiness.

From the early 19th century, more and more experts even advised that women were naturally frigid. Dr. William Acton wrote, A woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband's embraces, but principally to gratify him. The best mothers, wives, and managers of households know little or nothing of sexual indulgences. As a general rule, a modest woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. Any appetite came to be regarded as unladylike.

An 1844 cookery book by the domestic goddess of her day, Mrs. Maria Rundle, warned that elite ladies avoided food. In the higher ranks, an idea is entertained that any consideration connected with eating is injurious to the delicacy of the feminine character. Eating is an unpoetical thing. Lord Byron disliked to see women eat.

I've just got to say, Geri, I wish this was television. Your face, you just look like a gasp. It's certainly interesting hearing that. And part of me, you know, we've moved on. massively, you know, and I'm grateful to the age we live in. But then part of me thinks, you know, those sort of values can still sort of creep into our modern day living. They can.

I think certainly they do. I think there are still people saying, I mean, saying be dainty, be graceful and, you know, don't be loud and sexy and patient. Yeah, and to be successful is to be thin. You know, that's kind of a sign of success. And if you kind of extrapolate out from that, it's the idea of women shouldn't take up too much space.

But, I mean, I think what is so interesting about this, why I avoid the Victorian period, Philippa, is because it's just so incredibly hypocritical. We know in the Victorian period, women, middle-class women in particular, have fewer rights than the servants they employ.

They are as children. Why? They're the property of their husbands, quite literally the property of their husbands. Their money goes to their husbands and they have no self-determination, no agency, no right to be an adult. Actually, they are like... children in the law. The law actually says that a man has to be in charge of, say, trust for a woman, a child or a lunatic.

A wife. Because you can't, the marriage, the act of marriage is to hand over all your money, all your property permanently to your husband. And it's also, I mean, the terrible black hypocrisy of this. that we know, even now, that the most dangerous place for women is behind the closed drawer of the home.

That is where the majority of women, if they are going to suffer any sort of violence or coercion or anything, it will happen at home. So the idea that the safe place is at home, I think most modern listeners, male, female, anybody, will be thinking, uh-huh. Oh, it's a myth that continues even now. Government advice for women to take care on the streets. Avoid dark and isolated places. Get chaperoned when you go out.

or stay home, as if we were Victorian maidens, and they failed to tackle the appalling violence and sexual violence against women on the streets and at home.

The angels of the house didn't just stay in the home. For some, it's not a glass cage that keeps them picturesque but passive at home, but a springboard that bounces them into action. The extinction of slavery, the abolition of war in general, cruelty to animals, the punishment of death, temperance, and many more, on which neither to know nor to feel is almost equally disgraceful.

In short, women's politics must be the politics of morality. That was Sarah Stickney Ellis again, demonstrating the revolutionary and unintended consequences of putting women in charge of morality. Women expanded their moral view and looked at the world outside the house. But of course they took a rather particular view of things from their position of privilege. They called for the abolition of slavery so that enslaved women too could make ideal homes for their husbands and children.

The privileged upper-class white wives did not want women free from the control of men. They wanted them free from the control of a master and put under the control of a husband. This was absolutely clear. One campaigner said that an enslaved woman should be freed so that she could occupy her proper station as daughter, wife and mother.

Abolitionist campaigner Priscilla Buxton co-secretary of the London Female Anti-Slavery Group, who helped organise a petition to end slavery, signed by 187,000 women, the largest anti-slavery petition ever presented to Parliament. chose Emancipation Day, 1st of August 1833, as her wedding day, so that she would be married on the very day that the law to free English slaves was officially passed.

The bride's fellow abolitionists raised their glasses in a toast wishing that the bride might long rejoice in the fetters put on that day as well as over those which she had assisted to break. It was the angels in the house, the elite women of the upper-class homes, who drove the campaign for the abolition of slavery in England. By 1831, a third of all anti-slavery societies were run by women, and by 1850, there were more women's anti-slavery association than men's.

Not that they were wanted. William Wilberforce, the great leader of the abolition of slavery in England, made it clear that he thought the women should not campaign. For ladies to meet... to publish, to go from house to house, stirring up petitions. These appear to me proceedings unsuited to the female character as delineated in Scripture. Many ladies agreed. Poet Eliza Condor insisted that women belonged in their homes. If we are thus to start out of our spheres, who is to take our place?

as keepers at home are to guide the house and train up children? Are the gentlemen kindly to officiate for us? You've got this terrific contrast between the biggest campaign that's ever been done to make one of the biggest changes in world history, and it's being done by women who don't actually want to see other women.

freed, they want to see them in marriage in domestic homes. Why do you think that is? I honestly think it's because they thought home was a wonderful place to be a wife and mother. I think they genuinely bought it completely, internalized it. Because if you're inherently taught that, you've read the books. Because I always think about fairy tales. A boy reads the fairy tale that the prince...

he saves the princess, he has to slay the dragon. So if he's bought that and then we bought that, it's what you've learned, what you know, what you're comfortable with. And it's the contract, isn't it? It's like, in a way, with that Victorian home. You see that at the end of the 19th century and the 20th century in the movement for women to have the vote, that many comfortably off white middle-class women...

They don't want the vote because they feel they will lose the privileged position that they have within the household. They don't want to be treated equally. They think that it's great that they've got this... Someone else can... Someone else. Absolutely. So many women genuinely thought that being this protected at home was actually a position of great strength, which gave them the chance to give to others. their house and their reputation and their power there and their leisure.

to, in a sense, go out into the world and make a difference. They did campaigns for slavery. They did campaigns for sexual health. They did campaigns for prostitution. And some of those campaigns still go on today. Oh, so I had experience when I worked for the... UN and that was for health and reproductive care and there's two things that I learned one was that if you educate a woman then you improve economy but the other thing was

and this was when I was in the Philippines, that the younger generation were really like crying out for health and reproductive care, contraception, which actually... is quite controversial in a Catholic country. So to be mindful of people's cultures, I think it's really not just going in there and stamping on you've got to do it this way. I think change happens through friendship, through community sharing values.

The angels, the campaigning reforming women, divided dramatically at the end of the 19th century when having won campaigns on slavery and abused women. They think, well... Why don't we have a vote? Why can't we speak in the Houses of Parliament since we can address MPs? Suffragettes. Absolutely, the suffragettes. But though we hear very little about them, there were many women who opposed the vote. Coming up. The women who wanted to make the world a better place, but didn't want to vote for it.

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Welcome back. To Normal Women Are Angels, with me, Philippa Gregory, and my guests, singer, actor, and writer, Geri Halliwell Horner, and Kate Moss, best-selling author of Labyrinth and the Languedoc Trilogy. One woman, Caroline Norton, who successfully campaigned for changes to the law on custody of children in 1839, was clear that there should be justice for mothers, but not equality for women.

Kate, I know you're a great fan of Caroline Norton. I know she's a heroine of yours. I admire her enormously. Caroline Norton is one of the most significant women to women's lives that people mostly haven't heard of. Yeah, I've never heard of her. Well, here is the moment. You're going to hear about this. Yeah, tell me about her. She was a society lady. In 1836, she left her husband. He was abusive. He was drunken. He was even in the standards of the time. People said he was a wrong one.

And she petitioned for divorce. He responded by accusing her of this wonderful thing actually called criminal conversation, i.e. adultery, with... no less than the prime minister the case was thrown out but he still wouldn't agree to a divorce under the terms of marriage he could take away her children

she could never see them again and that happened to her younger son who died without her ever seeing him again. He could continue to claim all of her earnings from her own writings because that's also, she was his property. And unlike many women who would just say, well, this is the law, she refused to accept it. So she wrote to Queen Victoria and said, it should make a difference that there's a woman on the throne. Why doesn't it? And she petitioned and she campaigned and over her...

very difficult life in some ways, even though she was a society lady. She was responsible for the Custody of Infants Acts, which was 1839, the Matrimonial Causes Act, which was 1859. And finally, the Married Women's Property Act in 1870, which meant that you kept your property, absolutely. And she transformed women from being seen as the property of a man.

to having some rights within marriage, and for the first time, over their own children. So every woman owes a debt to Caroline Norton. So she released them from slavery, in a way, property, in her own way. She did change their status. I mean, generally then they became the children of the marriage. And generally then if they were babies, if they were infants, they had a fighting chance of being allocated to their mother.

So she had that vision of justice for women as wives and mothers, but she was absolutely against women having the vote. This is a letter of hers. That natural position of a woman is inferiority to man. Amen. That is a thing of God's appointing, not of man's devising. I believe it sincerely as part of my religion. I never pretended to the wild and ridiculous doctrine of equality.

It's one of the extraordinary forgotten stories of history that there were more women who did not want the vote at the turn of the 20th century than those that did. I thought that was due to the way they were trying to make change, you know, because the suffragettes were quite, you know, they were using violence. Was it to do with that? No, it's genuinely because they don't think women should have the vote.

The National Anti-Suffrage League was founded in 1908 with many famous women signing up against votes for women. By 1913, there were 270 branches with more than 33,000 members. The campaign led by Emmeline Pankhurst, the WSBU, far more famous now, had only 2,000. One early member of the National Anti-Suffrage League, Etta Lemon, also campaigned against the trade in wild bird pelts and feathers, founding the RSPB. She linked the two causes... of boycotting the feathers and boycotting the vote.

If women are so empty-headed and stupid that they cannot be made to understand the cruelty of which they are guilty in that matter, they certainly prove themselves to be unfit to be voters. The organisation said that women voters and MPs would not be competent to run a large and complex empire. Women were...

Debarred by nature and circumstance from the average political knowledge and experience, open to men. Queen Victoria, one of the most powerful women in the world as the Empress of India and Queen of England. was passionately opposed to women getting the vote.

In a letter in 1870, her close friend Theodore Martin wrote, The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in checking this mad... wicked folly of women's rights, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor, feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety. Woman would become the most hateful, heartless, and disgusting of beings were she allowed to unsex herself.

It's extraordinary to me that this really powerful idea of the unsuitability of women for power, of their inability to vote, was so strong, and yet the history of it has almost been lost.

There's no major history of the campaign. I only learned the importance of it from the biography of Etta Lemon, one of the founder members. Yes, and I have my own experience of this learning only in lockdown that my... own great-grandmother, Lily Watson, was a celebrated novelist in her days. She was Gladstone's favourite novelist. And I...

had only been told that there was someone in my family who wrote. And it was very much as if she did the flowers in church on a Sunday. You know, there was never an idea that this was a profession or important, whereas actually her money saved the family when there was an embezzlement and a financial crash.

But as I investigated further and further and found some letters and got to know her, I discovered to my real disappointment that she didn't just think that women shouldn't have the vote, but she was a member of the Anti-Suffrage League. And that made me think, okay, about women in history and likability. The idea that women, we can only put women into history if we like them or we agree with everything that they said. Now, do I hope that if we admit...

I would have persuaded her, to my point of view, with my silver tongue. Of course, would I have done? No. She knew what she thought, and she has the right to think differently. Absolutely. And one of the real disappointments, I think, for women when they got women in as MPs in sufficient numbers, they found that they couldn't then agree on a policy. There's no such thing as women's policies. There are certainly policies which...

enable health or enable, you know, a dispersion of income or support to the poor. But those are not specifically women's policies and they shouldn't be women's policies. They should be something we're all campaigning for. They're just people policies. Exactly. This is it.

That until we get away from the idea that all women agree, we won't ever genuinely get to a point where you can look at how things are because we don't expect men to agree just because they're men. Women should be free to choose.

as men are free to choose. And we're allowed to disagree. Absolutely. And it's also incredibly interesting that one of the reasons and the ways in which women are left out of history is partly because of the question of legacy and who... writes up a woman's history. And so many women in this period...

do not marry and do not have children. And often the protection of a legacy comes from within the family. And that's why you suddenly see all those first lawyers, all those first doctors, very few of them. I mean, they're there. You have found them. But there were many, many, many of them, but almost none of them married because then they lost any right as an individual. So that's the same part of it, isn't it? It's exactly the same part of it. Are you saying if you didn't have children...

You had more power. Yeah. Well, if you didn't marry. Yes, because you were... Very Queen Elizabeth I. Yeah. No wonder. But not at all Queen Victoria. But part of the difficulty is how a woman can be herself.

when she's told all the time what her nature is. It's not just the 17th century conduct books and the 18th century novelists. It's the 20th century as well. And even after the Second World War, there was a revival of angels, women who were warned by... childcare experts that their children would not flourish unless there was a full-time mother at home.

After the Second World War, that period of time known as the Great Betrayal in the late 40s and early 50s, when women who had been saving England and Scotland and Ireland and Germany and everywhere else were told...

Oh, no, you're back to the kitchen with you now. You can't work. If you get married, you have to give up your work. You can't even buy a television without your husband's signature. Wow. But I do agree with what Kate was saying. As that chap was reading about, you know, the Victorian times.

that you have to go back into the household. I was thinking, actually, that's happened just after war. You know, you get these amazing warriors, these women that have gone to war or in the factories, and then suddenly their husband comes.

comes home wartime pay for women was cut back and jobs given to returning soldiers magazines and newspapers pushed the idea that a woman's place was in the home. Women were encouraged to buy things for the home, to make a career out of homemaking. and the new washing machines and hoovers didn't save time, they just raised the standards expected of the woman homemaker. The sexual liberation of women in the 1960s led...

Not to women being more free to choose their lifestyle, but to an explosion of advice for women as to how to please men. Even today, women who work outside the home generally do twice the childcare and housework done by her husband. And amazingly, a woman who earns more than her husband increases the amount of domestic work she does. And we are still encouraged to be ladylike.

In the 1990s, Nigella Lawson coined the phrase domestic goddess. I love cooking with my children and one of their favourite things to make are green cakes. A mix of broccoli, peas... and cold potatoes all mashed up and burned with an egg. Modest fashion became a trend in the 2000s, and Marie Kondo advises us to find joy and mental clarity.

in colour coding our sock drawer. Kate, what do you think? Well, I think, you know, there is a great deal of attention about the idea of traditional homemaking and all of these things, but that always happens when the economy is bad.

You know, always follow the money. That's what it's about, isn't it? What do you mean by that? Well, it's just, you know, one of the reasons that nobody wanted equal pay in the 1970s is that they would put a huge amount of money on the bottom line of employers' bills.

That's why everybody writes about that and says we don't want equal pay because it's the bottom line. When there isn't enough work to go around when you're in a recession, what do you do? Let's get half the people out of the workforce.

You, who come of a younger and happier generation, may not have heard of her. You may not know what I mean by the angel in the house. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg. If there was a draft...

She sat in it. In short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathise always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all, I need not say it. She was pure. And when I came to write I encountered her with the very first words. The shadow of her wings fell on my page. I now record the one act for which I take some credit to myself. I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her.

my excuse if i were to be had up in a court of law would be that i acted in self-defense had i not killed her she would have killed me she would have plucked the heart out of my writing thus Whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her.

That was Spice Girls wannabe saying what they really, really want. And before them, perhaps the only time that Spice Girls had been introduced on air by Virginia Woolf, the great philosopher attacking the angel in the house who wants nothing for herself. How do you feel when you hear the lyrics again? I think, yeah, I'm proud of them. When you strip down any song, any medium, you know, without, the lyrics are very poignant. Yeah, I'm proud of them.

You were a fan, weren't you, Kate? Still am. Sorry. No, no. I mean, I think, you know, obviously different generation and all that. I think you maybe underestimate quite how significant you were, all of you, and you particularly as... that bold woman out there. So that song was reflecting how we were feeling at that time. Okay. The funny thing is, I'm just thinking about this as we're talking.

That song, I remember that I stood in an office by myself. I had one of the other girls on the telephone call with a room full of male execs from the record company. Not one of them wanted that song. not one but I was going no but I like it I like it. I had the backing of one girl down the phone going, I like it. It's right. And I think it's sometimes we're just reading the temperature on behalf, you know, of our fellows. That's all it is. And that's when we get it right.

Do you carry in your head at all what we've been talking about, the angel in the house, the idea of being the person who's self-sacrificing and giving? Do you know what? I think men and women, we can all be the angel in the house. Why not? To me, if you just take away the sex actually. To me, that's about being a good person. That's being selfless and kind. You know, sometimes we do have to make self-sacrifices for one another, regardless of your genitalia.

I think it's beyond that. If we're really going to move the dial, for me, it's a bigger thing. It's about love and kindness. That's what I'm taking from it, without the chastity, so to speak. Kate, you've been a carer for many years. Do you see yourself at all as an angel in the house? Slightly singed wings, I would say. No, I think...

There is still absolutely the idea. And when we start to see women being allowed back into the workplace in the Victorian period, it is nursing and it is teaching. So anything that is connected with nurture. As a carer, I'm a full-time carer and have been for a long time, as some people will know. But I do that, as you say, Gerry, out of love and opportunity in that I'm in a position to do it. 50% of women will be carers by the age of 59. The odds are not the same.

of everybody okay interesting men don't have that odds till they're 75 so essentially women care for everybody and men care for partners Are there things that are not equal in women's and men's experiences? Yes. Are things in some ways getting worse? Yes. Are they getting better in other ways? Yes. But it's always about choice. A man or a woman or anybody being free.

to choose to be this version of themselves that they want to be and all these amazing women you're talking about Philippa from the 19th century in the end that's what they're doing can women be themselves. I want loads more than women to be themselves. I want them to have equal pay. I want them to have equal opportunities. And rights over their own body. There is no other group that doesn't have autonomy over its own body. I also think, how do you make the home?

not an unequal place. You know, since women are obviously going to have a place in the home, since the home has traditionally been a place where women have been overworked, not paid at all, and...

increasingly ill-treated, physically ill-treated and sexually ill-treated. How do we make our homes a place fit for an angel? Well, it's very interesting. You know, one of my favorite. anecdotes is about an American woman called Josephine Cochran, who in the later part of the 19th century, had literally just had enough. And she left her kitchen in Chicago and she went to a shed at the end of the garden.

And she invented the dishwasher with the amazing, wonderful phrase, I suppose if no one else is going to invent a dishwashing machine. I had better do it myself. Mother Nature. Mother Nature. But she became the founder of the Cochrane Garris Electrical Engineering Company. There are many, many, many female inventors, most of whom have written out of history.

And what were they mostly looking at? Things to make a woman's life in the home easier. Need. Need. Need. You know, you giggled when I said, what about making home equal? Well, I think we're in a time of change, okay? And so I'm thinking about men as well. Actually, if we're going to be real leaders, actually, we don't need to put others down. And sometimes women might be a bit more caring, might be naturally that way, more nurturing. That doesn't say men aren't.

I think they're finding their way too. So I'm wondering, can we have a period of grace that, you know, having that communication in a home life? Yeah, I want to be out there. And yeah, I want to look after my children. And I want to feel great in myself. So you've got that. But then men are on their own journeys too. You've got this new generation of men coming up where they don't want to. to feel they've got to be that sort of macho archetype.

But they've still got the DNA of the past. And actually, they're just as confused. We're all idiots at different times. That's what I've come to the conclusion. So, and we don't know the answers. I don't know. Sometimes I don't want to stack the dishwasher and nor does he. Maybe we both don't want to, and maybe we both got to.

It's like a game of chicken, isn't it? Those socks, they're still there, aren't they? But at the same time, on a serious note, I think it does also... just want to keep saying making a situation where there is choice many women have absolutely no choice at all and some men have no choice but more men have choice than women have choice things have changed a lot in that and so

That's why I'm just so passionate that we talk about the things that have changed for the better. Yeah. While saying women's rights are going backwards in certain areas because telling the truth. insofar as we ever can, rather than it all being black and white. We know what is happening. We are being told that it's all very straightforward. You're either with me or against me. We know that most of us live in the nuanced place.

in between when nobody really wants to stack the dishwasher. That is the truth. That is the truth. I don't think it's about, yeah, I think it's beyond sex. We all just think, oh, really? I... Would love to think it is, but the statistics just show it isn't.

You know, women do do three quarters of the housework. You know, Kate was saying women do most of the caring. Whether you earn money outside the home or not, you still do more housework than your husband. So it's, you know, what I would like is, I agree with you, a period of... race where we all suddenly treat each other wonderfully, but history suggests that doesn't happen.

History, we know this, is a pendulum. It goes backwards and forwards. There is always this lovely idea that actually things generation after generation get better for women and more equal. But it's not true. I don't actually believe in a pendulum. I think there's movement and pushback.

I don't think history or time goes one way and then it goes another way. I think literally we make advances and then patriarchy, which I think is much more powerful and much more advantageous to more people than... you were suggesting. I think patriarchy and capitalism, all those great forces of inertia and conservatism push back. No, I agree that when I talk about the pendulum, I don't think of it as an abstract thing that is...

simply, if you like, going with the diurnal movement of the earth. I agree, it's absolutely forced backwards and forwards. I think, though, what is important, that everything about things that are bad...

are just a reminder about why we need to keep using our voices and speaking up. But I also think that we have to guard against essentially what all of those... that kind of quite deliberate writing and publishing of women to put women back into the home, that the narrative that everything is terrible and it's all much, much worse than it was is a very subversive way.

of putting women back into the home. So that sort of sense of boldness and that it's... that we have to keep trying and we have to keep using our voices for all the other women and girls and people around us is very important because otherwise self-censorship and fear achieve what in the old days, as it were, the law did. You know, in this country, women do have many, many more rights than women do have in other parts of the world. But every single right we have. was fought for by somebody.

It's been wonderful to spend time with both of you. I think we could go on all day. It's just been brilliant. Kate Moss, Geri Halliwell Horner, thank you very much indeed. Thank you very much, Philippa. Thank you. Thank you. What a pleasure to meet you both. In the next episode on the Normal Women podcast, normal women love women. I'll be taking a closer look at female friendships that were not even recorded.

And I'll be joined by TikTok stars Caitlin and Leah and historian Laura Gowing. All of the themes explored in this series can be found in my book, Normal Women, 900 Years of Making History. And if you've enjoyed this episode, please tell the normal women in your life about it. Hope you'll be joining me soon. But until then, I leave you with who else? The angel in the house. singing Home Sweet Home.

The Normal Women podcast was written and presented by me, Philippa Gregory, and features the voice talents of Claire Corbett, James Good, Melanie Gutteridge, and Rufus Wright. The producer is Marilyn Rust. Executive producer is Kate Ford and sound design is by Tom Birchall and includes original music composed by Juliet Pochin. Commissioning editor for William Collins is Arabella Pike.

My book, Normal Women, 900 Years of Making History, published by William Collins, is also available as an audiobook. There are links to both in the show notes. Wayfair's Labor Day clearance is here. Right now, score up to 70% off everything home. Plus, fast shipping on everything right to your door. Shop now through September 2nd at Wayfair.com.