Monasteries and convents sheltered and fed the most vulnerable – the intellectually or physically disabled, the very old, the very sick and the very poor. Their suppression left a massive gap in the social fabric. Here's an example from the Minories, a wealthy house of Poor Clares just outside London's eastern walls at Aldgate. Jane Gowryng, Frances Somer, Mary Pilbeam, and Barbara Larke, all nuns in their early 20s, and Bridget Stravye, a novice of just 15, are living there when the 1536 law forces them out for being under 24. They petition Thomas Cromwell to be able to stay. It seems they were heard because I found them again in the Dissolution rolls three years later. They also beg him to provide for their lay sisters, Margaret Fitzgared, 12 years old, deaf and mute, and Julian Heron, 13, an “idiot fool.” Surely, the king does not mean for them to fend for themselves. By 1539, Margaret is a professed nun of 16 and is pensioned. But Julian, the intellectually disabled teenager, appears alongside all the unpensioned lay sisters, such as Joan Crosby, 95 years old, or Elizabeth Martin, 68, with just two words: “all cancelled.” What happened to them?

History loves a bureaucrat. The Dissolution was preceded by a vast nationwide survey of the more than 900 religious houses. The Valor Ecclesiasticus established the worth of each institution's property and income as well as who lived there. Research gold. What we know of the nuns’ fate, we then largely infer from the records of the Court of Augmentations, the administration charged with taking control of the religious houses’ finances and properties and assigning cash rewards and, vitally, pensions to the former religious men and women.

In the 1530s, an annual income of £5 was considered a poor living for a cleric. Life was more expensive in the capital too: in 1531 already, junior clerics complained angrily to the Bishop of London that a yearly wage of 10 marks (£6 13s 4d, or £6.67) was “but a bare living” given rising costs. The median pension given an English nun? 4 marks. What’s more, pensions were fixed and the 16^th-century economy is known for inflation. By the mid-1540s, a lucky senior nun's pension of £6 was little more than a farm labourer’s wage. The last monastic pensions were collected around the turn of the 17^th century, at which point their purchasing power had roughly been divided by three.

[00:00:00] Isabelle Roughol: Hello and welcome to Broad History. I'm your host, Isabelle Roughol.

Have you ever spent hours slaving over a holiday meal or for that matter, over the relentless repetition of everyday meals, cleaned up after a sick child, or devoted an entire Saturday to catching up on the chores that piled up during the week?

Have you ever done that and thought, exhausted and bored, " man, I should get paid for this?" Well, some women tried.

Today we are continuing our exploration of women and work with an episode on a movement that I have to admit I'd never heard about until now: the Wages for Housework campaign. It's exactly what it sounds like, a campaign to compensate women monetarily for the work that they do for their families.

And if you're thinking that that sounds radical and utopian, well yes, but that's what the seventies were like. So for some of you, this will be lived memory, but I grew up in the Girl Power era and I matured in the Girl Boss era, and this is neither of those things. This is a very different kind of feminism that I got curious about.

So my guest today is Dr. Emily Callaci, a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, who has just published Wages for Housework and has had access to incredible archives as well as the surviving organisers of this movement. And she's going to take us back to this unique moment in feminism.

Emily, hello and thank you.

[00:01:20] Emily Callaci: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

[00:01:22] Isabelle Roughol: My pleasure.

So I think we need to introduce first the central idea. What is Wages for Housework?

[00:01:31] Addressing housework in the women's right struggle
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[00:01:31] Emily Callaci: As you point out, it is exactly what it sounds like. And I think,perhaps the best way to introduce the idea is to think about the moment in which it arose. So you mentioned second wave feminism. It's a time when women all over the world. were coming together to really questionwomen's role in society and to really fight for more power, more resources,for liberation.

That included demands like right to abortion, like equal pay for equal work, equal opportunities for education, all these really, really crucial things. But one of the insights that some women had at that time, from this movement was that. while all those gains and all those struggles are critical for women's power and for liberation, they don't address one of the core issues that women face, which is that they are doing so much unpaid work to make society function. You know, think about all the work of caring for children, all the work of caring for the elderly, caring for the sick, preparing the workforce to go to work every day through housework.

Their insight was that a lot of thatdid not address the core issue, which is that women were working this double shift, And so to really address women's empowerment, you can't just think about legal rights in the, in the legal sphere. You have to think about all these economic factors that have women doing all of this work, and yet not sharing in the wealth that it produces.

[00:02:50] Two workers for the price of one
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[00:02:50] Isabelle Roughol: And I think one idea that, when I was reading you, that I thought was unique or different from the way that I had heard people talk about housework before, is that it's not [00:03:00] just something that they're doing for their families: they are helping capitalism run by cleaning and cooking.

[00:03:07] Emily Callaci: Exactly. This is, I think, the critical insight here. just to start with one of my favourite quotations from Selma James, one of the founders of this movement, she had this insight. She said, "you can't make Ford cars and change nappies at the same time."

This insight that, when a boss hires somebody to work. they're basically getting, two workers for the price of one. They get the person who shows up to work every day to work on the assembly line or, mine the coal out of the ground, or, work in an office. But they also get the labour of the person who cares for them, the person who cooks their meals and cleans their house and prepares them to go to work each day. What Mariarosa Dalla Costa, one of the other founders of this movement, said was that, the critical thing that women produce for the economy, which is not recognised, is they create labour power itself.

[00:03:53] Isabelle Roughol: So the boss pays for one worker, but really they're good getting a whole support team there that is unacknowledged.

[00:03:59] Emily Callaci: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:04:00] "All work is shit"
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[00:04:00] Isabelle Roughol: One thing, that I think is quite confronting, in the analysis, of this movement for middle class women, for professional women and for the kind of feminism that, that maybe we're, we're used to, is that it's almost saying we're not interested in a better situation in the workplace. We're not interested in, you know, hiring discrimination or equal pay. I think it, is it Federici who says, "All work is sh*tThere is no work that we wanna be a part of. We don't want any of this. There is no fulfilment in work, which is something that, might be very foreign to people who think of themselves as, career women.

[00:04:39] Emily Callaci: Yeah,I also grew up in the kind of girl power nineties with the idea that, women's liberation comes through our careers. And I think there's a lot of validity to that, and I think that's very important. I mean, of course I'm in favour of equal pay for equal work. Of course, I'm in favour of education and all these things.

But one of the insights of Wages for Housework was that that idea about the value of work, the satisfaction of work, is a very middle-class perspective. For someone, for example, who's going to clean toilets for a living, or someone who's going to work in a coal mine and breathe in the coal dust, like these kinds of jobsare not liberating for anybody.

And again, one of the sort of insights in the, this is from Wilmette Brown who was, one of the founders of Black Women for Wages for Housework, is that, you know, the idea that going to take on another shift working at McDonald's is going to liberate you, is kind of insulting to people who do that work, you know?

So I think that's one of the things that I think was very shocking about Wages for Housework was that there's a very anti-work politics within that, at a time when so much of the feminist movement was about liberation in the workplace, having the ability to raise to the same ranks within a company that men raise to. I think that kind of questioning of the value of work and trying to recast that as something that was really in favour of the boss's perspective, which is that you should seek to work as a form of liberation, that was something they really tried to question.

[00:05:57] Isabelle Roughol: I think it's something that probably will start to [00:06:00] resonate more. I don't know. I, this might be, very much the bias just of what I'm seeing around me, but I'm certainly seeing a lot of middle-class Millennial and Gen Z women having lost a lot of illusions about fulfilment through career, these days, I don't know.

[00:06:13] Emily Callaci: Yeah,

[00:06:14] Isabelle Roughol: I think that's true. And I, because I teach, students of that, you know, of a younger age and,I think that a lot of feminists in the seventies, as I said, found Wages for Housework very controversial because it was basically seeking to, rather than leaving behind housework, it was about recognising housework.

[00:06:30] Emily Callaci: And at a time when you're trying to sever that link between the yourself and housework and challenge the idea that women are naturally suited to it, it seemed counterintuitive to demand compensation for it, right? A lot of people thought, won't that just entrench us in this role?

so that was one of the things I think that was really challenging and counterintuitive about it. But as you say, when I talk to younger people about it, people who have become somewhat disillusioned with the idea that liberation will come through work, people who are facing the possibility that their standard of living will be lower than their parents' generation, people who are finding themselves unable to afford housing, the idea that a job in the market economy is going to be their source of liberation, I think Wages for Housework and their critique of work is something that really resonates much more with younger people than I would've expected.

[00:07:15] Isabelle Roughol: And obviously, work that, you know, is a shift work, work that is, backbreaking, exhausting, maybe not glamorous, maybe not intellectually fulfilling, that is the reality of the global majority of men and women, right? I mean, it is a luxury to be, to feel stimulated by work.

But obviously as you say, one critique, which they received a lot, is this idea that, we're just entrenching women in the home as domestic workers. If we're paying them for it, are we saying like there is no escape from it? How did the campaign respond to that?

[00:07:51] Not wages for housewives
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[00:07:51] Emily Callaci: Sure. Yes. And I should say that's, it's, a critique that I completely understand, right? Again, you can imagine the 1970s, women who grew up fighting the expectation that your destiny in life is to do housework, the idea suddenly, someone comes to you and said, no, you should get paid for housework, that is something that I think really cut against the grain of,what feminism was about. But I think it's really important to recognise that wages for housework was not promoting the nuclear family ideal, was not promoting women as housewives.

And they were very clear that their campaign was not wages for housewives. It was wages for house work. It was about recognising that work is part of the economy, whether a man did or a woman did it. And so the idea, the kind of utopian idea here, was that what we have to do is recognise that work as part of the economy, recognise that historically it has been gendered.

And once you recognise that and you demand compensation for it, you challenge the way that capitalist society exploits that labour and makes profit from it, then you can start to challenge the capital system as a whole. Then you can start to challenge a scenario where so [00:09:00] many people in the world, the majority of whom are women, are doing work for free to make the system function, empowering and making profits for other people, right? To challenge that system is what you're doing when you're demanding wages for housework.

So by proclaiming, or demanding that wage, you're not saying: "I'm going to be a housewife. That's my role in life. I'm gonna participate in that kind of patriarchal construct." What you're doing is demanding that the system actually recognise something materially that's already, part of how the economy functions.

[00:09:30] Isabelle Roughol: And we should say, I mean, that's kind of the subtext through everything we've talked about so far, obviously it is a Marxist analysis. It is a sort of radical left campaign.

One insight that they have, that I thought was interesting as well, is that if you recognise this housework, it also helps value it to its real value.

So,There's this insight in your introduction that, I thought was interesting is that the closest, that work is to the work that women do for free in the house, the less valued it is monetarily by the economy, right? So that's why we don't really pay nurses and teachers and cleaners and sanitation workers very well, it's because they're a lot like your mom and you're expecting your mom to work for free.

[00:10:13] Emily Callaci: Absolutely. Yeah. There was this great quotation,from the 1970s. One of the anecdotes in my book is about the sanitation workers strike, and there was this artistwho was interviewing sanitation workers, and one of the comments, that one of the sanitation workers made was: "they don't respect us 'cause they think we're their mother."

So it's just that implicit assumption that work is denigrated. Calling something the work that your mother does is an excuse to think of it as valueless. I think that says so much about the role of this work in society.

[00:10:43] Biographies of 5 campaign leaders
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[00:10:43] Emily Callaci: But I wonder if it might help for me to talk about, just to give a bit of context for the five women that are the centre of the

[00:10:49] Isabelle Roughol: Yes. That was my next question because we've thrown a few names. but let's talk about yes, let's talk about who they are.

[00:10:56] Emily Callaci: Sure. And so one of the things I found so fascinating about this movement was how widespread it was. It's a movement that was fairly small, but it was, they had branches in the UK, in New York, in Italy, in the Caribbean. And so I focused my book on five women in particular, who I thought, who first of all had really critical roles in defining this politics. But part of what I was interested is how they really understood housework in different ways.

[00:11:20] Selma James
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[00:11:20] Emily Callaci: So the first person I focus on is Selma James. So she was born in 1930 in Brooklyn, New York, and grew up in a very kind of radical, immigrant community in Brooklyn. She grew up around, members of the American Communist Party and the troskyist Socialist Workers Party.

And so she grew up around radical politics and, as a young woman, one of her insights was that much of the left at that time really understood working class politics through the lens of the male worker who went to work in a factory, the kind of classic proletariat, the idea that to become a radical member of a social movement, you had to go and work in a factory, right?

But she grew up in a context where women were doing really [00:12:00] critical activism. Her mother was involved in organising tenants, organising mothers to collect their payments from the government for childcare. So she really understood housewives as being inherently political, even as the left kind of cashed them as people who were apolitical.

So she, in the 1950s, moved to Los Angeles, joined this kind of offshoot of the Socialist Workers Party called the Johnson Forest Tendency, and they're basically trying to organise workers in a kind of broader working class struggle, and her role within that was to go around to all the housewives in the neighbourhood and ask them about their daily labours and their daily lives.

And so she really became convinced that these women are not counted as workers, but they have all this political potential. If we could just bring that into how we think about the labour movement, we could really have a truly authentic labour movement that included everybody.

And so in the 1970s when second wave feminism really hit the scene, she'd already been thinking about this issue of unpaid work in the home for several decades already. So she really brought that struggle to second wave feminism. And for her second wave feminism was really an extension of class struggle.

She understood the women's movement as a movementof the working class more generally, and that women were an unacknowledged part of the working class.

[00:13:15] Isabelle Roughol: It's so much harder to organise, right, women, who are not together essentially in a factory, right? If everyone is just spread out and within the four walls of their house most of the day, you don't have that exchange, right?

[00:13:27] Emily Callaci: Yeah, exactly. That isolation in the home is really part of the struggle. How do you actually build a kind of collective movement, when you don't have the factory floor as the kind of location where everybody gathers? So that was her real challenge and that was her real ambition, was to make a working class movement that could bring in all those unpaid workers as part of how we think about the working class. And so that's Selma James.

[00:13:48] Mariarosa Dalla Costa
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[00:13:48] Emily Callaci: The second person I write about is Mariarosa Dalla Costa, who grew up in Northeastern Italy, in a place called Triviso. And she was part of student movements in the 1960s at the University of Padua. And she was part of a movement known as _operaismo_, which was a kind of coming together of the student movement and the workers' movement to really challenge some of the expansion of factory capitalism across northern Italy in the post-war era. And there were all these wildcat strikes, all these attempts to really question the profit and efficiency model that was basically taking over factory life, but also everyday life, in cities in the north of Italy.

So she joined this movement. She organised outside of factory gates, but again, like Selma James, she had this insight that this notion of working class struggle doesn't account for all the work that we as women are going to be expected to do as we get older, raising children,taking care of our parents, taking care of basically people, particularly in a very Catholic society, there's this real gendered expectation that women produce children for the state and for, for God.

And so, she had this idea that if you're thinking about workers working [00:15:00] on a factory line, an assembly line, you have to imagine the assembly line extends far beyond the factory into the home, where people are there, getting the worker ready to go to work every day, producing the worker by feeding him, doing his laundry, cleaning the house, producing children for the next generation of workers.

So for her, that's where the working class struggle began, in the home, where workers are being produced and raised. So those are the first two members, Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa. They met in the early 1970s and basically realised that they had a lot of politics in common. So they launched the Wages for housework movement together, Selma James in London, Mariarosa Dalla Costa in Italy.

[00:15:38] Silvia Federici
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[00:15:38] Emily Callaci: And then the third person I write about my book is Silvia Federici. So she's probably the most well known, at least in the US of the campaign. Her work is very widely read and she's still a very active feminist activist.

[00:15:49] Isabelle Roughol: If you're in women's history, you've come across her.

[00:15:51] Emily Callaci: Absolutely. Yes. So she was also born in Italy,in Parma, in the red Belts of Italy where the Italian Communist Party was kind of a stronghold there. And, she grew up very active in politics, but even though she grew up in, in a very kind of politically progressive community, she still faced these very kind of strict gendered expectations about the role that women would play, in society, again as homemakers, which is a role that she really resisted very strongly. And so she, as a young woman, she went to the US to get her PhD in philosophy. And she had this real interesting class politics and, the student movements in the sixties and also in feminism. But it's really when she encountered the work of Mariarosa Dalla Costa, really talking about women's unpaid work in the economy, that she really thought that feminism had a place for her.

So she, went home for the summer, met Mariarosa Dalla Costa, and then when she came back to New York where she was living, she started the New York Wages for Housework Committee in the mid 1970s.

And that was a really critical moment because just to give you a bit of historical context, New York at that time was on the brink of bankruptcy. There was a big financial crisis, and the way that the city responded to that was through austerity measures, cutting social programmes. And, at that time, the Wages for Housework campaign in New York really thought about that as a feminist issue, because so many of the things that were on the chopping block were things like childcare, were things like welfare payments, were things like subsidies for women togo to college for free.

They tried to really reframe the issue of austerity, and say, austerity is not just tightening your belt and making government more efficient. It's freeloading on women's unpaid work. It's taking things that are collectively recognised as valuable and paying for it, and then just stopping paying for it, expecting that women will continue to do it for free.

[00:17:40] Isabelle Roughol: Because you're not gonna stop feeding children or educating children, right? So you're just expecting women to pick up the slack because somebody's got to, right?

[00:17:48] Emily Callaci: Exactly. Yeah.

[00:17:49] Wilmette Brown
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[00:17:49] Emily Callaci: And so the fourth person I wrote about in my book, and this is the person who really, whose work I really was inspired by and made me wanna write the book is Wilmette Brown. So Wilmette Brown, she was born in Newark, New [00:18:00] Jersey, which is a, a very segregated city in the United States.

She grew up immersed in the civil rights movement. She was a brilliant student and went to Berkeley where she was, involved in student activism there in the anti-war movement. And, during her studies there, she encountered the Black Panther Party, which was based in the San Francisco Bay area at that time. And so she left university and began becoming basically a full-time organiser with the Black Panther party. She participated in the first struggle for ethnic studies at San Francisco State University. But at times she found that her identity as a black lesbian woman was not an identity that was fully recognised within the Black Panther party that she was a part of, because there was a kind of masculinist politics and a kind of idea of the gender roles within that,within the groups that she was a part of there. So she left the Panther Party, she went to Southern Africa and taught English for a couple years, and then when she came back to New York, in the 1970s, this again, was right the moment when second wave feminism was hitting, and she encountered the writings of Selma James and Mariarosa Dalla Costa about wages for housework. And for her, that was a real kind of aha moment because for her, this question about women's unpaid labour was an extension of the Black freedom struggle.

She was thinking about this in terms of longer histories of slavery and colonialism and the ways that the United States and the global North have extracted the labour of Black women through histories of enslavement and colonisation. And so for her wages for housework was really a version of the movement for reparations, really trying to recognise all the work that has been exploited historically along racial lines. And so she, together with the fifth person I write about in my book, Margaret Prescott, founded Black Women for Wages for Housework, which was a branch of Wages for Housework that understood the issue of unpaid labour of women, particularly through the lens of race and racialized dispossession.

[00:19:58] Margaret Prescott
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[00:19:58] Emily Callaci: So Margaret Prescott, the fifth person in my book, she was born in Barbados when it was still under Colonial Rule and one of the factors that she grew up with that really had a big impact on her was the extent to which women in her community travelled abroad to work as low paid domestic workers in the global North, in New York and London.

Despite having been the site where many of the profits of the British empire came from, many of the profits of the slave trade came from, she grew up in relative poverty. So many people had to go and work abroad to send home remittances as a way to lift the family above poverty wages. She sees so many of the women in her family going to work abroad and not making enough money to even bring their families with them. This is a really painful part of her childhood. And then she moved to Brooklyn, New York in the 1960s into a very kind of activist family and community that was involved in the Civil Rights movement.

And she encounters this very different discourse in America, which is this idea that, " oh, immigrants are freeloaders. They're here taking advantage of the [00:21:00] riches of Western society. They're collecting benefits from the government. Immigrants are the problem."

And from her perspective, it was exactly the opposite, right? Immigrants were coming to the US having their labour exploited. They were creating much of the wealth of society and not being compensated properly for it. So for her, she really brought to Wages for Housework, a real understanding that the exploitation of unpaid work and the work of women crosses national borders too.

That much of that exploitation, and profit making is not just about within a society or within a country, rather exploiting the unpaid work of women, but across on a global scale, women in the global South producing wealth for the global North through that unpaid work.

[00:21:40] Isabelle Roughol: There's, I think, a really powerful connection that's made in your book, that is still extremely current, which is this idea of this connection. You have women from what we'd call today the global south, having to leave their children behind in the care of women who are paid even less than they are, so they can make a little bit more money in the West, working potentially for Western women who are employing them to free their time to themselves be able to make just a little bit more money in paid work. So you have these like connections of women just making barely more than the woman who allows them to even be able to work outside the home.

[00:22:20] Emily Callaci: Yeah.

[00:22:21] Welfare
---

[00:22:21] Isabelle Roughol: I'm interested in the work that these last two women that you mentioned, do to connect welfare as well to the idea of wages for housework, this idea that actually welfare payments are not, they're not charity, they're not welfare, they're due.

[00:22:38] Emily Callaci: Absolutely. Thank you. Yes. And perhaps for, a UK audience, the campaign that really was concurrent with the Wages for Housework was the family allowance campaign, the campaign to protect family allowance at a time when there was a political push to get rid of the payments that were going directly to women and instead pay it through their husband, through his employer.

And the argument that Wages for Housework made was, this money is the only source of income that many women have. It's a source of autonomy. And so to take that away and pay it through their husband really is a blow against women's power and women's autonomy.

So in the US,Wages for Housework and particularly Black Women for Wages for Housework, understood Wages for Housework as an extension of the Welfare Rights Movement, which was a really important political movement in the US, led mostly by poor, working class and Black women. And basically their argument was to understand welfare payments as compensation for the socially necessary and important work of raising children. And the language that cast it is a kind of a handout or as a charity payment really missed the point, that this was payment for really vitally important social work. And so one of the arguments or one of the efforts that Black Women for Wages for Housework made was to get together with women from the Welfare Rights Movement and to protest cuts to the [00:24:00] welfare system that were happening in the 1970s by reframing recipients of welfare as workers, as workers that were not again demanding a handout, but demanding fair pay for the work that they were doing.

And so the place where this kind of becomes solidified in the historical record is there's this really important conference in 1977, convened at theinitiative of Jimmy Carter's administration, or during the Carter administration, the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977, and Wages for Housework got together with women from the National Welfare Rights Association, some of the figures here historically are Johnnie Tillmon and Beulah Sanders, and basically they got a kind of statement to be ratified by the convention that said that, not only should welfare be protected, should the amounts be increased, but it should have the dignity of being called a wage rather than a handout, to recognise that these women are doing skilled, important work.

So I find that really important. To recognise this as work is to recast this from a demand for charity or sympathy and basically recognise it as a, a demand for justice, for workers justice. And Margaret Prescott and Wilmette Brown were doing this organising, particularly in in Queens College where they were both on the teaching faculty at that time. And this is a time when, I mentioned the austerity crisis in New York in the 1970s, there are cuts being made to welfare programmes, cuts being made to subsidised childcare, and cuts being made to to college tuition. This is a time when university was free in New York. It's no longer free.

But part of the argument they were making was that many of the students, In the university system in New York were also care workers. A lot of them were single mothers. A lot of them were caring for their siblings or for their extended family. There was this real kind of discourse in New York at that time was that students are freeloaders, they're getting all these benefits from the government, it's wasting everybody's money. And they tried to really demonstrate that these students. Were workers in many senses of the word. So one of their strategies was to hold these kinds of speak outs where students would go and they would speak about the different kinds of work that they did on the course of a typical school day.

They would, perhaps for example, wake up,take a relative to a medical appointment, prepare the children for school, take the children to school, go to their classes at university, come home, get the children home, go to the shift for their paid work job, 'cause they have to have another kind of income, and then get home, stay late at night and have to do their homework and then get up the next day and do it all again. As a way of challenging this idea that recipients of welfare were freeloaders, and try to turn that around and show how they were actually some of the hardest workers in society. Without their work, everything would grind to a halt.

So that connection between welfare and Wages for Housework was the way they tried to bring together this very working class, poor, Black women's movement and try to project it into this bigger kind of analysis of capitalism.

[00:26:53] How far did the movement go?
---

[00:26:53] Isabelle Roughol: So how far did the movement go? I mean, did we ever get to a point there was a bill out there to [00:27:00] introduce wages for housework? Or did it stay this, intellectual and activist campaign, without a physical reality? I mean, did they even imagine how that would work in practise? 'Cause I know that's a criticism that, that they got.

[00:27:13] Emily Callaci: I think there's a lot of disagreement within the movement about this. So I think that, for example, for Silvia Federici and Mariarosa Dalla Costa, there was this sense of political theatre about it, that by demanding wages for housework, you're demonstrating, capitalism's internal contradictions, right?

And you could therefore the next steps, were less a policy blueprint than trying to launch a movement that wouldchallenge the system.

I think that particularly for Prescott and Brown and Selma James, and again, through their kind of linkages with the welfare rights movement, there was a real kind of concrete sense of having demands for government compensation for welfare as a kind of first step that can then lead to further demands, So there was a sense that, fighting with the welfare rights movement, fighting for things like the family allowance were part of the bigger kind of aim of,of challenging this situation where women's work is unpaid and essential to the economy. But I have to say, like if you're asking me did they succeed in getting wages for housework, the answer is mostly no. This is started in the 1970s and next you have the 1980s, which is the era of Reagan and Thatcher and massive cuts to many things that we might think of as wages for housework, things like subsidised childcare, things like welfare. So in that concrete sense, this is really kind of an unfulfilled promise. I should mention that many members of this campaign are still doing this work.

They're still together, particularly Selma James, I think she's 95 now, and she runs the Crossroads Women's Centre in, in London. They're still very much again, campaigning around wages for housework, although the demand has been, updated to, to a more kind of modern sensibility. Now it's called Care Income Now. The idea of asking for compensation for that work, um, calling it a care income rather than housework And they've really extended the analysis in many different directions, and I think it got a lot of traction, for example, during the COVID, pandemic because the issue of unpaid work was just so apparent to us in a way that perhaps it had been hidden before.

It was amazing to me, you know, within a week or two of the pandemic hitting, they were having teach-ins. They were having these discussions together with people who worked in the health sector, people who worked in anti-poverty campaigning, really talking about the need for a care income as a way to recognise this work and the kind of massive crisis we are now collectively facing about,the lack of care work and the lack of resources for care work.

[00:29:32] The care work of the climate crisis
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[00:29:32] Emily Callaci: Another direction that they have gone in recent years, or not that recent, I guess for several decades now, and this is really spearheaded by Wilmette Brown, is to think about the work of, surviving climate change and some of the environmental catastrophes that we're facing.

And one of the issues that got this way of thinking started was the crisis over,nuclear power and the Chernobyl disaster, and thinking about the kinds of unpaid care work that go into caring for people who are [00:30:00] living with the consequences of environmental degradation and pollution.

And of course we know that those effects are experienced differently by people depending on their socioeconomic status, depending on factors like, like race. Wilmette Brown really talked about what she called the housework of cancer. So she grew up in Newark, New Jersey, where they have the highest cancer rates in the country at that time. And part of that had to do with the industrial, production of chemical weapons along the river, near New York, New Jersey, that then polluted the local environment and then led to higher cancer rates. And so the community was facing having to care for all these people who were getting sick from, these industrial processes.

An extension that has been to think again about environmental issues as housework issues, as women's labour issues. And one of the places where I thought about this most recently is, and I'm not sure how familiar UK listeners will be with this, but we had this crisis, in the US in a place called Flint, Michigan. Basically the story was that there were these elevated rates of lead poisoning within the water system there. And again, this is a community that's predominantly Black, predominantly working class. and I think that wages for housework really helps us understand that as an environmental issue, but also an issue of women's unpaid work because so much of what it requires to care for people who are ill in that kind of community, to try to prevent people from getting ill in that context, to try to raise children when you can't even trust the water supply, this is all work that women are having to do for free, to live in a society that has all these environmentally harmful practises.

So the Wages for Housework as a concrete demand for payment, from the government in the seventies, that was not, that demand was not met. That was not a successful movement in that respect.

In other respects, I think there's a really long afterlife of this movement that really helps us reframe some of the most pressing issues that we face today, from the care crisis to the environmental crisis.

[00:31:52] Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, there's something that's extremely current. Before I studied history and journalism, I studied economics first, and a lot of things that, that I think we're still talking about today when we talk about the economy, things like, the way that the profits of enterprise are privatised, but the negative externalities, like pollution, like

[00:32:11] Emily Callaci: Yeah.

[00:32:12] Isabelle Roughol: consequences for society, harm on people that is collectivised. And when we say it's collectivised, it's really a lot of unpaid women's work to pick up the tab for a lot of those effects. So I think that's very current. As well as something I know I was certainly taught in economics classes, the idea that things like the numbers that we're staring at all day, like GDP, don't account for so much work that exists in the world that like, like housework, right?

[00:32:39] How housework got remarketed as care work
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[00:32:39] Emily Callaci: Something else that you touch on that, that we didn't talk about that I thought I was really interested, it's that switch from housework to care work, which almost I think makes it maybe a little bit more palatable. It's more noble, right? Care work. And this idea that this is a work of love, right? There's this beautiful quote, you call it love, we call it unwaged labour. yes. That's a quotation [00:33:00] from Silvia Federici.

[00:33:01] Isabelle Roughol: Yes. I wonder if you could talk about that, the way that all that work is wrapped up in this idea of love or familial obligation, and how these campaigners think about that and the idea that you would be introducing, almost introducing capitalism or capitalistic or moneyed relations within something that is being presented as, this sacred work of love and of family.

[00:33:26] Emily Callaci: Yeah, I love that quotation too. I think it's one of my favourite, it might be my favourite one, because it comes from Sylvia Federici's questioning, you know, why is it that women have done this for free historically? Why? How are we socially pressured to do it? And it's through that idea of love that this is fulfilling to you.

This is something you should do because it is generous, because you are a good mother. Because that's what it means to be feminine, right? And so part of what Wages for Housework was trying to do is to take off that veneer of. Holiness and virtue, and reveal it for its real hard-nosed economic function.

They saw that ideology of love as a way of basicallypressuring women to do it for free, right? so that's part of what they were trying to address. And I think, one of the things that I think is the real tension within both Wages for Housework, but also in how I think about it, is that, you could say on the one hand, is the point of thinking about housework, to recognise that it is virtuous, that it is highly skilled, that it is fulfilling, and that becomes a reason to value it? Or does that then further play into that idea that housework is virtuous and it is feminine and you should do it for free?

Is the other perspective that housework should be compensated because it sucks, you know? And because it's, it's hard and it's time consuming and it's boring. And it's not fair that women have to do it and men don't, So I think those two perspectives are kind of at war within me when I think about it.

And they're kind of, I think, contradictory or rather, a tension within the movement itself. And I think that's why I think, on the one hand, calling it care work, there's been a real turn I think towards thinking about the value of care and I think this also is something that has been really taken up in conversations about mutual aid that I think have become much more central from our experiences living through the pandemic.

And I think that my own ambivalence about that is that, again, on the one hand, I think it's really important to uplift that work and to not see it as less skilled. It's incredibly skilled, much of it. But one of, I think, the problems with that is that there still is always going to be a lot of housework that kind of sucks. So for example, there's this magnificent article by the sociologist Dorothy Roberts. I think sociology is her discipline. I'm not sure. But basically it's this article from the nineties, that talks about this sort of, way in which the housework done by white middle class women, can be cast as virtuous and rewarding,taking care of children, reading them bedtime stories, taking this great care with this kind of work. But that's never gonna be the way we talk about cleaning toilets, right? Or cleaning up vomit on a hospital floor.

And so by elevating it all as care work, are you then separating out [00:36:00] the kinds of work that are done by more middle class women and then, separating it out from the kinds of work that tend to be done by low paid women of colour or, poorer women. By separating those things from each other, are you,perpetuating this kind of inequality?

Part of what I think housework does and Wages for Housework does is by taking away that veneer of emotion and virtue, you see it as an economic issue rather than as an emotional issue. And you can do away with some of that ideology.

[00:36:25] Isabelle Roughol: I think we see it in the world of work in the more traditional sense in, in paid work, in the careers that you choose, right? if your career is a calling, somehow that becomes a reason to pay you a lot less, right? We see it in academia, we see it in journalism, we see it in the arts, right? You shouldn't make money if you're an artist, but, if you work in finance, that's okay. Those, I think, are similar dynamics at play that, that are really, interesting.

[00:36:48] How the campaign ended
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[00:36:48] Isabelle Roughol: You say this campaign continues in some ways, but really it ended with the end of the seventies and the change of the,political moment. I think what's really incredibly poignant and sad and beautiful all at once is that a lot of these women sort of drop out of the fight because of the very reasons that brought them to the fight, right?

It's, they have to care for ageing parents. They have less time for activism. They have less time for politics. They need to take full-time jobs to support themselves because all that activism, all that intellectual work isn't necessarily remunerated. Um. I think that's very poignant and very telling.

[00:37:24] Emily Callaci: Yeah, it is. and I should say that, the Italian Wages for Housework campaignreally ended in the late 1970s, in part for the reasons you mentioned. Also because in the late 1970s, there's a wave of political repression of the left in Italy that really forced activists underground, and the New York Wages for Housework Committee closed down basically in the 1970s.

But,a lot of them really did keep campaigning throughout the 1980s. I think that because those were such a terrible decade for feminism in many ways that we don't know their work as well. Many of the campaigners, particularly in London, and, Margaret Prescott moved to Los Angeles where she was campaigning there, particularly around defending welfare rights,

particularly against protesting austerity measures. that work was really, I think, very important. Again, it's not as well known as the work in the seventies, and I think because they kept doing that work throughout the 1980s and nineties,I think that's part of why this work has been able to endure, because then when, say the COVID-19 pandemic hits, there are people who have been thinking about this all along for a very long time, who could share their insights with us and organise. yeah, it's got me thinking a lot about the kinds of feminist activism that are happening at times that are very hostile to feminism and that, might not be as, um, well known. to just be clear, I do think a lot of the activism continued past the 1970s, even though the end of the seventies was a major moment of defeat for them.

[00:38:45] The long tail legacy of Wages for Housework
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[00:38:45] Isabelle Roughol: You talked about care work and the pandemic. What are other areas where you see a continuation or legacy of Wages for Housework?

One thing that came to mind when I was reading you was the idea of universal basic income, which [00:39:00] sounds not the same, but a child of that idea maybe.

[00:39:04] Emily Callaci: Absolutely. I think in many ways the care income campaign has some similaritieswith basic income. And, I know there are different kinds of schools of thought within basic income and there are many trials going on right now actually that are specifically targeted towards, for example, women in their first year of motherhood, trying to give an income to those women, With The understanding that it's better for women, it's better for children,it's, the kind of programme that targets them. So that's a real kind of connection between basic income and wages for housework.

Another way in which I think it's connected is as you've talked about earlier, is thinking about delinking,income and the right to live and thrive in the world from paid employment. thinking about income as something that is a right and something that is beneficial, that's not just dependent on you working for an employer, you know?

Another place where I see a longer term legacy of Wage for Housework is in conversations about a Green New Deal, particularly in the US and also in the European Union. And part of the thinking there is how to prioritise an economy emphasising work that is not disastrous for the environment. Moving away from a model of economic productivity that's based on extracting things from the environment, putting carbon into the ozone, right? And, doing these things that are terrible for the environment, rather shifting towards forms of work that are either neutral or positive for the environment.

And care work is one of those functions. Care work will always be necessary to our economy. It's not something that can be outsourced to, AI or something. But it is something that can work to renew and protect and conserve the environment rather than extract from it and pollute it.

So many people who are thinking about a Green New Deal are thinking about how can we make care work the centre of a green economy. And then a third place where I really see many of these insights being taken up is for, the efforts of domestic workers around the world, domestic workers organising.

So there's thismovement of domestic workers in the us. I'm not sure about labour laws in the UK actually, but in the US, domestic workers, housekeepers and house cleaners, many home health aides are not protected by labour laws, because the home is not considered a workplace.

And there are lots of historical, you know, reasons for this. But basically if you go to work in a factory, your employer has to provide certain protections under labour law in terms of, for example, if you're breathing in chemicals, they have to supply,the proper kind of masking or the proper ventilation. You have to be given things to keep the work environment safe. Those protections don't apply for most people who work in the home. So much of the organising for domestic workers has been around. Recognising the home as a workplace and trying to seek labour protections for domestic workers.

and one of the victories of this movement was in passing the I-L-L-I-L-O, international Labour Organisation Convention 189, which is popularly [00:42:00] known as Decent work For Domestics, but really tried to recognise, again, the home as a workplace. And what I found, that really interested me was that one of the big organisers to pass this convention was Ida LeBlanc, whose mother founded the first Wages for Housework branch in Trinidad and Tobago, her mother's Clotil Walcott.

So a direct connection between, the efforts of wages for housework in the seventies and eighties and this current organising that's happening for decent work for domestics.

[00:42:25] Isabelle Roughol: Emily Callaci, thank you so much. This is really interesting. I think it's a campaign that,in some ways is really confronting and it's, challenging intellectually and some ideas that, I may not necessarily agree with, but I think are just very interesting to, to think about, to sort of reimagine the world and the economy differently.

Which,if the future that we're promised in terms of AI, eating half our jobs... it's work that we're gonna have to do, Figure out, how we divorce income from jobs that no longer exist apparently. So thank you so much for that enlightening conversation.

[00:42:59] Emily Callaci: Yeah, thank you so much for your really thoughtful questions. I really enjoyed it.

[00:43:02] Speaker: That was Emily Callaci. Her book is Wages for Housework. You can find it in the Broad History bookstore, both in the UK and the US. Every sale on the Broad History bookstore helps support this show. You can also join as a member with a recurring donation or make a one-time donation.

I would really appreciate your support to make that happen. Thank you so much. This was Broad History. I'm Isabelle Roughol and I'll talk to you very soon.

[00:00:00] Isabelle Roughol: Hello, and welcome to Broad History. I'm Isabelle Roughol.

To my shame, my double shame as a French woman, I could not until this week have named a single novel by George Sand. I knew of her, of course, because she's famous, but not so much because of her work, which hasn't stayed in the canon, I have to say, the way that her contemporaries have. That would be Victor Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac, Stendhal a little bit earlier, Zola a little bit later, so if you're a reader of French lit, that will sort of situate you. And I read all of these men in school, never George Sand. And we'll certainly talk about why that is. But no, I know of her because of her personality. George Sand sort of looms over the 19th century as this larger than life character, early queer icon, a gender-bending woman in men's clothes, to French people, sort of the female Oscar Wilde.

And then I read Becoming George, which is the biography, the new biography of George Sand by my guest this week, Fiona Sampson. And I have to admit that I found her to be both a really, really interesting woman, but not nearly the scandalous or unusual character that I think pop culture had made her out to be in my mind.

So we're gonna break all that down and also through her talk about gender expectations, creative careers, and the lives of women in the 19th century with Fiona Sampson. Fiona. Hello.

[00:01:21] Fiona Sampson: Hello, Isabelle. Thank you for inviting me. This is going to be great.

[00:01:24] Isabelle Roughol: My great pleasure. And so I should say that you're a biographer of George Sand, but also of Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, as well as a professor and a renowned British poet as well, in your own right. So when did you encounter George Sand? Why this interest in this woman who, as I say, has somewhat fallen out of the canon?

[00:01:43] How female authors drop out of the literary canon
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[00:01:43] Fiona Sampson: Well. I think two things really. One is that I'm really interested in the way women fall out of the canon, in a way that the men don't. And the other is that, um, in my first life I was a musician. I was a violinist. And so if you're a musician, you know about, obviously, you know about Chopin. And if you know about Chopin, you know there was this kind of strange figure who has a man's name, but it's a woman, but she seems to be bad for him. But at the same time, she was part of his life for a long time. There is this sense of a kind of musty glamor around George Sand.

And as you kindly said, I've already written this... really, it's a trilogy. I've written about Mary Shelley and I've written a biography of Elizabeth Barret Browning. And Barrett Browning and George Sand seemed to me to share having been tipped out of the canon, although they were still in the canon when I was a kid.

I mean, there was suddenly, even in an English public library, George Sand was on the bookshelves,when I was, in school. And Elizabeth B. Browning was in the poetry anthologies. But in the decades since, their reputation has superseded their work enormously, but particularly things around Elizabeth B. Browning and a TV schlock series and play, and it had many [00:03:00] iterations. A show on Broadway called The Barretts of Wimple Street, which is all about Elizabeth Barrett Browning as not a great writer with a sense of vocation and destiny, but Elizabeth Barrett Browning as the girlfriend of Robert Browning and as, and then wife, and as kind of a hindrance to him and a kind of inversion of actual literary history, where in fact she was the literary pioneer. She was his senior and so on.

And, uh, Mary Shelley, although Frankenstein has enormously now taken up cultural space, and that's wonderful to see, very much that cultural space is around the James Whale 1931 movie with Boris Karloff being the shuffling monster. And, less of it is actually that this was written by a teenage woman, and she wrote this fabulous novel, which is a kind of hybrid myth. And again, perhaps the opposite really, that when I was say a student, the idea was that Mary Shelley hadn't really written Frankenstein, Hey, maybe she had a great idea, but really Percy Bysshe worked it up into a literary work. And that of course is not the case. It's also not the case with George Sand that there was no work, there was only a scandalous private life. And I think this kind of being subject to scandal is something that really women still now, women stars now, celebrities, actors, they're not anymore novelists, are still subject to.

But I think all of us women in our working lives are more subject to personal reputation than our male peers. And I think that it's tragic for us that we don't know our own canon, that we let these women be disappeared, which makes it much easier to say, "of course women can't do very much. Look, they never have." On the contrary. Even denied education, even denied the fabulous education that privileged 19th century white men had, women managed it. They managed to write masterpieces and managed to be highly productive, even while they're having babies and goodness knows what. So in fact, I wanted to kind of invert the story with which we tend to live.

[00:04:55] Isabelle Roughol: Wonderful. That's music to my ears. That's exactly the, the point of the Broad history project, to remind people, women have done all these things in the past. We just haven't kept track of them as we have of the men who have.

[00:05:07] A girl of two worlds
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[00:05:07] Isabelle Roughol: Let's start with,her childhood, the world that she's born into. She went by many names, and her first one, her birth name, is gonna be a mouthful for the non-French speakers. My apologies. Amantine Aurore Lucile Dupin de Franceuil. I don't get to my French that often on this podcast. Can you tell me about sort of her and the world that she's born into, that Aurore Dupin is born into in 1804, I believe?

[00:05:32] Fiona Sampson: That's right. July the first or fourth, we are not quite sure, 1804. As you will know, and most Anglophone listeners won't know or will have forgotten, of course it's Revolutionary France. This is a France where there is, everything is, as it were, called by a new name. This is a France of the revolutionary calendar, of the départements suddenly being introduced, of a kind [00:06:00] of partial deconstruction of the old aristocratic, I want to say fiefdoms, although I'm saying that metaphorically, divisions of the country and ruling class.

And Aurore herself sits right on that kind of fault line because, although not in an unusual way historically, because her mother is a former call girl, a Parisian working-class girl who was on the streets by the time she was 14, and whose father and stepfather were both bird catchers. And Aurore's father was an aristocratic cavalry officer, whose mother was the illegitimate daughter of the Great Marshall of France, Maurice de Saxe, and he himself was the illegitimate son of the King of Poland. I mean not quite yet king of Poland when he was conceived. So there's a kind of zigzag zip of illegitimacy that goes through the family tree.

But because Aurore was lucky enough that her parents were quickly married a month before she was born, they conferred on her legitimacy, which had huge practical consequences. But it meant that particularly her childhood when, for reasons we'll come to, she moved between care by her paternal family and her mother's care, there's a kind of fracturing of her identity, a sense of she doesn't quite belong to either class, and it is still class, or set of economic prospects. And her identity is verycontested. It's fluid. And you have this sense when she's writing, particularly in her autobiography, "Une Histoire de ma vie", about her childhood,of a kind of anxious child who's trying to do it right with both kind of sets of families, to both kind of family stories, trying to belong to both sets of codes and perhaps, finding that very difficult. A kind of quite intense sense of self invention going on even from early childhood.

And she had an illegitimate older half sibling on either side. Her father had had Hyppolite, and her mother had had Caroline. So she has an older half-sister, illegitimate, and older half brother, illegitimate.

[00:08:18] Isabelle Roughol: It's, I'm sorry to say, a bit of a cliché of, of France, but there is just so, so many mistresses. Even her very posh grandmother who keeps her to these very high society expectations of, of how a woman should behave is herself uh, a little bit on the edge, in terms of her own identity, and perhaps is all the more attached to defending that that, you know, gentry behavior.A girl raised in a convent, and we'll get to that, raised,educated in a convent like proper girls of her society, while also being a country tomboy who runs around, plays with horses and plays in the woods and, and has quite an idealic childhood. Let's talk about Nohant, the house, her [00:09:00] grandmother's house that she grows up in.

[00:09:02] Fiona Sampson: Yeah.

[00:09:02] Nohant and a custody battle between two women
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[00:09:04] Fiona Sampson: So Nohant isa beautiful, late 18th century house.

It's not huge. It's very much a manor house rather than a mansion. It's right on the village square, I mean right abutting it. It's sort of overlooked by the country neighbors, which is something you know, Aurore remarks on.

And she talks about how in her childhood she was speaking dialect and she is running around and getting dirty. And her mother is allowing this because it's, I think it's, to get back at her mother-in-law, to get back at Marie Aurore de Saxe, to resist the gentrification while at the same time aspiring to it, while at the same time having made this advantageous marriage, having managed to produce an heir, who as it were, luckily for Aurore, died. So Aurore had a younger brother who died in infancy, when she was just four. So Sophie Victoire, Parisian street girl, has arrived at Nohant as the wife of the heir to Nohant, having produced the next heir, and then very quickly, the little boy dies. The grandmother wants to take custody of Aurore and Sophie Victoire'snose is put out of joint.

And so I think as people do when they're defensive, she, she sort of, she pushes back by embracing sort of vulgarity in a way. And, clearly even in adulthood, the adult George Sand struggles with her loyalty to her mother, who she describes as musical, charming, irrational, can't concentrate, spontaneous, but very moody, and her grandmother, who is not moody, who encourages her to learn, encourages her in lots of skills, encourages her manners, but whose affection is a sort of, is conditional as a reward. And, it's clear that almost in adulthood, still in late adulthood, because the autobiography is not written until the 1850s, George Sand is still struggling with who, when she was a little girl, she should have been loyal to and who she should have identified with because the women who are both strong characters very much set it up as a, you know, you have to choose which way you'll go.

You have to choose which version of the family you're part of, which is tough for a child.

[00:11:14] Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm.

[00:11:15] Fiona Sampson: It's a kind of custody battle between two women in a way.

[00:11:18] Isabelle Roughol: And I think it's something that is, um, that really shines through in your book. You've got really four generations, 'cause you've got the grandmother, the mother, you've got George and then her own daughter later. And you just have these incredibly complex mother daughter relationships and incredibly complex people who want and don't want the same things all at once throughout their entire lives.

And I, um. Yeah. It's just, it's just so, still so preciously rare to see such complex female characters, in history and to be able to, to unearth all of that complexity of personality that is not that often recorded.

[00:11:54] George and boyhood
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[00:11:54] Fiona Sampson: Yeah. Thank you, Isabelle, 'cause I mean, every time I work on someone, I obviously sort of fall in love with 'em in a way. And I become more and more obsessed. And [00:12:00] you go down all these rabbit holes. And I think one of the, it's not a rabbit hole, I think is actually a huge space for exploration, is George, let's call her George, and boyhood.

You know, that she, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she recalls that when she was young, she wanted to be a boy, not a girl. She wanted those freedoms. You know, she learns to horseback ride and she rides bareback and not side saddle as young ladies were meant to, but in the English style as she calls it.

Her playmate is, at Nohant, is for a long time her older half brother, Hyppolite. So,there's a kind of boyish formation. And also when Aurore's father dies in a, he falls, you know, thrown by his horse and dies in a tragic accident, just when they've got to Nohant, so when Aurore is just four. At that point, her grandmother in her grief sometimes calls Aurore, my son. She says she very much resembles Maurice when he was a boy. And she, there was clearly a sort of palimpsest relationship going on there in a way that obviously there wasn't with Hyppolite, even though Hyppolite came first. And even though Hyppolite is also a boy. there's all of that.

And then in early adulthood when George is laden with responsibility, she talks about no longer being a garçon, no longer being free to be a boy, and to just go off to literary suppers or to sit around smoking and talking about books, she has to look after her children, she has to look after her household, she has to look after, eventually Chopin, and so on. So obviously, the figure of the boy is a figure of freedom and identification for her in a way.

[00:13:36] To be a girl in the Bridgerton years: "we raise them like saints, we hand them over like fillies"
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[00:13:36] Isabelle Roughol: And funny enough, if she reminds her grandmother, of her son, she looks like her father, later on, it's her own son who looks a lot like her and takes a lot after her, more so than her daughter. So again, you see these generational patterns.

But let's talk about what it means to be, as she's growing up, what it means to be a girl, what it means to be a young woman. We're in the, for people who want a pop culture reference, we're in the Bridgerton years, I'm just thinking about it 'cause it's on TV right now. It's not where you go for historical accuracy. But one thing that is really quite accurate actually is the position of young women and young girls and just how clueless they are made to be about the world.

So George gets an education in an English convent. So she ends up with a, with passable English. It's an English school in Paris. But the way girls are educated, they're educated to, to be good wives, essentially, right? They're not getting a, a very intellectual, classical education the way boys are.

And they're not educated either in the ways of the world, she has this wonderful sentence: "we raise them like saints, then hand them over like fillies." Talk about an indictment of, of what the early 19th century does to girls.

[00:14:46] Fiona Sampson: Yes, absolutely. And it takes her a long time to sort of learn that, because I mean, that, that, that wonderful sentence, I mean, terrible sentence, comes from a, a letter to Hyppolite when they're both adults, when Hyppolite's own daughter's [00:15:00] about to get married, sort of warning him, you know, try and give her some warning, try and give her some breathing room, and so on.

So that's the adult speaking, isn't it? But when she's in the convent, she, she's very quickly. First of all, she's a devil, she's a wild girl. But very quickly, she learns to fit in. Then she becomes immensely popular and lessons will come very easy to her. And quite soon she's writing plays and putting them on.

And she's allowed to do this, 'cause there's quite a community there. There isn't just pupils and teaching sisters, there's also the classical,in the classical sense, women who have been sent to the convent to live, who've got, who've retired to the convent. So there is an adult community too.

So it's a sort of mixed community and she puts on entertainment for them. She stages Molière. And she also has a crush on, she has a spiritual confessor for the first time, but she also has a crush on the assistant to the mother Superior, who is an a half English woman, Mother as she calls it – she's not mother actually because she's not the mother superior – Spearing. And, Sister Spearing inspires to such an extent that Aurore thinks she has a vocation, you know, she's popular, not lonely. Her life is rich and varied. And of course it's not the program at all.

The program is that she's supposed to acquire manners and a ladylike finish and then go home to Nohant. So after only two and a little bit years, when she's 15, her grandmother comes up to Paris and whips her off back to Nohant to be her companion,and then both restricts her life still further, but at the same time kinda mocks the pietism andthe little learning that Aurore acquired in the convent,

and in fact, is herself more educated than her granddaughter and challenges her in discussions and so on. And Aurore eventually, through sheer boredom, begins to educate herself, begins to read Rousseau, begins to read Leibnitz, begins to read Thomas à Kempis's Imitation of Christ, finds that kind of emphasis on self perfection even more isolating, depressing. So begins to read Chateaubriand, the genius of Christianity, and suddenly sees Christianity as a way forward. It's about art and religion and public and collective and everything she was doing at the convent.

And so, in a sense has her own very private auto didacticism, but it's very piecemeal. It's very happenstance and piecemeal. She only reads Chateaubriand because a local confessor suggests it and because Chateaubriandis immensely, popular and influential at just at that point. She's very failed by her education.

I think for contemporary readers, the result is she's very readable. She doesn't write the kind of French that's formal and throat clearing and ornate, and she doesn't write the French of a 19th century novel. She writes something that's very immediate. She doesn't have particularly vast vocabulary. It's extremely accessible and quite [00:18:00] informal and a very fast read, as indeed she was obviously a fast writer, so there are. There are benefits from her lack of education, but it's very much a girl's education.

[00:18:12] How women writers rose in service to a growing reading public
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[00:18:12] Isabelle Roughol: And that's something you see a lot, I think, in the 19th century. You see women writing for a growing female readership. Like there are a lot of female writers and a lot of female readers, and also men, but the common men, the ordinary men. They're a bit, they're excluded out of higher education and also therefore out of, um, maybe slightly more pretentious, or elite, or academic kind of writing.

[00:18:34] Fiona Sampson: Yes, absolutely. I mean, one thing is that it makes me think of, again, of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein and how readable Frankenstein is compared to Mary Shelley's own later novels when she sees herself as more of a literary figure. And actually compared to Percy Bisshe's little, you know, interventions of "change your description here", he always changes her prose into something stuffier. So there definitely is that.

I think that, one of the ways in which George Sand's timing was very lucky,when she's George Sand, is that she is becoming a writer at the time that literacy is increasing. There are more and more church schools, but there was also, you know, compulsory education is gradually coming in. So that the, that there's the rise of a new literate middle class, you know, the bankers and shopkeepers, and, well before the end of her life there is universal as it were literacy. And with that is a great rise in the number of kind of professional outlets, the number of periodicals she can write for, the number of editors. There's a whole expansion of a kind of working, as it were, commercial literary and writing world in Paris, as also in London. But obviously the timing is different because their states are so different. And I think that means that yeah, reading becomes a more, reading percolates down, reading for leisure percolates down many more layers of society.

So a common touch, as it were is suddenly a door opener to readers and reputation rather than the opposite.

[00:20:08] From unhappy provincial wife to Parisian auteur
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[00:20:08] Isabelle Roughol: And so that takes us, to her adult life and start of her professional career. Her adolescence, really her youth or her childhood ends with the death of her grandmother, who she takes care of. She gets married, almost instantly

And that's really the expected, you know, married at 18, she's a mother at 19. She really starts out like any young woman of her age. When does that take a turn? When does she start to become, the woman that, that we are gonna know? When does she start really writing as a profession?

[00:20:38] Fiona Sampson: She starts writing really quite late. There are eight years,of marriage, before she really tries her luck as a writer and during that time, for much of the time, she's just restless and gradually unpicking her marriage by infidelity and the marriage is failing in all sorts of ways.

So she's doing a lot of rather unsatisfactory provincial living. And [00:21:00] then in 1831, she has an affair with a law student called Jules Sandeau.He's a student in Paris, but he's back in Lachartre, her local town, for the summer, which is how they meet.

And conveniently at the end of that summer, she discovers that her husband, Casimir Dudevant, has framed his will, but he framed it in terms of such fury and contempt for her, that she understands it's not that he's just clumsy, but really he loves her and she's the problem. No, actually he detests her and that kind of gives her the emotional license to follow Sandeau to Paris.

And she, she sets down the terms of, she frames it all as being her problem husband's fault, which is another form of female self erasure, but we won't go there. and she sets up an arrangement where she'll spend three months, three months, three months in Paris, three months back in Nohant with her children, three months in Paris, three months back in Nohant with her children. And she goes to Paris and during the months before, she has been playing at writing, she's been trying to turn a travel journal into a book. She can't quite do it yet. She hasn't got the skills and so on, but she's very clever at discovering what she needs, which is a framework, and almost immediately when she gets to Paris, two things happen.

One, she and Jules have been playing at co-writing short stories, and they place a couple of stories in magazines. The other is that she herself goes to see the editor of Le Figaro, Henri de Latouche, who turns out also to be from Lachartre, and so she has an introduction from home, I mean, an extraordinary piece of luck. And they obviously get on, he obviously sees something in her. He immediately puts her on the staff, which I mean, you wouldn't do if you were the editor of the Figaro and you were gonna sully your reputation by just taking on some young woman from home. You wouldn't do that. You might try and offer to publish some of her fiction, but you wouldn't take her on. But he does, he takes her on, so she has a desk at the Figaro, and, also realizes that nevertheless, she's still very short of money and so he offers her and Sandeau the chance to do some ghost writing, to ghost write a novel called The Commissioner very quickly in four weeks, which had already been commissioned, but the author died. And they do it, and one suspects that Aurore, as she is still, does most of it, but they do it. And the publishers are pleased enough that they then pitch a novel that they themselves co-write called Rose et Blanche. And that too is published within, this is all in 1831. That too is published before the end of the year, and most of that has actually been written by Aurore.

And this is published under the pseudonym of J. Sand, so it's not yet, it's no longer Sandeau, to kind of equalize it up a little bit. Again, it's a suggestion of Henri de Latouche. So it all happens within a year, this commercial writing, and then in [00:24:00] April 1832, when she comes back to Paris after her next three months at home, she comes back not only with her 3-year-old daughter, bizarrely, because it's also into the middle of a cholera epidemic, but she comes with a manuscript of what will be her incredibly successful debut novel, which is Indiana, and which is the first novel she's written by herself. So it happens really quickly, but it does happen through contacts.

[00:24:24] The making of a nom de plume
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[00:24:24] Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. so Jules Sandeau, obviously hislegacy is to have eventually given her the name.As you say, when they co-write, it's J Sand and it over the time changes, she changes it to Georges Sand. Georges with an s uh, the French spelling. and I've always wondered: how does she come to the English spelling of George? Where does that come from?

[00:24:46] Fiona Sampson: Well, is that just that, just it, she lapses from George. So she's G, just G, on the title page of Indiana. And she is George, she's still being called Aurore by people in her own life and including Paris friends. But she gradually, in 1832, when she comes back to Paris that autumn after the next trip home to Nohant, she doesn't move back in with Sandeau, and she is Georges at this point.

But during the coming months, while she's living on her own in a new apartment, she gradually drops the s. She rehearses dropping it. And I wonder if it's partly because it's the English name and she went to the English school, whether it's partly because Sand is anyway an abbreviation of Sandeau, George is an abbreviation of Georges.

And obviously I wonder whether there is, I mean, it's not literal cross-dressing, in other words, sort of nominal cross-dressing, it's a male nom de plume. But there's give even within that.

And why she has a male nom de plume, I mean that's, you know, not mysterious at all, is it? This is the era this when, she will be succeeded by George Elliot. But I mean, it's the era of the Bronte sisters being, you know, the Bell Brothers and so on. It's not, um, uh. Mary Shelley is anonymous and Jane Austen is anonymous. She's "a lady", I mean, admitting her gender, but not, you know. Women publishing under their own name is, is still so problematic that I don't think that we can read anything into the fact she has a approximately male nom de plume. But nevertheless, she does, and she has an English one.

[00:26:34] What cross-dressing means to George
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[00:26:34] Isabelle Roughol: So first she co-writes with a man, which helps her get published, and she, adopts a male nom de plume, which as you say, incredibly common. It was just, being seen as a writing woman who's quite damaging to one's reputation, probably didn't sell books as well either, so again, very practical. And this is also the time, as she works as a reporter at Le Figaro in a very maleworld – some of the comments she makes made me laugh because I started my career at Le Figaro about 200 years [00:27:00] her, and I recognize so much of it. It's a very masculine environment, um, even, even in early 21st century it was.But so there she starts, dressing as a man, and it seems to be not really some grand statement about her own gender identity or of wanting to be a man, you know, we certainly shouldn't put modern ideas of trans identity or anything like that on top of that, it is practical. It is being a woman at that time is a bit of a cage and stops what you can do and who you can be. And she just wants to be a person without being limited by a gender, and therefore sometimes she takes on the attributes of men 'cause it's way more convenient to go around Paris in trousers. Right?

[00:27:45] Fiona Sampson: Absolutely. Absolutely. And I think that she's very much wearing it as a costume. I think she is saying, "I'm not gonna pretend, I'm not gonna hope that I pass as a man, although possibly on a rainy night with my hat well down". She is more saying, "This is the costume of Touch Me Not", oddly given that we think of her as someone who was promiscuous, as she was.

[00:28:08] Isabelle Roughol: It's safer. It's much

[00:28:09] Fiona Sampson: It's safer and it's also more authoritative. You know, she has this lovely quote about being at the Figaro and saying, if you can make yourself indispensable in an editorial office, it's the best thing because it's not, it has nothing to do with your personality, you know, ellipsis and your gender. It's a way of saying, "this is a writer's costume. I'm a writer."

[00:28:31] Isabelle Roughol: Hmm.

[00:28:31] Fiona Sampson: Okay. Yes, I admit it, I've got curls. Okay, I admit it I'm wearing a corset, but I'm a boy and I'm playing the role of a boy, a bit like a leading boy in a pantomime, an English pantomime. It's not sexual play because interestingly, in her private life, she wears frocks. In her private life when she's dating all these men, she's frocked up.

She's not wearing, she's not wearing men's clothes for the bedroom at all. She's wearing men's clothes precisely really for the outside world. And also of course, passing in the sense that it's hard, places where she can't, where women can't really go, like, um, the gallery at the opera and so on, in men's clothes, she can pass enough that, whereas if she were wearing a colored frock, obviously she'd stand out a mile.

[00:29:18] Isabelle Roughol: Mm.

[00:29:18] Fiona Sampson: Not that I think that people look at her like a Shakespearean heroin and you know, oh, which gender is she? I think it's that she, yeah, she's just saying, take me as seriously as you take yourself.

[00:29:28] Pushing the boundaries of a gendered language
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[00:29:28] Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. And it's, um, it's fascinating. I think that's something that's also very much sort of embedded in the French language, which is a gendered language, right? It's got, it's got the feminine and masculine, nouns are, are feminine or masculine. When people are trying to, you know, even give her compliments, you know, male writer, talking about her as this great man.

Or there's something about the French language that even if there exists a feminine version of a particular word like author, it is less than. And to use, you know, I mean, we, we [00:30:00] even do it in English, you know, some, some actresses go by actor because actor sounds more serious.

And even today in France, you know, people will debate whether the word "ministre", the word for minister, government minister, should be feminized or not. And and it's fascinating words become feminized when they become lesser status, essentially. It's just, it's a fascinating trait of language.

And so, again and again, even her friends, and her male friends in the arts call her by male names, male as a...

[00:30:31] Fiona Sampson: Exactly, and most famously Flaubert towards the end of her life, you know, in the last decade of her life, calls her "Dear Master."

[00:30:37] Isabelle Roughol: Mm-hmm. "Chère maître."

[00:30:38] Fiona Sampson: Not mistress, but dear with the feminine form.

Which is the word that, that you use? Yes, "maître" is the word that you use today still, to address a barrister. And we do not feminize it. Female barristers are called maître, not "maîtresse", mistress. So master, it's, um, it's fascinating, you know, and it's, it's a lot of the gender expectations that are embedded in French culture and therefore in French society, which are hard to convey in translation, but I think was an important point to make. And that's so interesting because I think that, it makes it even clearer that she is very early trying to rock that linguistic and conceptual boat, isn't she? Obviously, when Flaubert says "maître", he's talking aboutan artistic master. And I suspect there were no female barristers in those days, so all barristers were made.

So when she's dear female form, "chère", then something really is rocking in the language. And it's the same with, um, her lover Alfred de Musset, the poet. He addresses her, "oh my," no, let me get it right, "oh, my George" and my is

[00:31:45] Isabelle Roughol: Ma? Mon!. Mon, okay, so the masculine form.

[00:31:50] Fiona Sampson: And then he says, "my dear mistress."

[00:31:52] Isabelle Roughol: Mm. Mm-hmm.

So he says she's both "mon" and "ma" in the same of exclamation, the same greetings. Yeah, The way that she presents her gender identity, I think has more to do with the limitations of the world around her and the language that she has to use than anything to do with her own identity, which she seems quite secure in.

[00:32:12] The writer of the female condition and the tragedy of marriage
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[00:32:12] Isabelle Roughol: So you mentioned her first novel. And success comes quite quickly. And, you also mentioned she's incredibly productive. I mean, the pace at which she writes is insane, I think partly because she needs to earn, right? She has children, her husband is, or ex-husband is not very helpful. She, I think Jules Sandeau is the first, but she attaches herself again and again to younger men and takes on a caretaker role and ends up looking after their careers, their finances, their,there's a lot of people who are reliant on her.

[00:32:43] Fiona Sampson: Yeah. She is, she's a workhorse. By the time she's with Chopin, and for the years that she supports him, the nine years she supports him, for much of that time she's raising both children and she's also acting as tutor to those children. So during the day, she runs a household, looks after Chopin and [00:33:00] tutors her kids. And then at night she writes novels. Well, when does she sleep? She sleeps for sort of four hours and friends and peers talk her about her as being a sort of writing machine. The Goncourt brothers for example, talk about her as being like that. And yeah, sure enough, she's quite a relatively, by the standards of her day, she's quite a late starter and yet by the end of her life, there will be 70 novels. There'll be many successful stage plays. There'll be criticism, there'll be autobiography, there'll be travel writing. I mean, she's astonishingly prolific, Indiana is followed very quickly by Valentine, and then the next year by Lilia, and all three of them are about the condition of women under particularly arranged marriage and that arranged marriage is not just ho, ho, ho what a drag, but is actually an absolute tragedy for women. They have no autonomy, but also prevents them coming into selfhood of any kind. And they get progressively darker,

those three first novels do, so while Indiana is a terrific success because it's driven by emotion and the argument, but it's reasonably melodramatic. By the time she gets to Lilia, she's really arguing against the institution of marriage per se. And that makes her popular neither with traditionalists, nor with radicals like Saint-Simon who want to change other things but aren't particularly worried about the state of women.

[00:34:20] Isabelle Roughol: Yeah. Let's talk about her writing since, as we've pointed out, we need to talk about her writing and not just our relationships to put her back in the canon. What kind of literature does she write and how does that compare to what's going on in the time? I think we, we think of 19th Century, you've got the Romantics and then you've got the very political sort of, Hugo, Zola, criticism of, of society. Where does she fit?

[00:34:42] Fiona Sampson: Where she differs from Hugo and Zola and Balzac and his human comedy, is that it's not that all her protagonists are female, but they are centrally female, and that she tends to be up close on a paradigmatically difficult situation rather than kind of big canvas, crowd scenes. So she will look at how a marriage inevitably falls apart when effectively the husband owns the wife and the writing, which is, tends to be quite emotional and quite urgent, and fast. There's a strategy of celerity, as Helene Cixous will long time in the future say. There's a passionate argumentation from ideals about equality and the importance of women and their lives, but that's often misheard as, "oh, this is just a story about private lives." Or, "this is just a love story or a failed love story." But of course it's not. It's a critique of society in exactly the same way as the men are critiquing their society. And I think one of the tragedies of subsequent perception of Sand, or at least 21st century perception, is the sense, "oh, well, yeah, but those novels don't read to us as political now because we don't live like that now." Number one, there is arranged marriage in [00:36:00] many parts of the world, so yes we do. But also number two, but nobody says that about Les Misérables or whatever. Oh, we don't need to read that now because that was Paris in the 19th century. Society's different now."

It's the old sense of the male as a universal human condition, and the female as, not only diminished, but as an exception, a special case of minority interest. And so I think that, the kind of progressive politics of her writing is often forgotten, but it's a motor. And I think she had the courage to not just write from sentiment like "Wouldn't it be nice if these people fell in love?" but to write from ideals. So convictions which are held, but which she allows to be held within the emotions as well as within argumentation. And obviously for a storyteller, that's a significant gift.

I think the other thing, two things she does, which are very pioneering, is that she, she writes about the lives of the rural poor. And again, this is decades before Thomas Hardy will in English. And she writes about those lives as being full of dignity and meaning, but nevertheless, not sentimentally, pastoral and oh, you know, hes, oh well they're so wise and so on. No, she's showing the life is pretty awful. But she's also saying that the people themselves are not pretty awful. They're understandable, they're human, relatable. So she's according a real dignity to another group who have still not achieved equality after the revolution, you know, after the various iterations of empire and so on.

And the third thing she does is that she has this kind of ecological understanding. So when she writes about the natural world, she understands it as interconnected and that we affect it and affects us, but that it is independent of us. And that's ecology, and that's, that's not just countryside settings or rural settings, or nature writing, that's something much more than that. That's actually ecology.

[00:38:00] George Sand, international best-selling author
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[00:38:00] Fiona Sampson: So I think in all three ways, she's very significant. And then of course, she's just very significant because she is enlivening, she's part of this great, miraculous 19th century flowering of the realist novel, and she's doing it with her own particular diction.

And so in all those ways, she's, she's creating a certain fluency and immediacy. We were talking about this in a way earlier, weren't we? in the texture of what you get to read. And she's a huge role model as well because although she writes under pen name, everybody knows she's that woman over there, even though no longer know that she's actually Aurore Dudevant by marriage.

And, she's very important to the other women writers. But presumably, as you also say, to women readers, you know. So the Bronte sister for example, they definitely model themselves on, they read her with, uh, fascination and they model her. You know, Withering Heights is quite a George Sand kind of novel.

So her success [00:39:00] travels in her lifetime. She's read in translation.

She's more, she's more widely read in translation in this country than Hugo while they're both alive,

[00:39:08] Isabelle Roughol: Wow.

[00:39:09] Fiona Sampson: She knows everyone, you know, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Ruskin, in this country, but,Lizst as well as, Chopin, Delacroix, all the writers of her era. And they all speak to her about her behind her back, as well as to her face, as a literary figure of the utmost seriousness and importance. They don't dismiss her interestingly. There's a sense of she's definitely part of their contemporary pantheon and should remain there, and I think they would be astonished that she has vanished to the extent that she has.

[00:39:41] Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when, when she dies, Victor Hugo, he's one of those men who uses that great man image because just great woman I guess hasn't entered the vocabulary.and she has this lovely friendship with Flaubert, at the end of her life in epistolary.

[00:39:58] Fiona Sampson: She writes a huge number of letters and writes them quite literary, right? She writes letters the way that one might write books. Of course, it's a thing that is done in the 19th century. People are much better letter writers than, than we are. But it is still astonishing, isn't it? Because again, that's another part of her productivity. I mean, there are thousands of surviving letters. She just obviously was a graphomane, she never stopped. It's just extraordinary.

[00:40:24] The process of self-invention
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[00:40:24] Isabelle Roughol: One thing I think you see in her letters as well, and I think that's something that is a bit of a theme throughout your book is this idea of the creation of identity, right? You're telling a, she's telling a story about herself to the, the friend who's reading her to, to us, you know, reading her later on. She's kind of always inventing and reinventing her own identity and her own personality.

[00:40:47] Fiona Sampson: Yes, and I am fascinated by that. I'm fascinated with all these women, with these three women by how they invented themselves as writers. That's to say how they swam against the tide of social expectation right at the outset of their lives, and then continue to do so. I mean, how did they have, not only how did they acquire the accomplishment to do what they did, but how did they have the courage to do it?

But I'm also very interested in how people become in general, I'm quite a believer in subjects and process. I think people shape themselves and are shaped by life and not only in an early life psychoanalytic way. And I think that these women, figures like George Sand, who traveled such an enormous distance from where she started, the process of self invention is really apparent. It's apparent in, the life story and the achievement, but it's also, I think, apparent in again, that layering that palimpsest sense around her final or her later iterations of who she is. When she stops having to be in Paris to be a success, and she's able, even for [00:42:00] stage, what we call West End, to have, a lot of success on the Paris stage, she can stillwrite those plays and have them rehearsed in Nohant. And she doesn't need to be in Paris all time. So she goes back and settles mainly in Nohant, which she's owned all her life, of course, since she's inherited at 17. But she makes it a sort of literary center, a center of productivity. But she isn't a salonnière. She becomes the good woman of Nohant, she becomes very generous, does good works to poor people in the neighborhood and so on, and becomes very practical in running the home farm and having a well appointed kitchen and so on.

So she becomes this other iteration, this matron in a way, but at the same time, she's also the master and I think that's just extraordinarily interesting that these things coexist, that there isn't this kind of essentialist polarization. There is a simultaneity, but it's not chaotic. She has produced a mixture which works for her. She has found a way.

And she invents herself as well, as we all do, through the relationships that she embarks on, and, I think it's fascinating that we're coming to the end of our hour and we've barely talked about them, even though that's what she is, is so perhaps most known for today, at least in the pop culture.

[00:43:22] Isabelle Roughol: And I think that proves our point from the beginning, which is she's so much more than that. But I will just mention them and then people can read the book because otherwise that's a whole hour, another hour of our conversations. But, um, obviously the most famous one, as you mentioned, was Chopin, who is actually a fairly short relationship in the traditional sort of romantic and sexual understanding of the word, but then remains a presence in her life, and she in his really for quite a long time. And you have Alfred de Musset before, the young poet, the probably more famous of her, of the many young, younger men that, that she has known. And Marie Dorval, who is the only woman I think that she is known to have had a relationship with. So again, we have this image of this sort of bisexual, gender bending queer icon. There is a quite short maybe relationship, we're not even a hundred percent sure, with a woman in her youth.

[00:44:18] Fiona Sampson: We're not absolutely sure, but it, I think one has to argue quite hard to, to try and, dissolve that relationship. But there is absolutely no evidence of any other women. And definitely she has very much a sexual, romantic type, and it is the younger man. It's the garçon again.

But I still think she remains a queer icon because I think it's queer in a sense of, not really who you sleep with, but queer in what being a woman is. I think that, uh, that's, that's where possibly the richness of her as a figure for us now is, is most significant. That she in a sense says to us over and over, well, whatever the convention of the cage of convention you had to be in, [00:45:00] happened to be in right now,

No, think around it, reinvent it, see what you can do with it, see how you can play with it, see what you might change. And to me that's very rich, that sort of elective querying.

[00:45:13] Isabelle Roughol: Yeah, it does feel like if she had had another a hundred years, there would've been another 10 versions of her, you know, we would've known her by other names and other, other associations and other interests. Fiona, thank you so much. It's been really, really interesting conversation.

I had no idea when I started reading into George Sand, who I, again, barely knew, that there would be just so much there to learn and to be inspired by. So thank you so very much.

[00:45:38] Fiona Sampson: Ah, thank you so much, Isabelle, it was a joy talking.

[00:45:41] Outro
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[00:45:41] Isabelle Roughol: That was Fiona Sampson. The book, Becoming George, is available at the Broad History bookstore, which supports this programme. You'll find links in the show notes and at broadhistory.com.

There's also a slightly longer uncut version of our conversation over on the YouTube channel, so you can see our faces as well, if that's your thing. The handle is @BroadHistory.

You can become a member or make a one-time donation to make Broad History possible. This work, covering women's history with all the depth and nuance that it requires, backing good science with good storytelling, this requires constant research, reading and making. It's a lot of work, and it simply could not happen without supporting members. A big thank you to our first founding members, Michael, Ron, Alexandra, Hannah, and Caroline. You can join them at broadhistory.com. Sign up for the newsletter, read the articles, and become a member.

I am your host, Isabelle Roughol, and this was Broad History. I'll talk to you soon.

How much "Man the Hunter" endures and impacts current research is itself a matter of debate among anthropologists. They also disagree on how much women hunt in present-day hunter-gatherer societies and what that can tell us about our distant past. Don't look for consensus where the forward edges of research meet contemporary politics. If you want both sides, I found these two articles in The Conversation enlightening:

• Sarah Lacy and Cara Ocobock, who conducted the research on women's physiological advantage for the hunt, write that "the idea of 'Man the Hunter' runs deep within anthropology" and that they are often "accused of rewriting the past to fulfil a politically correct, woke agenda" despite bringing plenty of evidence as biological anthropologists.
• Vivek V. Venkataraman says "the theory died a well-deserved death decades ago" and is irrelevant. Of course, women were and are capable of hunting, but gender specialisation was and still is the norm, he argues.

Isabelle Roughol (00:00)
Hello and welcome. I'm Isabelle Roughol and this is Broad History, a brand new independent media about history with women in it this time. I'm so excited to be here behind the mic again. I'm just going to take a minute of your time and get on with the show. My goal here is to host a weekly history podcast that centers female characters and changes our perspective on the history we think we know. And I think if we do that, it might also illuminate our present.

making a show on my own with that amount of research, storytelling, of production, and then making it every single week is a mammoth task. So I'm starting smaller with a bunch of experiments over the next few weeks. What matters right now, and you'll know if you've ever built independent media, is finding out if there's an audience for this, pivoting until there is, and gathering enough momentum and evidence of momentum to secure funding and partners for the next step.

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Okay, episode one. We may not have a full show yet, but I recorded this great conversation and I didn't want to make you wait.

Isabelle Roughol (02:14)
You may remember this headline from the New York Times a few weeks ago that the internet had thoughts about. "Did women ruin the workplace?" I saw red. Not because of the blatant and quite cheap clickbait, but because the newspaper of record was propagating probably the biggest myth there is when it comes to women's history. That it once was a workplace without women, that they suddenly butted in where they never had been and didn't belong circa World War II. No, women have been engaged in paid labor in the economy

as long as there's been an economy, I promise you, and not anecdotally. So I called on the wonderful economic historian Victoria Bateman to help me bust that myth.

Isabelle Roughol (02:52)
Victoria, hello and thank you.

Victoria Bateman (02:54)
Hello, it's a pleasure to be with you!

Isabelle Roughol (02:57)
Thank you. It's great to have you too. And I should add that you're also the author of one of the most wonderful history books of 2025: Economica, A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power.

I want to start us way, back in the Stone Age, which is where you start, because you found that even that far back, we already have misconceptions about the role and the work that early human women took on.

Victoria Bateman (03:22)
Yes, that's so true. Our ideas of the Stone Age economy have cast a great shadow over how we think about gender inequality in the present day. The idea of man the hunter, the idea that men were the active participants in their societies, hunting and providing for women and for children,

whereas women were sheltering in their caves in theory, looking after their infants and cooking a casserole on the fire from the meat that came back from the hunt the previous day, that idea of man the hunter, of man as the provider, it's cast such a shadow. And I think, sometimes in the present

When we're out there fighting for gender equality, there are those that say that to fight for a world in which men and women are equal is to fight against history. That if history tells you that men and women have always taken on these different roles in their economies, men as the active participants, as the providers and women as these

passive creatures that need to be protected and provided for, then perhaps in the modern day to fight for equality is to fight centuries, millennia of evolution. there certainly are those, I think, that say that we shouldn't be aiming for gender equality, that what we should be aiming for is gender complementarity. You know, the idea that

Isabelle Roughol (05:06)
Mm-hmm.

Victoria Bateman (05:09)
men and women are kind of equal but different and that we just need to accept our differences and it's gaining more traction I think in some ways today.

So really what I wanted to do with Economica was to push economic history right back to the beginning of time,

right back to the Stone Age and to crack open that myth of man the hunter to show that from the very beginning of economic history, women were there at the heart of their communities, at the heart of the Stone Age economy, hunting alongside men, providing not just for themselves, but for their

Isabelle Roughol (05:34)
Mm-hmm.

Victoria Bateman (05:54)
families. So I look at the recent archaeological evidence on that and it's fascinating because actually until relatively recently there was a big assumption amongst archaeologists and that was that if you found a Stone Age skeleton and that skeleton was buried with hunting gear, hunting tool kit, then

that skeleton was male. The assumption was that men were the hunters and because we assumed men were the hunters, when hunters were found in archaeological digs, then that backed up the assumption because we just assumed they were men. But interestingly, the most recent archaeological research that has actually started to take the bones and take the teeth of Stone Age hunters and actually sex them

Isabelle Roughol (06:22)
Mmm.

Victoria Bateman (06:48)
What that research has shown is if you take say the Stone Age Americas, 40 % of big game hunters were women. So actually it was quite close to 50-50 in terms of who was providing for their communities. And that was purely on the basis of hunting alone. we think about the Stone Age, we've kind of been obsessed with hunting, but actually...

Isabelle Roughol (07:02)
That's... that's

Victoria Bateman (07:13)
the gathering, for example, was in many Stone Age societies just as important and actually in some perhaps even more important. And we know that women were doing a lot of that too.

Isabelle Roughol (07:25)
And that's such a leap, that's such an assumption to make, that weapon in grave equals man in grave. And that's something that we saw

much more recent grave that I found fascinating which was, the Birka warrior, which is a very famous Viking tomb of a an axe and a spear and a sword and bow and arrow. It was found in the 19th century and only I think in 2017 a DNA analysis after a bone that was indeed

Victoria Bateman (07:42)
Yeah.

Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol (07:59)
a female warrior. And the backlash against that notion was so powerful. The researchers who happened to be a mostly female team had to defend their work and were harassed on the internet. They were accused of mislabeling their samples because there had to be some other explanation rather than a woman might wield a weapon.

Victoria Bateman (08:01)
Yeah.

Yes.

That's right, the mental gymnastics that people have performed to try to explain away the idea that women were hunting and that women were using weapons. The mental gymnastics, lots of crazy hypotheses have been put forward, like perhaps there had also been a man in the grave alongside the woman and that the tools and the weapons were his.

And somehow his body has, you know, has been lost in time, whereas hers has survived. And we're now falsely attributing the hunting and the fighting to the woman, when instead it's, you know, it should be this missing man that we're, that we're honoring. Or the idea that perhaps, you know, the women that are buried with these weapons and these hunting toolkits, perhaps that they were honorary hunters or honorary

Isabelle Roughol (08:50)
You

Victoria Bateman (09:14)
fighters, perhaps they weren't really doing the hunting and perhaps they weren't really doing the fighting, they've just been buried with these perhaps in in reverence to their husbands or their fathers. So the mental gymnastics that are performed to avoid the obvious answer which is actually simply that women were hunting alongside men and that women were

also as you say fighting alongside men because we have become so steeped in this idea that men were the providers, that men were the active people in history and so it becomes so difficult to overturn that mythology that we have of the past.

Isabelle Roughol (09:58)
Nonetheless, though, we do see some specialization in the roles and quite early on the tasks that are performed by women and the tasks are performed by men with some outliers, of course, which you will always find in history. What causes that specialization

Victoria Bateman (10:02)
We do. We do. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So one thing we find happening in the course of probably the first big economic revolution in human history, which was the shift towards settled farming, the shift away from a hunter gatherer existence towards settled farming. One thing that we find is the rollout of the plow. The plow was the big technological revolution of the time. I mean, the plow was like AI today.

in terms of the impact on society and the impact on gender equality, because the thing about the plough is to a degree, it depended on muscle power. And that created an advantage for men

And so what tended to happen was that men increasingly specialised in being in the fields, ploughing the fields, whereas women took on the role of providing cloth.

men were providing food, women providing cloth.

spinning and weaving cloth for their families. And that cloth, I think, has been underrated in terms of its importance in the earliest economies because cloth was essentially the currency of exchange, the currency of trade.

It's all very well trading in food. I mean we can trade, you know meat for cheese for example. But the thing with trading in food is Certainly some food products can go off or if they're stored for example, they can be eaten by vermin So they're pretty perishable but the thing about cloth is it withstands the test of time and it's easy to judge

the quality of the cloth, by the feel of it, by the look of it, it's also lightweight. So to use as a trading medium, that all meant that cloth quite quickly became, in a sense, our first money, the first currency of...

global trade. And when we think about the Silk Road for example, named after the silk that women were producing and along the Silk Road all types of produce was priced in terms of bolts of silk.

So yes, there was this division of labour that started to arise within early societies, but what women were doing for their communities, what they were producing, I think has been sadly, and it's time to, I think, recognise the value that women were producing for their societies.

Isabelle Roughol (12:51)
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

And it's always a bit of egg in the right? do women do a particular kind of work because it is not valued very much, or is it not valued very much because it is women performing it?

Victoria Bateman (13:02)
because it is women's

work, that's right.

And certainly with something like cloth making, from the point of view of women's reproductive labors, women throughout history have always had this double burden in a sense, the reproductive labors, but then also what we can do with our hands. And cloth making was something that women could do alongside, for example,

looking after young children. So cloth making, it's not a dangerous activity. The types of tools that you're using aren't dangerous to children. It's something that you can pause if you need to. It tends to be quite repetitive. So if you lose concentration because your eyes wander to your children, that's not going to diminish the task that you're doing.

So for all kinds of reasons really whilst in theory men and women should be equally good at cloth making, I think because of this extra role that women had to take on in terms of the providers of the next generation, then cloth making was something that they could do alongside that relatively easily.

But I mean, it certainly is true to say that

just because as a woman you're producing something of value for your communities doesn't mean that you yourself get to keep the value of what you're producing. And certainly the fact that cloth was valuable in a number of societies in history led to women being enslaved in order to produce

that thing of value, but where the value went to the enslavers or to the elites rather than to the women themselves. So whether that's, for example, in Viking Europe, women were enslaved and put in sunken round huts, producing cloth that the Vikings could trade through Eastern Europe.

or whether that is lots of examples of women producing without themselves experiencing the rewards of their labour.

Isabelle Roughol (15:09)
And you mentioned reproductive labor, which is again something I think we don't count, that doesn't feel part of the economy, And what I found interesting as well is how

tied the fate of women is to the state's need for that reproductive labor and how the balance shifts between how much women are priced for their labor of their hands versus their reproductive labor.

Victoria Bateman (15:25)
Yes.

Yeah,

yeah, that's right. mean, I think Women have always been on a knife edge in a sense. because certainly going back to, some of the earliest periods of history, when the planet was very sparsely populated, when there were very few people, you know, wandering the planet compared with the present day,

An extra birth within the community meant a great deal. That was something to be prized. It provided an extra pair of hands for the future. It provided the next generation. Fertility was something that was revered. The mother goddess was the religious icon that societies praised. And on the one hand, that could give women immense power.

But on the other hand, it meant that women, because they were so valuable for their fertility, they were also liable for capture and control. Because you don't want to capture and control something that is of no value. Because why bother? You only want to capture and control something that is of worth, something that is valuable.

And so, you know, trading in young fertile women, the exchange of young fertile women between communities, elites that build up harems of women, providing not just sexual services for elite men, but also reproductive services, the next generation of...

of elites or the next generation of fighters perhaps for the community. you might think where people have been scarce and where women's fertility has therefore been highly valued, that that's a good thing for women, but that can also lead to capture and control. I mean, I do think that As population pressures

expand and retreat throughout history, that you can see that reflected in state policy and state attempts to control what women do with their bodies, control who they marry, for example, control who can marry within the community, which women are the ones reproducing the next generation and which ones aren't.

Isabelle Roughol (17:51)
And you argue, I think quite powerfully, and I'd love for you to make that case for us, that restrictions on women's autonomy or involvement in paid labor sort of is directly connected to the economic decline and the fall, the collapse of entire civilizations. show a really great variety.

of attitudes to women throughout the ancient world, you know, I'd much rather have lived in ancient Egypt than ancient Athens, for instance. And in terms of collapse, I think the fall of the Roman Empire is a really interesting case study that you

Victoria Bateman (18:30)
Yes. really the key finding of Economica is that whatever civilization you look at in history, The most successful civilizations have always been those where women were at the heart of the economy. Whether that's ancient Egypt, whether it's ancient Rome, whether it's the medieval Middle East, whether it's Song Dynasty China, whether it's the West today, the most successful civilizations in history

have always been those where women are at the heart of the economy. But similarly, their subsequent decline is preceded by a process of sidelining women, of marginalising women, of controlling how they work, where they work, of controlling the rewards of their labour. And I think Rome is a fascinating example because,

Ancient Rome had a much more successful and longer lasting economy than say ancient Athens. And I think actually what was key to that was that Roman women had relatively greater freedoms than women in Athens. They were able to walk freely amongst with uncovered hair, at a time when in

Athens women were expected to be secluded, were expected to cover their hair. In the Roman world, women were out there in public, they were running businesses, they were working alongside men. Roman women were trading their wine and their olive oil the Mediterranean. And I do think that that was...

key to the initial dynamism really within the Roman economy because it meant that the Roman economy could fire on all cylinders. wasn't losing the dynamism that comes from of the population that is women.

But what we started to see in particular as the Republic turned into the Empire, into a more

autocratic kind of structure, what we started to see within the Roman world was almost an attack actually on working women and a building rhetoric that saw working women a problem. So you have, for example, the Emperor Augustus, who was part of a moral panic, really fuelled a moral panic about

feeling of declining fertility rates in the Roman world, a feeling that immigration was to risk kind of the purity of Roman culture and tradition. And so, Emperor Augustus, what he wanted women to do was to breed for the good of Rome, to preserve the Roman way of life

and prevent cosmopolitanism from ruining Roman traditions and Roman culture. So yes, there was sadly this growing kind of backlash against working women, a belief that women had better things to do than start businesses and be earning money, that they should be in the home breeding for the good of Rome.

That's something that you see within many civilizations throughout the fact that women were there at the heart of the economy, but then subsequently you get this backlash.

Isabelle Roughol (21:48)
I certainly hear some echoes that sound familiar for We're going to make a giant leap in the going to talk about my favorite nerdy moment in economic history, which is the Great Plague, but it's going to be right after these ads.

Victoria Bateman (21:51)
Yes!

Yes.

Isabelle Roughol (22:05)
We'll be right back.

Isabelle Roughol (22:11)
Did you know that women pretty much invented mass market publishing? Locked out of higher education and therefore out of writing academic books that impressed the elites, women identified a niche in the general audience instead, a hunger for entertainment and education among ordinary men and women. So they wrote for them. It wasn't a rich woman's hobby, it was done to support themselves and their families. And it wasn't just Jane Austen. Between 1780 and 1830, ten of the twelve bestselling novelists in Britain were women.

And at that time across Protestant Europe, about one in five published authors was a woman, a number we wouldn't reach again or get past until the late 20th century.

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Isabelle Roughol (24:04)
And we're back with Victoria Bateman

Let's talk about my favorite, favorite bit of economic history, which is towards the end of the Middle Ages, and that's the Black Death. We circa 1345 in Caffa, which is a Genoese trading on the Black Sea in Crimea. What happens in Caffa at that time?

Victoria Bateman (24:26)
So this was a battle really, wasn't it, between East and West and perhaps one of the first times in history that we see biological warfare. The dead bodies of

plague victims thrown over the city walls, infecting the Italian merchants who then once they were able to escape, boarded their ships, traveled through, the usual ports. this was a time when the Italians were really dominant when it came to trade across Europe, traveled through their various European ports, taking the plague.

with them. As you The Black Black Death, one of the most devastating shocks in economic history. I mean It wiped out between a third and a half of the population of Europe. and really shook the foundations of society. because you know this was a time when the system of serfdom that had really grown since the fall of the Roman Empire

was subject to challenge. Because when you have this devastating effect on your population then workers, or serfs, people, we, you know, as people, become more valuable because there are fewer of us. But at the same time, land became much less valuable because

Now land was in abundance relative to the fewer people that existed that needed to be fed from that land. So workers, greater value and want to be respected for that and want to be rewarded for that. Whereas the landowners, the elites within society,

the effect of the Black Death on the value of their land was really quite devastating from their point of view. you've got these two parties within society, your landowners and your peasants, this big shift in power relations between them. And the way that played out really varied depending on where you were in Europe. In Eastern Europe, for example, what tended to happen was

Isabelle Roughol (26:15)
Mm-hmm.

Victoria Bateman (26:35)
the imposition of like a second that restricted, for example, the geographic mobility of peasants.

And if you can't move, then you can't run off, find a better job and build a better life for yourself. So that was one result. But what was happening over in Britain or in Western Europe is that Peasants were able to wrestle greater rights from the landowners and achieve higher wages.

I mean, it wasn't an easy process. What it culminated in in Britain was the Peasants' Revolt in the 1380s, when peasants got tired of being ignored, tired of being unrewarded, and so marched on London to demand greater rights and higher wages and lower taxes and so on. And actually women were there

on the front line of that. ultimately, what we find in Britain is a higher wage economy, peasants with more rights. And this wasn't just about, a

change in the landscape in class terms, between the landed elite and peasants, but this also had an impact in terms of gender equality as well. Because one of the things that you're seeing at this time is that In response to the fact that you have fewer peasants within your economy, fewer men, Then farms, businesses,

increasingly need to turn to women to perhaps do tasks that were previously done by men. And so you have lots of opportunities for women in this economy in which ordinary people are able to achieve greater rights and freedoms. This is a time when women have the opportunity to increasingly so go out to work, get a job,

build a life for themselves. And I think we see that in particular in two sectors of the economy. So one is in meat production and the other is in brewing. and ale. you imagine that, you know, these peasants, they now have more rights and they're earning more. And one of the things they do therefore is to buy more meat and to buy more beer.

they can afford.

Isabelle Roughol (28:51)
That's a good life.

Victoria Bateman (28:52)
those things.

is living your best life. perhaps making up for what you'd lived through in the years beforehand.

And one of the things that happens as people eat more meat is that really boosts the meat production sector. And so we get the emergence of the stereotypical dairymaid, of women whose job it is to look after the cattle. look after the cows that are both producing the milk, but also producing the beef. And so it's at this time that beef started to become the national dish

of the English. Beef pies, roasted beef and so on start to become the national dish. And what do you need to wash down your beef pies or your roast beef? It's good ale, know, beer. And women were also there, you know, at the heart of what was happening in the brewing system. So You see the transition away from home brewing towards more commercial brewing.

You see the birth of the British pub and tavern. And it's fascinating when you look at the records, say, of the Brewers Guild in London in the early 1400s, so not long after the Black Death, And by that point, London Brewers, there were enough of them to get together to form this guild.

And around 40 % of them were women. So, this transformation that happens not just to class relations, but actually to gender relations, I think, is so important at the time.

Isabelle Roughol (30:16)
a huge

And that's where you have a bit of a roll of the dice of history as well, because this continued in Britain and in Northwestern Europe, whereas perhaps Southern Europe went back to more...

traditional gender relations. And so the powerhouses that Spain and Portugal and Italy not continue on to be the great powerhouses of later centuries. And you draw a direct connection between these transformation after and why the industrial revolution happened in the unlikeliest of places, you know, this tiny cold island a

Victoria Bateman (30:38)
right.

Isabelle Roughol (31:02)
smallish population and not that many resources you know if you compare to to a lot of the previous empires of the world.

Victoria Bateman (31:08)
that's right. I mean, I think To understand why it was that Britain had the Industrial Revolution, why it was that with that, Europe and the West moved to the top of the economic league tables, you know, after millennia of being behind and why it was that alongside you see this shift from Southern Europe, Southern and Eastern parts of the Mediterranean up to the northwest of Europe,

first to Holland and then to Britain, to understand that I think we really have to look at the lives of ordinary women. so often when we think about how did Britain do it, we think about men. we think about famous male scientists, engineers, industrialists, bankers but actually I argue in Economica that It was the freedoms of ordinary women and those freedoms that you know go back to that story

of the Black Death, of ordinary women being able to go out onto farms, get jobs, milking cows or brewing and working at their local ale houses, that the ability for young women to leave their homes, earn their own money, that that sowed the seeds of economic change that over the centuries led to the rise of Britain. And I think that worked through a number of four or five different

channels.

So the first one was that When young women were out there earning their own money in Britain, they were able to avoid child marriage. because they could stand up, they could run off, get a job and decide for themselves whether, when and who to marry. And actually, if you look at the 1500s, 1600s, 1700s, the average age that a British woman was getting married at was 25 or 26,

It wasn't in her teens. at a time when, for example, in Southern Europe, in China, in the Middle East, in India, women typically did get married in their teens. In Britain, and I should say also in the Netherlands, so in Northwestern Europe more generally, women were getting married not until their mid-20s. And that meant that they weren't producing children until their mid-20s, until they were married.

and the result was much less population pressure on the economy. And That meant that the economy was better able to support higher standard of living, Whereas what was happening, say, in southern Europe at that time was population was really expanding to a point that it was pulling down those high wages that existed after the Black Death. And so you ended up with this

kind of divergence in wages between Northwestern Europe and Southern Europe. And those high wages, I think, were really important because that provided businesses with an incentive to develop and use machines. Because if instead you can just exploit cheap labor, why do you want to build machines? And actually when we think about the Industrial Revolution, it's very much about machines.

Isabelle Roughol (34:16)
Mm-hmm.

Victoria Bateman (34:17)
It's

the capital in capitalism, you just the rollout of machines, clunking, clunking, know, machines in the cotton industry and the steel foundries and so on. And why do businesses increasingly want to adopt these machines? It's to save on labour costs. And why are labour costs? To get more productivity.

Isabelle Roughol (34:34)
Yes, to get more productivity out of that labor.

Victoria Bateman (34:38)
And I think the other thing is that because women were marrying in their mid-twenties rather than in their teens and having smaller families as a result, Families could better afford to educate or apprentice, train their children because they had fewer of them. And they could also better afford to save because with fewer mouths to feed, you've got more disposable income. So you think actually that

the ability for young women to go out into the economy, get a job, and take charge of the marriage decision, which in turn feeds through to later marriage, smaller families, and with it, a higher wage economy that provides the incentive for technological innovation, the incentive for businesses to use machines. Also, families that are better able to afford to save, and that's therefore providing the funds to invest in machines.

and Families that are better able to afford to educate their children so that you've got the skill base that can help develop those machines and that can use those machines in the production process. So I think actually in terms of sowing the seeds of the industrial revolution and the rise of the West, it is those freedoms that ordinary women had going all the way back to the

black death, you know, that's so critical. Possibly going back even further than the black death, but I think To understand what was so special about Western Europe, what was so special about the West that allowed it to overtake parts of the world that had been ahead, not just for centuries, but for millennia, it's women.

It's the freedoms of ordinary women. I think when you look at the lives of men, actually they were relatively similar. Whether you were looking at China, India, the Middle East or Europe, relatively similar. But the lives of women were markedly, markedly different. And I think that is the piece of the jigsaw puzzle that we've been missing when we've tried to explain the Industrial Revolution and tried to explain the rise of Europe. And I think...

Isabelle Roughol (36:49)
Hmm.

Victoria Bateman (36:49)
Appreciating that, appreciating how important the freedoms, the economic freedoms of ordinary women is for building a successful economy. think it's really key

where we are today.

Isabelle Roughol (37:04)
It is and it's fascinating and I think it's a very important point that you make and we've heard everything about the industrial revolution from Protestant work ethic to the weather, but that has been talked about less, which is really surprising when you think about how much women's empowerment and women's autonomy is at the heart of development policies today when you're talking about developing

Victoria Bateman (37:13)
Mm. Yes.

Isabelle Roughol (37:29)
poorer economies. I was reporting in Cambodia 15 years ago and it was all about young women in garment factories that were transforming the economy and transforming their own destiny, earning more than young men. And yeah, that's something that was also true our own history.

Victoria Bateman (37:32)
Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol (37:49)
Is this the point at which work becomes something that happens in the workplace? Because we've, I think, devalued

Victoria Bateman (37:49)
Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol (37:57)
women's work a lot in history because it happened in the home. Even paid labor happened in a home, piece work Is this the Industrial Revolution that changes that?

Victoria Bateman (38:01)
Yes.

Yes,

To a large extent, yes. historically, Before the Industrial Revolution, the home was the workplace and the workplace was the home. And I think similarly For men and for women. you would, you know, you would be sleeping, living, eating, whilst also, you know, weaving your cloth or making your pots.

Isabelle Roughol (38:14)
For men and women, for both, right?

Victoria Bateman (38:28)
or hooving horses or... your workshop and your home were on the same patch of land. And What happened with the Industrial Revolution, with the arrival of mills and factories, is this greater division between the workplace and the home. And The workplace becomes seen as

the economy and the home instead becomes seen as a place of nurture. And What you see in the course of the 19th century is so as the industrial revolution wears on and as you approach towards the latter part of the 19th century is much as you'd seen actually in the Roman world a kind of backlash against working women

a push really for women to to remain within within the domestic sphere. and for men to be the people out there in the workplace. And so you see not only this division between home and workplace, but This division is gendered: So The workplace becomes seen as masculine and the home as feminine.

various things push in this direction in the 19th century. I mean, in terms of working class jobs, Unions, for example, that push for family wages for men, unions that put pressure on employers literally to not employ women so as to free up more jobs for men. by

By locking women out of the labour market of course, Men feel that they can push up their pay packets by locking out half of the competition, so hat makers, printers, forming these unions or these guilds that are pushing women out of the workplace and into the home and under the pretext that this is good for women, that you know let men

protect and provide for women, and that the workplace might be an exploitative place for women. So It's better off if they're in the home. So that's what was happening in terms of working class jobs, but then also in terms of professional jobs, more middle class jobs. And the 19th century and, beginning with the industrial revolution was really a time when the professions were really starting to Things like law,

and accountancy, civil service, administrative sectors, were really pushing forward because businesses were becoming more complex, the economy was becoming more complex, so we needed more accountants, more lawyers and other things. And what started to happen was that those professions started to form their own societies and those societies pushed to get royal charters that allowed them to

establish entry requirements or you know, training requirements. So to become a professional accountant or professional lawyer or a professional medic, you needed to be a part of one of these societies and meet their requirements, meet their standards. And sadly, what happened as these societies formed was that they locked women out. Again, it was a great way if you were you know, a middle class man to

to wipe out half the competition you might face in the job market. So Women were being increasingly pushed out of the most lucrative jobs, and left with the crumbs really. Expected to assume the role of a housewife, but of course the reality was that many women couldn't afford to be housewives.

you know, Reality bites. But at the same time, they were locked out of better paid jobs. so women were left in a situation where Yes, they had a family to look after, they had children to bring up, but they also had to work to make money. So whether it was taking in...

Making gloves at their kitchen table, in cloth make small garments, sew stockings or sew gloves at their kitchen table. Whether it was going on the high street with a basket full of hot buns to sell, the bankers outside the stock market in the centre of the city of London. Women were having to really kind of root around and find a means to support their subsistence.

Of course, if you were an unmarried woman, then really your key options included domestic service a notoriously poorly paid, poor working conditions, part of the economy that was very much ignored, neglected by the unionisation, by trade unions that were forming at the time.

So sadly you do see this backlash really against women's work that happened. And So the idea of the housewife is a Victorian invention. an invention of Victorian Britain, an invention of that time. Before Victorian times, women were there alongside men in the workplace. And it was hat makers,

printers, stationers, In my book I talk about this collection of business cards that's held at the British Museum and the British Museum has tens of them, hundreds of them, these are from the 18th century business cards you can see that women were doing all kinds of things. This is the business card, it's from 1735, it's of a female shoemaker who had a shop.

you know, at the heart of the city of London in 1735. You can see her name, Anna Skew, shoemaker on her business card. But there were business cards of female fan makers, hat makers, printers, jewellers, tea dealers... Women had been there, doing all kinds of things in the economy. But what happened in the course of the Victorian period is that

they were sidelined, they were marginalised, they were pushed into the home and expected to take on the role of the

Isabelle Roughol (44:38)
So I should say for audio listeners that you showed us this beautiful original, I'm thrilled to see the business card of a woman shoemaker with a beautiful illustration of a boot. It's reproduced in the book so people can see it as well or check the YouTube channel. I think you make a really, really important point which is that this idea that...

seems a lot of people have now of women's workforce participation as something that's novel, that is something that our generation or maybe our mom's generation introduced from the 60s and forward not novel, it's perhaps a reintroduction of something.

Victoria Bateman (45:05)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol (45:18)
that has existed and that's why I think the headline did women ruin the workplace just rankled me so much is that it establishes as some kind of eternal and universal truth something that is really

Victoria Bateman (45:19)
It is.

He

Isabelle Roughol (45:30)
a blip in human history. and something that I think as you show was not natural, it's something that was engineered, the exclusion of women from work by unions, by people seeking their own self-interest, which ended up locking women out. So, yeah, next time you see a trad wife, you know, not that trad take the long view of history.

Victoria Bateman (45:45)
Yeah.

Isabelle Roughol (45:56)
We're going to conclude on something I know I should never ask of a historian, but I'm going to risk it anyway, which is to predict the future. Because with everything you talk to us I would this doesn't feel like a time of expansion women's rights and women's autonomy. What does this say about our economic future?

backlash that we're seeing now against women's rights, that nativist impulse also that's being pushed.

Victoria Bateman (46:21)
well, I think History can be our greatest ammunition to stand up to this. If you honestly believe, if you have a view of the past in which successful civilizations were built on men alone, then perhaps you have little to lose from sidelining one half of the population. If you honestly believe that ancient Egypt, that ancient Rome, that the Industrial Revolution was a result

of male-only efforts, then perhaps what do you have to lose? Whereas if instead we can show that throughout history the most successful civilizations have depended on female as well as male labor, then you have a lot to lose from sidelining women. You risk repeating what has been the biggest mistake of human

history. know, what we've talked about in the Roman Empire, how the Roman Empire went from rise to decline and how that followed the fact that women were there in the economy but then this backlash against them. And that has been repeated throughout all successful civilizations in history. Rise and decline is the repeated story of economic history.

If we in terms of our civilization, if we don't want to end up in the waste paper basket of history, then we need to stand up to this backlash. We need to recognize what history tells us. We need to stay on course. We need to continue to regain the ground that was lost in the Victorian period.

continue in the direction of an economy in which men and women are contributing equally with the same economic freedoms and I think ultimately The recipe of economic success, the thing that all economists are desperately looking for, it's actually, it's not complicated. it's actually relatively simple.

Economic success comes from people being free to make their own decisions about how they work, being free to keep the rewards of their work, being free to save and invest those rewards and decide how they spend their rewards. But women need those freedoms as well as men. We can't be

sidelined. We can't be pushed to the margin. We can't be dictated to in terms of how we work, such as pushed into the home to perform reproductive labour if we might prefer to be out there starting a business, driving the economy forward in that particular way. building a successful economy, it isn't rocket science when you think about it. It is about ordinary people

having the freedom to make the most of their lives, to make the most of their talents. and time after time civilizations have shown the power of that but they have also shown what happens when you move in a very different direction. So let's not repeat the greatest mistake of human history.

Isabelle Roughol (49:52)
was Victoria Bateman. Thank you so much for such a fascinating conversation. The book is called Economica: a Global History of Women, Wealth and Power. There will be a link in the show notes. You can buy it straight from the Broad History bookstore. That's another way to support this program.

Remember to sign up for the newsletter at broadhistory.com and consider becoming a founding member. But for now, it's goodbye from me, Isabelle Roughol. This was Broad History. We'll be back soon.