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.