WOMAN’S HOUR From Joyce Grenfell to Sharon Osbourne: Celebrating Sixty Years of Women’s Lives
introduced by Jenni Murray
John Murray, £20; 352pp
WOMAN’S HOUR WAS born on October 6, 1946; I followed a week later. The Controller of BBC Radio warned the programme’s editor that the contents should not be too taxing, since “producers are asked to bear in mind the very simple nature of the Woman’s Hour audience”.
Like the Women’s Institute, Woman’s Hour may seem fluffy and inconsequential to non-believers, but in reality both are seriously subversive. Put women together and they will tackle controversial subjects with a ferocity to make masculine hearts quail.
The first producer and presenter were both men. Listeners objected, and Jean Metcalfe took over in 1947. Woman’s Hour got into its stride with talks on the change of life, miscarriage and sexually transmitted diseases, although the word “vagina” was frowned upon.
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The head of the BBC Home Service wrote to the head of spoken word after a 1948 item on the menopause: “I do believe that the inclusion of such a talk represents a lowering of broadcasting standards. It is acutely embarrassing to hear about Hot Flushes, Diseases of the Ovary and the Possibility of Womb Removal transmitted on 376 kilowatts at two o’clock in the afternoon.” The capital letters speak volumes.
This book, consisting mostly of broadcast transcripts, is a remarkable history of how women feel about themselves and their surroundings. In June 1947 a newly-wed describes the miseries of sharing a house with domineering mothers or avaricious land- ladies. A young mother starts part-time work and is thrilled to be able to afford her first lipstick in five years or two pairs of stockings at once: “The sheer luxury of it all!” An “Ordinary Housewife” offers recipes using reconstituted egg and tips for dealing with bread rationing. This should be compulsory reading in today’s schools where obesity waddles down every corridor.
How things change. When Nancy Astor became our first woman MP no one would talk to her. Years later Churchill explained, somewhat shamefaced, that they had hoped to freeze her out, as her arrival made him feel “as if a woman had entered my bathroom when I’d nothing to protect myself with except a sponge”. She replied: “Had it never occurred to you that your appalling appearance might have been protection enough?” Barbara de Vitre, the first woman Assistant Inspector of Constabulary, sets out the qualities necessary in a police officer: “Cool heads, kind hearts, and a great deal of common sense.” Still true, but is that what they recruit for now? Woman’s Hour was always a brilliant forum for discussing women’s health. Ministers such as myself knew that the best way to persuade women to take up cancer screening was on Woman’s Hour. The Pill and its safety have been tracked since the 1960s.
They get it wrong occasionally — a talk by a male doctor in 1958 spoke of “homosexuality, and how it can be made, prevented and cured”.
Prejudices are tackled head on: Lesley Elliot, a 35-year-olddying from cancer, describes how collectors for her charity Breakthrough Breast Cancer were chastised for using the word “breast”. “They didn’t mind the word cancer.”
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Over the decades items on divorce, singledom, rape, child abuse and abortion plus the daily serial have alternated with Marguerite Patten and Nigella Lawson, Margaret Mead and Mary Quant, Kathleen Ferrier and Ms Dynamite, Yoko Ono and Glenn Close, Oprah Winfrey and Clare Rayner, Benazir Bhutto and Jean Rook (a talk on naked ambition that might have sounded funny at the time but in black-and-white is eye-poppingly horrible).
Winnie Mandela angrily defends the “matches and necklaces” of township violence. Margaret Thatcher never thought about going into politics as a girl because her family could not have afforded it — what a difference Denis made.
Governments seldom give women their due. Tony Blair appointed the first full-time Minister for Women in 1997, a post discontinued after one year. The WI booed him and it is obvious that he doesn’t listen to Woman’s Hour.
Like many of its audience the programme at 60 is a doughty matron still bristling with opinionated intelligence, with a fair bit of history and great deal of life ahead of her. And her own teeth.
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www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst