The Other Virgin's Baby | How WW1 Changed Sex | 4

Behind the Russell scandal lay a nation's spectacular ignorance about women's bodies and pleasure. One of Britain's foremost historians of gender and sexuality, Professor Lucy Bland joins Alice Levine and Matt Forde to uncover the bizarre sexual myths of the interwar period, from forgotten scientific knowledge to dangerous fertility advice. Plus: how the war changed women's sexuality, why this terrified society, and Professor Bland's favourite historical euphemism for sex. Do you have a suggestion for a scandal you would like us to cover? Or perhaps you have a question you would like to ask our hosts? Email us at [email protected] See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alice Levine?

  Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of British Scandal ad-free right now. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app.

• 0:16Matt Forde?

  From Wondery, I'm Matt Ford.

• 0:18Alice Levine?

  And I'm Alice Levine.

• 0:19Matt Forde?

  And this is British Scandal.

• 0:31Matt Forde?

  Alice, what a series. Three episodes, one marriage, one baby and sort of half a consummation.

• 0:39Alice Levine?

  Yes, that is not an equation you often see. I can see why Britain was obsessed, I mean, we were obsessed. A court case about whether a woman could get pregnant without having sex. And everyone had an opinion, doctors, judges, of course, our sweet, sweet media.

• 0:55Matt Forde?

  It was like Love Island meets Judge John Deed.

• 0:59Alice Levine?

  I'll take your word for that mashup. What it definitely was, was all of the things that make for an incredibly compelling story. Classism, sexual shame, misogyny, things that we deal with in spades here at British Scandal.

• 1:15Matt Forde?

  Which is why I thought we need someone to explain the wider context and ideally one of Britain's leading historians of gender and sexuality. Fortunately, I know just the woman, Professor Lucy Bland from Anglia Ruskin University. She's written about everything from the modern woman of the 1920s to post-war femininity and the way scandal and shame have shaped who we Brits are.

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• 2:47Matt Forde?

  Lucy, welcome to British Scandal. You've spent a lot of your career studying the history of sexuality. What drew you to the slightly spicier part of the past?

• 2:57Speaker 03

  I mean, what happened was I started to look at the turn of the century, 19th into 20th century feminism. And so much had been written about the suffrage movement, but very little then, and we're talking about in the late 80s, 90s, this is for my PhD, very little had been written about the debates that were going on around sexuality. And I thought, this is really interesting. And there were all sorts of debates and organizations. And then I had a book that came out in 1995 about that. And then someone approached me and said, oh, would you like to do a book about sexology? And so we ended up doing two books with someone called Laura Doane.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  One is a series of essays about the impact of sexology on culture. And the other is a kind of handbook with lots of extracts. And then I was moving forward gradually into the interwar period. And I was just fascinated by how women were really changed by the war. And one way they were changed was they got much more confident about themselves, including their sexual selves.

• 4:04Matt Forde?

  Why did the war have that effect on women's sexuality?

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Well, the war had an effect on women in every kind of way because they had to take on so-called men's jobs, they had to fend for themselves, they had to deal with grief and they'd deal with, you know, often single motherhood and lack of money, and they gained confidences and skills. And it seems that a lot of women who worked in munitions, and that was the main area that women were working, particularly working-class women, they would exchange information about such things as their bodies and sexuality. So that seems to be one area, the munitions, where women started to get much more knowledgeable, because there was so much sexual ignorance, I mean, amongst men as well. And there still was in the interwar period, a huge amount of sexual ignorance, and you can see that with

• 4:51Speaker 03

  Crispel Russell, who's a middle-class woman. But I think it did change women, both in terms of getting more comfortments about themselves and the right to demand what they want, as well as gaining more knowledge, including a bit more knowledge about birth control, which, of course, still was pretty unavailable.

• 5:09Alice Levine?

  It feels like there's a trap that we can all fall into, that we think historically everybody was a prude. But what have you actually found in your research?

• 5:19Speaker 03

  What's interesting is, in the period I looked at initially, which is late 19th century, up until the First World War, there were women who were campaigning against violence against women. And that book is called Banishing the Beast, but the beast was seen as male sexuality rather. So it was seen as kind of dangerous and needy, controlling and undesirable. So there were women who definitely wanted to control men sexually and weren't terribly pro-sex. But on the other hand, there were these other women who were quite the opposite and wanted to explore sexuality. And there was this journal called The Free Woman that ran from 1910 to 13, I think. And there would be debates in there about the value of celibacy.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  One woman saying, you know, it is absolutely right and good for women to be celibate, another saying nonsense, it's bad for you and it's fine to be, you know. So there were a lot of women who weren't what we might call prudish. But there is such a myth about the Victorian period, actually. And in fact- There was obsession with sex. I mean, the pornography industry, I'm not saying this is a particularly good thing, but, you know, it was absolutely rampant. And I think many women, because of the sexual ignorance, probably didn't have very nice, happy sexual lives. It was wam bam, thank you man, for them. And many of them didn't discover that actually it can be enjoyable. So I wouldn't say they were inherently prudes. It was often because of the ignorance, often of the partners as well as the women.

• 6:43Matt Forde?

  What's the most surprising or outrageous thing you've discovered about the sexuality of old?

• 6:48Speaker 03

  Oh, my goodness. I think one thing I discovered I was very surprised about was that there had been knowledges in the past that have then been forgotten. So there used to be, earlier on in the 19th century, knowledge about the clitoris, and that could give women pleasure. And then that got completely lost and sidelined. And the myth was, and there were doctors writing this, that women were inherently asexual. So the fact that knowledge was, you know, then only really rediscovered, and pleasure from the clitoris, in the 70s and in feminism, when there were women writing about this. And I think, you know, extraordinary.

• 7:31Speaker 03

  So there had been years of complete ignorance about it. And then another thing I found absolutely extraordinary, actually, was about ignorance about when women were fertile. For a long time, until at least the 1940s, it was thought that women were like other animals, and they were most likely to get pregnant around the times of their periods. And this is what the church, the Catholic Church was preaching, the safe period, which of course was completely unsafe. And rather than all those Catholic families who had big families thinking, well, you know, this information must be wrong, they thought, oh, human error, we made a mistake. You know, it was extraordinary. So right up till, you

• 8:11Speaker 03

  know, less than 100 years ago, this was a common idea. So that kind of ignorance about women's bodies and ovulation, I mean, I was quite stunned by that.

• 8:22Alice Levine?

  A lot of people listening will also be stunned. So that's a really helpful lesson for them, British scandal listeners. There you go. I wondered if you had a theory about why we find sex scandals through history so gripping?

• 8:34Speaker 03

  Well, I think everyone is intrigued by sort of so-called naughty things that other people are doing, particularly people in high places. I'm not saying this is good, but there is a kind of wireistic attraction to seeing people misbehave. You take pleasure in the discomfort of others, and if you can see these scandals, particularly people who have a big downfall, I think people take pleasure in that, in probably a rather unpleasant way.

• 8:59Alice Levine?

  Do you think it's also because we still don't talk about sex enough? And so these are glimpses into other people's sex lives and to things that we actually, although we think of ourselves as sex-positive and enlightened, we still find incredibly taboo?

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think there is still a big taboo about sexuality. And funnily enough, you know, one way it can be talked about is through talking about scandals or talking about television programmes. I mean, young people don't watch television programmes now, or films, or whatever, but certainly social media stuff. But you often are thinking about yourselves and comparing yourselves to that. So you're right, yes, it is completely taboo still.

• 9:40Matt Forde?

  Sorry to be the immature bloke in this conversation, but I think on the whole, we love a euphemism for sex, and on this show, "tonking" has become a word that we use for intercourse. Are there any historical euphemisms for sexual intercourse that are your favourite?

• 9:57Speaker 03

  Well, actually, this is a term in the 18th century, which was just short of intercourse, which was called bungling. And bungling was rolling around in the hay or wherever with the opposite sex and doing everything but, but possibly, but it was called bungling, which I thought was quite a nice word.

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  Hey, what's up, guys? It's Haley Bailey. Okay, I need to tell you about something. I just got YouTube Premium. It's got tons of awesome features like offline downloads, so I can download my favorite videos before I travel and watch them whenever I don't have Wi-Fi. Because we all know airplane Wi-Fi is the worst. I get ad-free, I get background play, and there's like a ton more in there. You should try it. If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. So try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies. Terms apply. Cancel anytime. That's a mouthful.

• 11:56Alice Levine?

  We are in the business of scandals here at British Scandal. And one sex or lack of scandal that caught the country's attention was, of course, the Russell v. Russell case. Had anything like this ever happened before in Britain?

• 12:11Speaker 03

  Not that I know of. And it's fascinating, isn't it? And I think many people, including myself, actually, did not realize that, you know, you can have an unbroken hymen and yet get pregnant. Because it is a sort of membrane that can, you know, can absorb things. So fascinating.

• 12:32Alice Levine?

  This case is such an interesting crossover point for placism, homophobia, perhaps, misogyny, sort of sex shame around kink. I suppose the aristocracy being in the press around their sexual behavior must have been quite rare for that to be public.

• 12:52Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm not sure how rare, because in divorce cases, there was quite a lot would come out. But I think what was interesting, the class element, is that she was solid, middle-class, and worked, and had this very successful dress shop she ran with her mother, and it always worked. And he was out of work, he didn't work. I think people thought he was completely lazy, and lived off his privilege and his allowance and whatever, and messed around with cross-dressing. So I don't think there was a huge amount of sympathy for him. I mean, I think there is, at the time, a fascination with the aristocracy, and also a kind of desire for them to fall from grace.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  And the fact that he cross-dressed was seen as pretty peculiar. And the fact that she was so amazingly outspoken and confident, the modern woman personified, despite not having a sexual persona, which is interesting, because the modern woman's meant to have this sexual persona. I think that's part of the attraction. It's really about her word against his, and actually a discussion about what constitutes proper sex. But what's also very interesting is when you look at the reportage in the press, as opposed to the trial transcripts, there's such a contrast, they're so censored. Despite George V being horrified by what is said, a lot of words are not repeated. But a lot of it is very suggestive, and often what's suggestive is even more kind of outrageous.

• 14:19Matt Forde?

  The press obviously loved covering this case at the time. How did media coverage of women's sexuality back then, how does that compare to today's tabloids?

• 14:30Speaker 03

  I mean, until relatively recently, you had The Sun, page three, so you had topless women. I mean, you certainly didn't have any of that. What you had in the interwar period, you did have a lot of visual images of sports women, and a celebration of that, it wasn't sexualised, but a kind of celebration of these, the modern woman, on the one hand, but on the other hand, in the same day of that newspaper, there would be an article written about the dangers of the modern woman.

• 15:01Speaker 03

  She'd be celebrated and she would be vilified for actually undermining family, undermining the stability of the nation, et cetera. It was always this notion, they were the product of the war. So it's not just me saying this. This was a constant refrain, they are the product of the war. And so that's seen as, you know, both great that they are doing these athletic things, but also there's many who are very uncomfortable with it.

• 15:27Matt Forde?

  And is the celebration of women in that context purely to appeal to female readers? Or does it represent any sort of shift on behalf of male proprietors or journalists?

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Well, that's a, that's a very interesting point because I think some of these, what are called the pictorial press, like the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail, are aimed at a female readership and it is mainly women who do read it. But presumably men were getting pleasure looking at these women's, not completely naked bodies, but you know, they're kind of scantily clad, which was very unusual. You think about it in a pre-war, you didn't see women like that at all. So maybe there was a bit of that. So that's the visual thing. In terms of writing, I've just said it was that there was a lot of disapproval of them. And so there wasn't celebration of women's sexuality in a written form.

• 16:15Alice Levine?

  Now there's a lot of tabloid sexual shaming, body shaming, shaming for being supposedly sexual in appearance and behaviour. Was that too explicit to be happening then? To be calling out women for their sexuality explicitly?

• 16:33Speaker 03

  I don't think there was absolutely explicit calling out, but there was also, there was obsession about body shape. And there would be adverts then for, as carried on, for various ways of getting slim. I mean, extraordinary machines with a belt that you had to move around and things like that, and diet and et cetera. So there was always a obsession about the perfect body. And the body ideal in that period with the Flapper was a kind of, interestingly, a very asexual body in some ways because they were kind of boyish, you know, the young woman. And the name Flapper was a woman who hadn't got the votes up until women under 30. Women of thirty and over, most of them got the vote in nineteen eighteen.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  And it was another ten years before women got the vote on the same terms as men at twenty one. So the flapper was seen as this androgynous kind of figure with short hair, as of course she had a bob, and a dress that was kind of, you know, flattened the front, fairly short, I mean, below the knee, but much shorter than you'd had before the war, dress. But there would be these reports on nightclubs and women in nightclubs, and they were seen as very dubious. And drugs and drink and nightclubs, and so there would be stuff about women. I've also written about that, actually, some trials about women who were dealing with cocaine. Cocaine was taken a lot in nightclubs and easy to get hold of. So that's where it came in, which isn't about sexuality per se, but it's about being on the edge,

• 18:01Speaker 03

  being sort of dangerous and undesirable.

• 18:05Alice Levine?

  That feels really contemporary because the idea of, you know, Daily Mail articles talking about women flaunting their long legs or even articles sort of suggesting that women have had multiple partners or that they're out late at nightclub, you know, falling out of nightclubs. That actually feels like a very contemporary accusation.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, and what's also went on, which is work I've done more recently, is in interwar period in ports around the country, interracial relations, so white local women having relations with seamen who are from Africa, the Caribbean, China, North Africa, various. Men of colour, they were attacked, they were vilified as being prostitutes or kin to prostitutes. So there was attack on those as working class women. The assumption being that these women would only have relationships with men in colour if they were prostitutes. But some of them were, you know, long term and successful relationships. So there was a, that's another element that was going on, including in London, because that was a port.

• 19:10Matt Forde?

  And thinking about Christabel specifically, how much do you think she represents how women's lives changed after World War One?

• 19:17Speaker 03

  Well, I think she does to some extent. The thing is, as I said, you know, the women gained a lot of confidence and skills in the war and they came out of the war wanting to be able to carry on working in the sort of work they'd been doing, but they weren't allowed too often. So, you know, if they'd been working munitions, they were turned out of that or various other skilled work. And there was this whole drive to get women back into the home and to reproduce because the birth rate was falling. So it was often difficult for women to get work. And before the war, the biggest area of women's work was domestic service. And after the war, if they went along to labour exchanges, that was what they were offered. And women didn't want to go back to domestic service because it

• 20:02Speaker 03

  was very oppressive. There's a whole hierarchy, you know, and you're not in your own home. But some of them had to. So I think for a lot of women, it was very hard. So she was privileged in that although she's, I mean, she was middle class, she managed to get some money, people invested in her. I think a lot of women couldn't do that. There was new jobs opening in clerical work and in teaching and light industry in the South East. So there were jobs for women, but I think there are a lot of women who were very frustrated, indeed after both world wars, that they couldn't actually carry on with this kind of skilled work.

• 20:38Alice Levine?

  John and Christabel had a very particular interpretation of marriage, a very modern interpretation of marriage perhaps. How has the role of the wife changed in the past century?

• 20:51Speaker 03

  Well, I think the role of the wife has changed hugely in the past century or so. I mean, in lots of ways. So if you think of legislatively, divorce law has changed a lot. So you have the Divorce Act, Matrimonial Causes Act, they always call it, of 1857, which meant that a man could divorce a woman simply on grounds of adultery, but she, this whole double standard, had to prove additionally desertion or cruelty or bestiality, et cetera. Yep. And that carried on to 1957. Twenty three when it was equalised. So for either it could be adultery, which was

• 21:33Speaker 03

  great, that actually didn't come into twenty five. And then slowly it's got better and you have irretrievable breakdowns. So that has improved. But up until the nineteen seventies, a married woman couldn't take out a loan from the bank or make a big purchase of her anything without her husband's written permission. Can you imagine? So the notion of coverture, which is under the cover control of, a French term, really carried on. So I I think that marriage was a quite a repressive institution, really right up until seventies or eighties. I mean, women got married because of sort of economic security. I mean, OK,

• 22:14Speaker 03

  maybe for love too, but often economic security, also to legitimise their children because illegitimacy was a big taboo for children, again, up into the seventies. I mean, now, if you talk to young people about illegitimacy, they barely know what you're talking about. But it was a taboo to be a single mother. And of course, still legally and financially, marriage is encouraged. I mean, at least it's no longer heterosexual, which is good. But it does mean that anything other than marriage is seen as kind of, almost as deviant. If you want to be a single woman, it's or a single man indeed, there's always a suspect kind of notion attached to that. So the single man, oh, he, you know, the bachelor, well,

• 22:59Speaker 03

  of course, he's a closet gay. But in terms of how it's changed, I think women do have much more independence. Interestingly, marriage is still very popular, isn't it? You know, and obviously financially, it's better to be married in terms of how you work economically. And there is this notion that you marry for love, but often it was very much in an earlier period, it was a a transaction that was out of necessities, particularly for working class women. A good husband was one who would give you most of his wages at the end of the week and not make too many sexual demands on you. That was the definition of a good husband a hundred years ago amongst working class. I mean, they're often quite separate lives until relatively recently, or maybe still.

• 23:42Matt Forde?

  Why do you think parts of the system, even in twenty twenty five, incentivised marriage?

• 23:48Speaker 03

  I think there is this whole notion that you need stability and that somehow having marriage, it's a stable context for children, for people to work in harmony. I mean, there is that idea that if people are single, they can go off the rails and, you know, et cetera. I mean, we can contest that, obviously, but I think there's still a very dominant notion. I mean, obviously, there is religiously a dominant notion, but, I mean, even non-religious people, I think, have that idea. I remember Cameron, David Cameron, talking about the centrality of marriage. And you think, really, you know?

• 24:27Matt Forde?

  Is there any data that supports it?

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Well, I'm not sure there is, because there's so much divorce. Divorce used to be uncommon, not because they were living necessarily very happily, but it was to do with how hard divorce was. And it was expensive, you know, it costs money. Even with the changes of the law, it cost money until relatively recently. And so you couldn't afford a divorce. You might separate, but then you lost certain rights and et cetera.

• 24:53Alice Levine?

  I'd love to have the data in front of me, but I'm pretty sure that there are studies that show that marriage is beneficial to men and that men describe their wellbeing as being higher than those that have been married, that are married. And I'm sure there's something about the benefit to life expectancy, I mean, these things.

• 25:12Speaker 03

  There certainly is. But, I mean, I know that if the woman dies before the man, a married man, he doesn't last very long. He's very dependent. I mean, hopefully now he can cook and whatever. But, you know, there's that sort of dependence. Whereas the widowed woman often can carve out a whole life to herself. She's got friends. I mean, I don't know how true this is, but it does seem that women network with friends, women friends, on a much greater scale. Than men do, you might dispute that, Matt, but you know, that's the impression. But yeah, certainly figures show about survival rates. I mean, women live longer than men anyway, but I think psychologically, you're right, women are less affected. I mean, of course, they're affected by the death of a partner, but less affected possibly

• 25:57Speaker 03

  than men. So Christabel, I mean, she lived, carried on living unmarried and did amazing things. At her old age, went on the sort of hippie trail and, you know, did fantastic things. She lived in a sort of drafty castle in Ireland. So, you know, she's an example, but she was a rather exceptional woman.

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• 28:29Alice Levine?

  You have written about scandals in terms of how they reflect on the people watching the scandals unfold. What does it say about Britain and its appetite for moral outrage that we still gobble these things up?

• 28:45Speaker 03

  It's sort of displacing your own sense of inadequacy onto others and you can feel better about yourself. I mean, it really is, it is quite disturbing when you think about it, but I think most of us do actually get some level of pleasure about reading about, you know, what happens to these people, especially people who who were high up and possibly arrogant, like Andrew, who's no longer Prince. You know, his downfall, I think there's very few people who feel sorry for him. Because he was so arrogant that you think, well, serves him right. And you can sort of rather enjoy that, but that doesn't reflect very well on us, does it?

• 29:26Alice Levine?

  I wondered if you thought that there was anything in our national identity or our kind of national psyche that drew us to these scandals and this sort of need or want to gossip.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  So gossip has been a big thing, hasn't it, for forever? And the pleasure of gossip.

• 29:44Alice Levine?

  And the social glue of gossip, apparently?

• 29:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I think it does draw people together. You know, people are often drawn together through a common adversary. So if you've got a common enemy, you can then unite. You might have huge differences, but if you both hate them over there, you can have an alliance around your common dislike of somebody or common scoffing at someone.

• 30:08Alice Levine?

  In terms of sex scandals, I mean, A cliche is that Brits are repressed, uptight. This stereotype about sort of comical descriptions of sex and sort of end of the peer, almost de-sexualising sex. Is that anything to do with our obsession with these things?

• 30:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's, that's right. And I was saying about the Victorian period, in fact, everyone was obsessed with sex, although they couldn't speak it. You know, they would still want to look at it and they wanted to euphemistically speak about it in some kind of way. So, yes, I think there is a British reticence. And in class terms, a stiff upper lip thing, but in generally, I think there is a kind of embarrassment. I mean, whether that's still the case with the younger generation, I don't know, but it certainly has been a whole embarrassment about thinking about sex. And this idea of thinking about your parents having sex, you know, oh, you can't, you can't imagine that. So, yes, it's, again, this displacement thing, if other people are doing it, you can actually

• 31:08Speaker 03

  think about it and talk about it via what's going on in this scandalous events elsewhere.

• 31:17Matt Forde?

  If you had to pick a moment or case that marked a true turning point for women's sexual freedom in Britain, what would it be?

• 31:24Speaker 03

  Well, I think the trial of the Well of Loneliness in, in 1928. So Radcliffe Hall wrote The Well of Loneliness, which was then tried for indecency. And it was really the moment that suddenly the public world knew about lesbianism. I mean, they sort of forgot about it again, but it became a kind of bible for a lot of lesbians of the period and subsequently. Because although it was banned in this country, it was then imported from the States in huge numbers. So I think that was an important turning point. I also think the women's liberation movement of the seventies is absolutely crucial, a

• 32:05Speaker 03

  turning point for all women to actually feel more confident about themselves sexually.

• 32:12Alice Levine?

  Is there a through line from those early 20th century morality trials to modern debates about consent?

• 32:18Speaker 03

  Yes, I think the issue of consent has never gone away, that's right. I think what's happened now is that...

• 32:29Speaker 03

  It is being looked at more squarely and the whole issue about how young men have been groomed into certain ways of behaving. But what's depressing, I think social media has encouraged men in a certain misogyny, which has always been around, but it's it's being validated by people like Andrew Tate and others, that in a very scary way. And I think, you know, social media has really changed the nature of the game. So I think consent, as I said, it's still around, there's issues, but it's good that we are still thinking about it. But, you know, it's depressing that in rape trials, which is all about his word against hers, the conviction rate has gone down. And it's

• 33:11Speaker 03

  still a really problematic area. So in some ways, things aren't getting better at all.

• 33:17Alice Levine?

  In Christabel's story, obviously consent is a huge part of that picture. Christabel stands up in court and she says that what happened on the night that Jeffrey was conceived was consensual. Obviously, we have a very different definition of consent now versus then. How would you define what happened that night?

• 33:38Speaker 03

  I mean, non-consensual, she didn't really want him fumbling around, but it seemed a kind of incompetent fumbling around, where not very much happened, but enough happened for, you know, a sperm to get through that hymen and swim up, you only need one, etc. She was totally uninterested in sex, so she says, and I'm sort of inclined to believe her. And I suppose she sort of laid down in bed with him just because she felt obliged, but really didn't want it. So I wouldn't say there was full consent. It's interesting that he didn't absolutely push it, because I think he was probably a bit scared of her. She's much more powerful figure than him, wasn't she? He sounds a bit of a wuss, really. But anyway, I don't think she fully consented to any of it. Yeah. And he clearly thought...

• 34:22Speaker 03

  Nothing could have come of it. And she clearly thought that as well, until she went to the clairvoyant. But I mean, it's interesting, that never, it's never called rape, but non-consensual, yes.

• 34:34Alice Levine?

  Well, that's the kind of murky area, isn't it? Because it feels like if she's somebody who didn't want a sexual interaction with him.

• 34:43Speaker 03

  That is rape, non-consent. I mean, that's what rape is.

• 34:45Alice Levine?

  Yes. But, but definitely, I'm sure, wouldn't have been considered that at the time.

• 34:50Speaker 03

  Not at all, no, that's right. But I think people were so amazed by how anyone with, with a in-place hymen could get pregnant. I mean, that amazed everybody, including women, I think, most women.

• 35:02Alice Levine?

  How do you see Christabel's sexual identity?

• 35:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I don't really think of her as having a strong sexual identity. She doesn't seem to have been interested in sex with men or women, as far as we know. She said she just got married to stop everyone pestering her about marriage. But she obviously thought she could just carry on with her life as she'd led it before. But she channeled all her energy into designing these dresses, her dress shop, and all her hunting. You know, she did various pursuits, very energetic. So I think she possibly was asexual in a way that, you know, quite a few people are. And that's, that's fine. I mean, that's again, something that is seen as quite deviant, actually, both then and now.

• 35:49Speaker 03

  That, you know, you have to have a sexual side, you must do. But I don't think she necessarily did, and that's, what's wrong with that, really? It seems extraordinary now, that wonderful exchange in court about not knowing about men's bodies. Well, she completely was denying that she knew anything about erections. And, you know, it was just thought the whole thing was revolting, which is fascinating.

• 36:12Matt Forde?

  Why do you think some scandals stick in the public memory and others fade? Is it the details of the scandals, or is it what they tell us about society at a particular moment?

• 36:20Speaker 03

  I think, yeah, I think the details and what it tells us. But sometimes, something like Jack the Ripper, because he was never identified convincingly.

• 36:29Speaker 03

  That depressingly, you know, has stayed on since eighteen eighty eight. And you have these Jack the Ripper walks. And it's great that now you do have the five women he murdered. And he probably murdered more. At least they are being named and looked at now. They were really so marginal, the whole thing, almost celebration of him. So something that's still a kind of whodunit, that still fascinates. Because those kind of whodunnits are a big fascination, aren't they? In murder mysteries, it's something that people love. Because they can then put themselves in the plot and try and work it out as well. The Profumo affair in nineteen sixty three led to the end of the of the Conservative rule and brought in Labour and Wilson in sixty four.

• 37:12Speaker 03

  And that was a crucial turning point. And we know about that scandal in a way that some of the other scandals of MPs subsequently, people can't really remember. Because it was a crucial turning point in the nature of government. And it had implications around the Cold War because Christine Keeler, you know, supposedly slept with a Russian spy as well as Profumo.

• 37:35Matt Forde?

  What more needs to be done for women to gain true sexual equality? And what are the biggest hurdles to it?

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Men.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  Well, I think men and women have to be able to, from an early age, you know, have good sex education, which is not just about body parts, but is about consent, relationships, about feelings. Because I think, I don't know, certainly my sex education was very minimal at school. It was just about rabbits breeding. It was sort of useless. So, I mean, certainly it's got to start from a young age and consent has got to be there from the start. And I think there are those kind of embarrassments that men and women probably still can't talk to each other about what they like and what they desire. And that's very difficult. And I think a lot of women still don't feel. They have the right to make demands or say no.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  You know, I think that became really difficult, as I said, the seventies was an important turning point. Nevertheless, you'd had the pill, contraceptive pill, introduced in the sixties. But the problem with the pill, although it was great, the first time you could have heterosexual sex without the fear of pregnancy, on the other hand, it made it harder for women to refuse to have sex with men. It said, well, you're on the pill, what's the problem? You know, because before it could be, oh, I might get pregnant, and even with a condom, I might get pregnant. And it made it harder for women to refuse. So that wasn't very liberating. It was a real double edged sword. I think there's got to be more conversations, more positive representations, more talking about it openly. But I do think there is

• 39:10Speaker 03

  still a kind of squeamishness and embarrassment, which is, it may be a very British cultural thing, which is hard for us to overcome. And I think certainly more debate, both in the public sphere, but also starting quite young in school.

• 39:28Alice Levine?

  After all of your years studying sexuality and women and scandals, what shocks you still?

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Well, I'm still shocked by things like what's happening in the north about these gangs grooming young girls and young women. I mean, that is absolutely horrendous, that still is possible. That these young women clearly don't feel they have any rights, they are kind of, or have a background where they're not loved and appreciated, that they fall for these men who then abuse them. I find that deeply depressing and shocking, yeah.

• 40:10Matt Forde?

  And does that tell us that in the hierarchy of sensitivities, women always come last?

• 40:17Speaker 03

  Well, I think they tend to, but I mean, I think, you know, there has been and is still a history of gay bashing of gay men, and that's pretty terrible, and now trans men and women, I mean, they are treated, they are abused very badly. So it isn't simply women. So I think women, they are the ones who've, through history, have come at the bottom. But then anyone who, men or women, who are seen as different, that is a problem. That kind of homophobia or transphobia, it's all about a fear of difference, isn't it? Or the racism, it's about difference. And it's a sort of channeling of that hatred, and that's what's so terrible, what the far right does, or the right generally, channels

• 41:02Speaker 03

  that hatred. You can certainly see that Trump, you know, the whole time, he's about drawing on people's hatred to affect anyone who falls outside incredibly narrow notion of what is acceptable and ideal.

• 41:15Alice Levine?

  Which feels like it brings us, you know, full circle back to Christabel, who was a real threat to the Amptons, you know, she was transgressive, feels like she was, in a way, the perfect person to change the law, to get this period transferred, you know, it feels like somebody else couldn't have done that because of her, what feels like kind of anachronistic spirit in a way. She feels like she was from another time to me.

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think she was quite exceptional in some ways because she had so much confidence in a way that I think a lot of women in that period didn't have. And, I mean, you could say it's class confidence, but she wasn't upper-middle class, she was sort of solid middle class, yet she had, in her personality, this ability to cut through all the rubbish. And she said, I'm, you know, I'm hopelessly truthful. And you could see that everything she said was, she absolutely meant it. I mean, she might exaggerate, she used a lot of sort of over-the-top words, everything was topping or whatever, but she was amazing role model. I mean, I hope she was a role model for women, I don't know. But, you know,

• 42:20Speaker 03

  it'd be nice to know if she, if women of that period looked to her as a wonderful role model, because, I mean, I would have had been alive at that time.

• 42:32Matt Forde?

  Thank you so much to Lucy Bland for joining us. Alice, what have you got for us next time?

• 42:37Alice Levine?

  Okay, I've got a bit of a riddle for you. What do Carla, Jo, Jo, Michael, Alexandra, Morella, Oscar, Lauren, Hannah, Victoria and Lawrence have in common?

• 42:47Matt Forde?

  They are your secret children that you've been hiding from us all.

• 42:50Alice Levine?

  Not quite. They are the extended version of Lou Bega's Mambo Number Five that you never get to...

• 42:55Matt Forde?

  Who you named your children after.

• 42:57Alice Levine?

  Exactly. So in one way, you were right. They are, in fact, listeners that sent in requests for one of the most famous British scandals in the modern era. And our listeners are getting the scandal they deserve. Next week, Matt, we are taking a trip to the post office.

• 43:13Matt Forde?

  Okay, as long as we go at a time when all the old age pensioners aren't there, so that we can just get in and out, get our business done quick, and I don't want to queue up at the counter for hours.

• 43:22Alice Levine?

  But you also don't want to use the touchscreen, because it's a nightmare.

• 43:24Matt Forde?

  Oh, other people's finger gloop all over it. From Wondery and Samistat Audio, this is the fourth and final episode in our series, The Other Virgin Baby. British Scandal is hosted by me, Matt Ford.

• 43:36Alice Levine?

  And me, Alice Levine.

• 43:38Matt Forde?

  For Samistat, our producer is Chica Ayers. Our assistant producer is Louise Mason. Our senior producers are Jo Sykes and Dashar Lissitseyman. Our engineer is Jai Williams. Executive producers for Wondery are Theodora Leludis, Estelle Doyle and Marshall Levine.

• 44:02Speaker 05

  In the summer of 1881, US Army Lieutenant Adolphus Greeley and 24 other men embarked on an ambitious scientific mission to the northernmost reaches of the Arctic. But despite several triumphs of discovery, the men would soon face tragedy. Hi, I'm Lindsey Graham, the host of the podcast American History Tellers. We take you to the events, times and people that shaped America and Americans, our values, our struggles and our dreams. In our latest series, after Adolphus Greeley and his men arrive at their destination more than 1,000 miles above the Arctic Circle, they get to work collecting scientific data and exploring the frigid landscape. But when resupply ships fail to reach them two summers in a row, they're forced to set out on a desperate search for rescue, and not all of them.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  We'll make it home. Follow American History Tellers wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American History Tellers: Greeley, Arctic Expedition, early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. There are books that change how you see the world, and there are books that change how you see yourself. In a new podcast series, A Great Book with Barack Obama, President Obama sits down with a series of surprising and sharp guests to explore six books that have shaped his life and perspective on the world. From Song of Solomon and the Fire Next Time, to All the Pretty Horses and Gilead,

• 45:30Speaker 02

  the president is joined by guests like Tom Hanks and Ta-Nehisi Coates to reflect on how these timeless stories shaped his thinking on everything from fatherhood to leadership, and discover together what they tell us about the world we live in and the world we want to create. Audible subscribers can listen to all episodes of A Great Book with Barack Obama ad-free right now, plus access each audiobook discussed in the series. Download the Audible app today.