This is the BBC.

Welcome to Late Night Women's Hour.

Around the table with me are anthropologist Kit Davis. Welcome.

Thank you.

Blogger and author Chidera Egeroo, aka The Slumflower.

Hello.

And journalist and deputy editor of the new statesman, Helen Lewis. Hello.

Hello.

They're here to talk about the political stuff, the personal stuff, the stuff you need to know.

No topic is off the table.

Okay, so let's have this conversation.

Starting off tonight, I know that a couple of you wanted to talk about Aretha Franklin.

Kit, you were very keen that we needed to discuss Aretha.

Why, if that isn't too obvious a question.

Well, it's like, how can we not discuss Aretha?

I think she was immortal before she died, but she died last week.

And that unleashed an enormous amount of retrospection about her work and about her life.

But I wanted us to be able to talk about her, to put her in the context of

the changes that happened in women's lives across the span of her life. So that she, at one end,

kind of started out in an era where a kind of devotion from a woman to a man or between men

and women was a very powerful kind of trope in terms of mature adulthood,

including passionate sex and the ways in which that kind of binds the imagination and makes people attached,

...