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Woman's Hour

Margaret Atwood, Harriet Harman MP, Joanna Scanlan, Sportswomen's urinary incontinence

Woman's Hour

BBC

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness, Personal Journals

4.22.9K Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2022

⏱️ 57 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Margaret Atwood's latest collection of essays, Burning Questions, gathers together her essays and other occasional non-fiction pieces from 2004 to 2021. She is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry and critical essays. Her novels include Cat's Eye, The Robber Bride, Alias Grace, and The Blind Assassin which won the Booker prize in 2000. Her 1985 classic, The Handmaid's Tale, was followed in 2019 by a sequel, The Testaments, which was also a Booker Prize winner (with Bernadine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other). Margaret joins Emma to talk about culture wars, free speech, feminism, grief and being in your 80’s. The Labour MP Harriet Harman has called for a full investigation into how a housing association failed to realise that a female tenant had apparently been left dead in her south London flat for more than two years. Harriet joins Emma to talk about this happening in her constituency, and also how she has been coping since the sudden death of her husband Jack Dromey last month. "There was urine flying through the air" - a new report out today in the Telegraph lays bare what it calls the ‘incontinence crisis’ blighting elite women's sport. Female athletes are overwhelmingly at risk of pelvic-floor dysfunction, leading to urinary incontinence which has, according to this report, become normalised in certain sports. Anna Kessel, Women’s Sport Editor at The Telegraph, joins Emma. The actress and writer Joanna Scanlan is known for her many roles in TV shows such as Getting On, No Offence and The Thick of It. She’s just been nominated for a BAFTA leading actress award for the film After Love. Set in Dover, she plays a white English woman called Mary Hussain who converted to Islam at marriage, but following the unexpected death of her husband many years later uncovers a secret about him across the channel in Calais. Image: Margaret Atwood Credit: Luis Mora

Transcript

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0:00.0

BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

0:05.4

Hello, I'm Emma Barnett and welcome to Woman's Hour from BBC Radio 4.

0:10.4

Good morning and welcome to the programme.

0:12.6

Today a literary giant stops by Margaret Adwood and in our conversation I had the pleasure

0:17.5

of recording a few days ago we talk about how we talk, how we ask people how they are

0:23.8

at the beginning of emails in a sort of Jane Austenway or in real life without perhaps

0:28.5

even taking the time to read it or care for the answer.

0:32.2

Poles have shown women often caveat more and are more polite in writing when they're

0:37.2

communicating with others.

0:39.3

What would it be like then to write and speak more plainly without such caveats, without

0:44.9

saying, oh I don't suppose I could, what do you think or but and yet and because it may

0:50.7

be?

0:51.7

All those sorts of things that you could be familiar with, perhaps you're not like

0:54.6

that at all, I recognise there's always a generalisation when you go for this sort

0:57.7

of idea but perhaps it does speak to you there you go, I'm caviarting it already, perhaps

1:02.4

perhaps, perhaps saying what you think instead of what you think you ought to, it might

1:06.5

be like if you did it just for a day like that film, do you remember Liyah or Jim Carrey

1:09.7

where you just spend a period of time saying exactly what you thought without any caveats,

1:15.5

have you ever done that?

1:16.8

Radical Candor is also what some people call it, I'm quite a big fan of that, quite a

1:21.3

big fan, there you go, I'm a big fan of that.

1:23.7

We also Margaret Outwood and I get on to what it is to be a good feminist and in line with

...

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