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Woman's Hour

Mona Eltahawy on embracing female anger; Maternal ambivalence; Women in the Senedd

Woman's Hour

BBC

Society & Culture

4.13K Ratings

🗓️ 11 May 2021

⏱️ 44 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

'We need to dismantle the patriarchy' is a familiar feminist rallying cry. But Egyptian-American writer and activist Mona Eltahawy believes we should stop just saying it, and start actively defying and disrupting the patriarchy now - with force if necessary. Mona's latest book is The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls. She joins Emma to explain why she wrote it with enough 'rage to fuel a rocket.'

In a recent article, writer and travel editor at the Independent, Cathy Adams said she wished the phrase 'I sometimes resent my baby' went down better at the pub. She describes imagining an alternate life without her son at the centre, and how thirteen months after her son's birth she's still struggling to articulate her feelings because of the lack of language surrounding maternal ambivalence. Cathy joins Emma - along with Amy Brown, a Professor of Child Public Health - to discuss these conflicting emotions and why we find it so hard to openly talk about the challenges of being a parent.

In Thursday’s Elections in Wales Natasha Asghar made history by becoming the first woman from a Black or Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) background to be elected to the Welsh Senedd. She’ll represent South Wales East for the Tories – a seat held by her dad until his death last year. However the overall number of women elected was down on the last Election. Emma talks to Natasha about what the victory means to her and how she feels about following in her father’s footsteps. Plus Jess Blair from the Electoral Reform Society Wales tells us why more needs to be done to make sure that we see more women coming through.

Transcript

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0:00.0

Choosing what to watch night after night the flicking through the endless

0:06.8

searching is a nightmare we want to help you on our brand new podcast off the

0:11.8

telly we share what we've been watching

0:14.0

Fladiated.

0:16.0

Load to games, loads of fun, loads of screaming.

0:19.0

Lovely. Off the telly with me Joanna Paige.

0:21.0

And me, Natalie Cassidy, so your evenings can be a little less

0:25.0

searching and a lot more auction listen on BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts.

0:35.0

Hello, I'm Emma Barnet and welcome to Womonsa from BBC Radio 4.

0:40.0

Good morning.

0:41.0

Now that we know England will be going full steam ahead with lifting lockdown

0:44.3

from next Monday and that socialising indoors and cautious hugging have been prescribed by the

0:49.2

Prime Minister, are you struggling to remember how to plan, how to plot a weekend, how to schedule a social life?

0:57.0

Personally, in need of some help, I loved how time out put it on their website as I consulted it last night,

1:02.0

trying to sort of remember how to sort a weekend for

1:05.8

myself. They put it as trying to relearn how weekends work, find out the best things

1:10.8

going on this Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

1:14.0

How are you finding it?

1:15.3

How are you getting yourself back involved?

1:17.1

Perhaps you are the person in your house that does a lot of this,

1:20.2

that tries to assemble some kind of life outside of work, some kind of play and

1:25.2

pleasure.

...

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