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Pretty birds and silly moos, the women behind the sex discrimination act by

Susanna Rustin, read by Carlis Pear.

Celia Brayfield was at her desk in the female section of the Daily Mail's Fleet Street office, when an editor called her over.

It was July, and Wimbledon had started.

He said, we want you to go down and get into the women's changing rooms and report on lesbian

behaviour. One didn't normally swear at that time, but I declined. That was the attitude then,

she told me. From the late 1960s until the early 70s, Rayfield was one of a small group of

female journalists working on women's pages in newspapers.

We were dealing with everyday sexism on an unbelievable scale, she said.

You learned to wear trousers or take the lift because if you took the stairs, someone would try to look up your skirt.

But then you couldn't go to a lot of press conference venues in trousers.

In the Savoy, for example, women in trousers weren't allowed. Today, Brayfield is an author

and lecturer living in Dorset. She started age 19 as an assistant to Shirley Conran,

then Women's Editor of the Observer.

When Conran moved to the Daily Mail, Brayfield went too.

The Daily Mail was a very sexist organisation, she told me.

I can't tell you how awful women's pages were, except for Mary Stott's at The Guardian.

All the news of the women's movement in America was flooding across the Atlantic,

but editors were profoundly uninterested. I always thought you couldn't mention anything to do with equality before the fifth paragraph. You were radicalised by your workplace. Brayfield found her

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