Susannah Constantine, How Work Fits into your Life
Woman's Hour
BBC
4.1 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 1 February 2021
⏱️ 42 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Susannah Constantine describes herself as an author, journalist, PA to three teenagers and middle-aged lapsed fashionista turned podcaster to the wardrobes of the superstars! She has recently written about her alcoholism. Sober now for seven years, she wrote the article because she felt a lot of women are struggling. This is borne out by figures from Alcohol Change UK, who have seen a huge increase in the number of women coming their website since the first lockdown started, with 173,580 female visitors, an increase of more than 100% on the previous year. Susannah joins Emma to describe the feelings of shame surrounding drinking, especially for women, and how it leads to a sense of isolation and loneliness. And she talks about the positives of her life post drinking Writer Sarah Jaffe joins Emma to talk about the ideas in her new book, Work Won't Love You Back. She argues we've been sold an idea that certain work is not really work and should be done for the sake of passion rather than pay. She looks particularly at how gender and the labour of love myth interact, how the devaluing of work in the home has lead to a devaluing of certain work outside (eg childcare, domestic work, nursing, teachers etc) . She examines the notion that paid work is a liberation for women particularly when the amount of work women do in the home has not been significantly reduced. She asks how the unpaid intern came about, the overworked teacher, the boss who describes the work place as 'like a family'', how the labour of love myth permeates almost every area of our lives and at what cost.
Presenter: Emma Barnett Producer: Lucinda Montefiore
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, |
| 0:33.1 | find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:37.6 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:41.1 | Hello, it's Emma Barnet here. |
| 0:43.0 | Welcome to the Women's Our Podcast. |
| 0:45.8 | Good morning. |
| 0:46.8 | January is done. |
| 0:47.8 | Into February, we go, still living though very different lives to the ones we are used to. And today I'm joined by the TV |
| 0:54.0 | presenter and author Susanna Constantine. She's going to explain why she |
| 0:58.1 | publicly outed herself as an alcoholic at the end of last year. One of the |
| 1:02.3 | reasons is she noticed the trend, the trend of |
| 1:04.9 | women in lockdown more and more of them turning to the bottle. She may be most |
| 1:09.5 | famous for giving fashion makeovers to women as one half of Trini and Susanna, |
| 1:13.7 | but she avoided turning the mirror onto herself for a long time. |
| 1:18.0 | Has your relationship with alcohol changed? |
| 1:20.6 | Tell us, get in touch on 84844, text will be charged at your standard message rate. |
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