From Wondery, I'm Matt Ford.

And I'm Alice Levine.

And this is British Scandal.

Alice, what a series, three episodes, one marriage, one baby, and sort of half a consummation.

Yes, that is not an equation you often see. I can see why Britain was obsessed. I mean, we were obsessed. A court case about whether a woman could get pregnant without having sex. And everyone had an opinion. Doctors, judges, of course, our sweet, sweet media.

It was like Love Island meets Judge John Deed. I'll take your word for that mashup. What it definitely was was all of the things that make for an incredibly compelling story,

classism, sexual shame, misogyny, things that we deal with in spades here at British Scandal.

Which is why I thought we need someone to explain the wider context,

and ideally one of Britain's leading historians of gender and sexuality.

Fortunately, I know just the woman, Professor Lucy Bland from Anglia Ruskin University.

She's written about everything from the modern woman of the 1920s to post-war femininity

and the way scandal and shame have shaped who we Brits are.

Thank you. post-war femininity and the way scandal and shame have shaped who we Brits are. Lucy, welcome to British Scandal. You've spent a lot of your career studying the history of

sexuality. What drew you to the slightly spicier part of the past?

I mean, what happened was I started to look at the turn of the century, 19th into 20th century

feminism. And so much had been written about the suffrage movement, but very little then,

and we're talking about in the late 80s,

90s, this is for my PhD, very little had been written about the debates that were going

on around sexuality.

And I thought, well, this is really interesting.

And there were all sorts of debates and organisations.

And then I had a book that came out in 1995 about that. And then someone approached me and said, oh, would you like to do a book about sexology?

...