Weekend Woman’s Hour: Baroness Margaret Hodge, Dame Imelda Staunton and Bessie Carter, Statues of women

Woman's Hour

BBC

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness, Personal Journals

4.2 • 2.9K Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2025

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Baroness Margaret Hodge joined Nuala McGovern to talk about why she thinks routine mammograms should be extended to women over 70. The former Labour MP was diagnosed with breast cancer at the age of 80. She requested a mammogram after realising she hadn’t been invited to have one in nearly a decade. Routine screening is currently only available in the UK for women aged 50-70.

Dame Imelda Staunton, of Vera Drake and Harry Potter fame, and her daughter Bessie Carter, of Bridgerton fame, are starring as mother and daughter in Mrs Warren’s Profession by George Bernard Shaw, currently in the West End. The play explores the morals of earning money from prostitution. They joined Kylie Pentelow to talk about the relevance of the play today, and tell us what’s it like acting on stage together for the first time in their careers.

There are still more statues of men called John than of women in the UK. But this imbalance is being redressed, mainly thanks to local campaigns to memorialise more female figures. A new book, London’s Statues of Women, documents all the current statues of, or to, women in the capital. Its author Juliet Rix joined Nuala along with Anya Pearson from Visible Women UK and Joy Battick who has been immortalised herself in bronze not once, but twice.

Presenter: Kylie Pentelow Producer: Annette Wells Editor: Corinna Jones

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, I'm Sing Sing and I'm Simon Jack. And Good Bad Billionaire is back. It's the podcast
0:06.2	exploring the lives and livelihoods of some of the world's richest people, but this time there's
0:10.6	a twist. On Good Bad Dead billionaire, we are looking back on the lives of some titans of
0:15.6	US industry. Like the first ever billionaire, John D. Rockefeller. The founder of the Ford
0:20.3	Motor Company, Henry Ford,
0:21.9	and the First Lady of Wall Street, Hetty Green. And Simon and I are asking you if they were
0:26.5	good, bad or just another billionaire. Good bad billionaire. Listen on BBC Sounds.
0:33.3	BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Hello, this is Kylie Pentelow and you're listening to The Woman's Hour podcast.
0:41.5	Hello and welcome. Coming up, some highlights from this week.
0:45.2	Baroness Margaret Hodge, who is pushing for routine mammograms for women over 70,
0:50.4	following a breast cancer diagnosis.
0:53.2	Also, Dame Imelda Staunton, who's back on stage,
0:56.6	this time performing alongside her daughter Bessie in Mrs. Warren's profession.
1:01.3	They play a mother and daughter with a somewhat complex and difficult relationship.
1:06.7	And female statues.
1:08.8	Since 2021, more statues of women have been erected in London than in the whole second half of the 20th century.
1:16.9	We talk to three women about why it's so important.
1:20.4	I always kind of refer to this great saying, you can't be what you can't see.
1:25.1	So it's about the visualization of forgotten women of history,
1:28.8	really. You know, these great women that have done fantastic things that have just kind of
1:32.8	been written out of history books. They're not there. Lots to get into. So let's get started.
1:39.8	The Labour peer, Baroness Margaret Hodge, was an MP for three decades before she stood down at the last election.
	...

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