Hello and Welcome to the History Hour Podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,

the past brought to life by those who were there.

This week from America in the late 1960s Ted Kennedy and the Chappiquitic affair.

Also a breakthrough moment for one particular section of Chinese society.

It occurred to me that lesbian women face the same pressures from their families. So why didn't we gay men find

lesbians and establish cooperative relationships? Plus the birth of mama mia,

the musical, and the dawn of humankind.

This skull is balanced on an erect spine.

So this isn't any old ape.

This is an ape who stood upright on two legs.

That's coming up later in the podcast.

But we begin this week in Tunisia, where the country is now in the middle of several days of official mourning following the death of President Beji

Kaid Esebsi. He was 92 and was the oldest serving head of state after the British monarch

Queen Elizabeth. He'd been involved in politics for so long in fact that he was

mentored in the 1950s by Tunisia's first president following independence from

France, Habib Bogeba, and it's to that era that we're going because it was in the summer of 1956 that Tunisia announced a set of radical new women's rights laws.

It became the first country in the Muslim world to legalize civil divorce and abortion, encourage

contraception and ban polygamy. Nidal Abumorad has been speaking to Saida El

Gueade, a women's rights activist employed by President Boergiba to explain the changes to men and women across the country.

On paper at least, the Tunisian woman of today is as free as the win.

She has the vote, she has the right to compete in any sphere of business with the men.

Where once divorce was the privilege of the man, the woman can now win her case in the courts of law.

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