Hello and welcome to the History Extra Podcast from BBC History magazine,

Britain's best-selling history magazine. I'm Ellie Korthon. In today's episode you'll be hearing from historian Maggie Andrews, whose latest book is Widows, Poverty, Power and Politics,

co-written with Janice Lomass.

From campaigning for women's suffrage to their struggles to survive in the face of poverty or isolation,

Maggie explores how the picture of widows in history is about much more than just mourning.

Putting the questions to her was our deputy digital editor, Eleanor Evans.

So we're talking today about your new book written with Dr Janice Lomus.

It's on Widows who have historically been seen in a very one-dimensional way perhaps as figures of pity or in need of charitable help or even cartoonishly sexually veracious.

Can we start talking perhaps by about the drive behind this book?

Yes, it was very fascinating.

We were exploring for the centenary in 2018 all sorts of women involved in the suffrage

and at a certain point we became very aware that all of the three leaders of the

main suffrage parties suffrage organizations as you might call them.

Mrs. Pankhurst, Mrs. Fawcett, Charlotte Desbard, they were all widows and we thought

about it, we thought this is not coincidental and the more you investigate it the more you

realize it isn't at all. They were women who had some financial security.

It might have been very minimal. Mrs. Pankhurst was arguably the poorest of the three,

but they had some financial security.

They had respectability.

They were married women.

They, two of them had, one of them had children

in terms of Mrs. Pankhurst, the other two didn't.

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