Women in The Archers, Jill Dawson, Menopausal flooding
Woman's Hour
BBC
4.1 • 3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 April 2019
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Radio 4’s soap opera, The Archers has long inspired a diverse and loyal fan base. The everyday tale of farming folk has tackled everything from unplanned pregnancy in the 1960s to the coercive control and domestic violence a couple of years’ ago. But with women still more likely to be found baking at Brookfield or gossiping in the post office, exactly how feminist is Ambridge? That’s a question tackled in a new book, Gender, Sex and Gossip In Ambridge: Women In The Archers. Academics, Nicola Headlam and Cara Courage, explain what drives them to give up their free time to organising academic conferences about The Archers - as well as listening to it - and they share a few of their thought-provoking conclusions.
Heavy bleeding or "flooding" can be one of the symptoms of the menopause. What do we know about it and what can be done to help women affected? Jane speaks to Paula Briggs a consultant in Sexual and Reproductive Health for Southport and Ormskirk Hospital NHS Trust and hears from listeners about their experiences.
Jill Dawson is the author of ten novels and the editor of six anthologies of short stories and poetry. In her latest novel, The Language of Birds, she takes inspiration from the infamous Lord Lucan case, placing the murdered nanny at the centre of this shocking tale.
Chemicals are an essential component of our daily lives, but some chemicals can severely damage our health or the environment. There is growing interest in the possible health threat posed by endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). They can be found in our environment, food, and consumer products. What do women need to know about EDCs? We find out with Dr Sibylle Ermler, research Fellow at the Institute of Environment, Health and Societies at Brunel University and Elizabeth Salter Green – Director of CHEMTrust
Presenter: Jane Garvey Producer: Caroline Donne
Interviewed guest: Nicola Headlam Interviewed guest: Cara Courage Interviewed guest: Paula Briggs Interviewed guest: Jill Dawson Interviewed guest: Dr. Sibylle Ermler Interviewed guest: Elizabeth Salter Green
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, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.0 | BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts. |
| 0:42.0 | Hi, this is Jane Garvey and this is the Women's Out Polls. podcasts. to the novelist Jill Dawson you hear some very frank chat about the archers and the |
| 0:54.4 | way the archers treats women and the leading female characters and a really |
| 0:58.8 | important conversation about menstrual flooding it's a symptom of the menopause that I don't know people don't |
| 1:05.8 | talk about perhaps quite as much as they should so we certainly do talk about it on |
| 1:10.3 | this podcast today. First up then to a conversation about the archers |
| 1:15.0 | which has always had women at its very heart |
| 1:18.0 | but it hasn't always treated its female characters entirely fairly. |
| 1:22.0 | What about the question of class for example and just |
| 1:25.2 | how feminist is the archers? Well that was a question amongst many others posed at an academic |
| 1:30.8 | conference on the subject of the archers over the weekend. |
| 1:34.0 | Here's a little bit of what happened to that conference. Let's play Name That Tune. |
| 1:38.0 | Dum-T-T-Dant-T-Dant-T-Din- Dum-T-Dum, Dum-T-Dum, |
| 1:49.0 | Yeah, incredible that, that's the sound of people at an academic conference on the archers over the weekend. |
| 1:57.0 | And if you think you've had enough, believe me you haven't because we're putting the archers through an intellectual washing machine this morning on the program. |
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