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Very glad that this episode, Dancer's History, it's brought to you by now, TV and now TV, Sky Cinema and Entertainment Pass, you can stream the latest blockbusters and award winning box sets with now TV. There are still people out there who say there's nothing on the telly tonight. Amazing. It's an extraordinary thing. So it's like when people used to say to each other, are you online to remember that it's people who say there's nothing on the telly tonight?

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Let me tell you something. These people need to understand. Streaming, streaming. You watch the biggest news shows, your all time favorite shows whenever you want. All you need is an Internet enabled device. You don't even need a TV anymore. Guys, this is the point. You get your phone up, you get your tablet out to evacuate, and then you get now TV and you watch what you want. Now does what it says on the tin and you get a movie for every mood with the Sky Cinema pass, start your seven day free trial.

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Now let me tell you why I use now TV. We're in lockdown at the moment in my part of the UK, we're in lockdown. So I'm looking forward to watching Jojo Rabbit. It's going to be streaming second half of November. It's a really weird and interesting film. I'm going to be watching The Wizard of Oz and me showing my kids The Wizard of Oz with Judy Garland in it. Happier, simpler times, man. I can't wait to show them that we got other stuff on there.

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We got Once Upon a time in Hollywood, which I love. That's the movies. Don't start me on the box set. You know what? I need a laugh at the moment. So we've got good comedy. You know what? I love the good Lord Bird. You know why? Because it's based in antebellum America. A little bit of historical fiction. You know me. Any historical fiction I'm into, it's a bit like Band of Brothers.

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But in the 19th century, you're going to love that. So don't get bored. This lockdown. Start your seven day free trial. You get the whole thing for free. Sweet search now TV. Hi everybody and welcome to Dan Snow's history hit. Got an exciting podcast for today. We got the brilliant Sarah Lonsdale's. She's a great writer of history and she today is talking about the remarkable women, the rebel women of the 1920s and 30s. Women like Una Mahsun, the first black woman to be a BBC radio producer, Leah Manning, who rescued child refugees from civil war torn Spain.

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Alison Satyal, editor of Vogue, who, when the war broke out, had to hitchhike to the front because Montgomery refused to facilitate female journalists. This is a hugely important time in the history of women's rights in all of our history, and Sarah Lonsdale is exactly the right person to take us through it. So enjoy this. You go in history, dot TV. You can sign up for the world's best history channel. If you want to watch great shows, please head over there and do that.

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In the meantime, there is a controversy brewing and one of those, you know, when the Twitter has lit up, there is a debate going on whether the history hit shop, knitted night hat is in fact, and I will quote this because I'm only going to screw it up, is in fact a crocheted Knight's helmet.

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This is obviously hugely important to get sorted out because it's call it knitted knights and we get to use the amusing term history knit if in fact it turns out to be crochet. That provides us with some really, really big, really big marketing obstacles here to the Knitted Knights, our best selling object at the moment. And I say a lively debate has broken out. If you wish to go and take part, please let us know what you think it is.

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Go a history at dotcom slash debate. You know, that's a thing. That's a thing that's happened anyway.

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In the meantime, everybody enjoy rebel women with Sarah Lonsdale.

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Sir, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's a pleasure. Thank you for having me. The interwar period is so extraordinary was a talk about some of these rebels. But why do you think these rebels came into existence as a group? They were always there and they've always been overlooked. Or why do we remember these once in the 1920s, particularly? What was the opportunity they were given?

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There were several reasons, I think, why this was a watershed moment for women. They had the 1918 Equal Suffrage Act, which meant that women over 30 at least had the vote on equal terms with men. So that provided a huge boost in terms of viewing themselves as citizens on an equal footing with men. They also, of course, did very well during the war. Lots of women worked in the munitions factories making armaments for the soldiers. Women went off to be nurses both at home and abroad, often suffering alongside men when hospitals were attacked and things like that.

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There was also quite a bit of legislation, particularly in the early 1920s, which allowed women to keep jobs on equal footing with men and allowed them to take jobs in the civil service, in medicine, in areas that had previously been banned to them. And these three areas, the vote, their war work and legislation all combined to create this kind of big energy associated with women's involvement in parts of public life that have hitherto been banned to them. This sense of injustice had always been there.

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So, for example, in Middle-Class Families, where boys were sent to university, where girls had to stay at home until they were married, was a very vivid illustration of the girls kind of lack of equality with their own brothers. I mean, Virginia Woolf wrote about this herself, where middle class girls saw that all their parents' income went to educating their brothers, whereas they were neglected. So it was a source of huge resentment. But also, I think, again, the war was a huge social melting pot in this sense.

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So working class girls who were in domestic service before the war, very often a very lonely job. If you're in a sort of one family home, you are often the only domestic worker. They were down in the scullery on your own day and night. No one to talk to. And then suddenly you were released either on to working on the land or into these munitions factories where you had a sense of purpose, you had the camaraderie, you had good pay.

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And then to be asked, as many, many were to go back into that lonely life of domestic service was too much for these women to bear. And they often refused and therefore they didn't get their unemployment money if they refused to go back into this lonely life of the domestic service. So this sense of injustice was always there. I think it was just that the combination of the liberating in the social explosion of the war and don't forget, of course, at the first Labour government was voted in in 1924.

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And so that really shows us that there was a real social revolution going on in the country, not just amongst women, but about everybody who wanted a better life for themselves. And they were just given this agency by the experience of the war, by being given part of them at least being given the vote that provided this huge impetus for them to go out and break the rules, do what they wanted.

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What were the areas that you've identified that these very determined women decided to try and break into in between North and 1920s?

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So pretty much all areas really of professional life were widening for women's participation. Obviously, women could become MPs for the first time. And one of my subjects was an MP in one of the early Labor governments, but also some of my women, their engineers, their foreign correspondents, at a time when women weren't expected to be interested in foreign affairs. And in order to participate, they had to really break the rules. They went off abroad on their own, often exposing themselves to much more danger than, say, male correspondents of the diplomatic journalistic corps did.

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I've got women who were humanitarian activists who went off again, exposing themselves to quite a severe degree of risk in order to help refugees, in order to feed the starving children in Russia in the 1920s. So these were all areas, particularly of professional life. So most of the women in the book, I have to say, are educated middle class. That's really because they're the ones who left archives. So in order to look into these undiscovered lives.

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One needs a breadcrumb trail, as it were, of evidence of what it was that they did. So I needed to look at letters, I needed to look at diaries, I needed to look at menu cards. I needed to look at all sorts of physical evidence of what they did. And of course, it was Middle-Class Women who could write and who had families that could look after their archives after they died and had photographs of themselves. That made it possible for me to follow the lives of these women about very little is known.

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So I'm appealing below the surface. So we know about women like Virginia Woolf, Victor Sackful, West Nancy Astor, the sort of the elite women who've already been written about and who we know an awful lot about, how they pursued their dreams, how they lived their lives, whether it was being married to rich and powerful men, whether it was being born into a very privileged family that opened more doors than others. This is about women who didn't have that kind of instant access to public life.

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This is about women who had to work that much harder, strive that much harder. Tell me about a few of the ones that you came across.

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Wow, there's so many. I'll start off by telling you about Claudia Parsons. She was a very unusual young woman. She was an engineer. And in 1919, she persuaded her mother to let to go and study engineering at Loughborough College. As it was then, she was one of only two women taken on the course. So she was always interested in how things work. She was taking bicycles and radios apart from a very young age, although she was markedly left handed and a bit clumsy, which is, I think, why I empathize with her so much, because I'm both of those things.

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She was very good at making things and putting things together, and she was fascinated, taking bits and bobs apart and putting them back. And she then went and studied at Loughborough College. Three year course. She came out with a diploma in engineering, with a specialism in automobile engineering. And quite naturally, she thought that she was made up to get a job in an engineering workshop in a factory as a factory supervisor or inspector. But of course, she didn't she wasn't given any job at all because she was a woman.

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And after a couple of very lonely years as a lady's companion, which made her very miserable, she set up her own business as a chauffeur. So at the time, lots of wealthy widows who had money and wanted to travel were starting to go on adventures with chauffeurs. But when they had a male chauffeur, they attracted all sorts of scandal and opprobrium. So a woman's chauffeur who could chauffeur around these wealthy elderly women wouldn't be so scandalous at all, or even wealthy younger women.

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And so Claudia Parsons made a very good living taking these wealthy American heiresses all around Europe. She took one young woman, Dolly Weidenfeld. She was called an heiress. They started in Paris. They drove across Eastern Europe, down through the Balkans, back into Greece. There were times she wrote in her biography about being chased by wolves through the snow. The windscreen wipers broke. They had punctures that she had to get under the car and fixed, wonderfully adventurous for a woman brought up to stay at home all day long.

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And one day she drove a couple of women across the states from New York to Vancouver, and part of her payment was to sell the car. So she sold the car and with the money, took a boat to Japan, took a train through Japan and another boat over to Southeast Asia, where she thought, well, I'm half way round, I'm going to drive home. So from Calcutta, she picked up a 1925 Studebaker motorcar and drove all the way home.

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And she had an extraordinary experience that women of those days really never had before. And she wrote a very beautiful memoir called Fagre Bondage about it that was published in 1941. Her memoir, Vagabond Age, is a really extraordinary narrative of a traveller. So, you know, you have these Edwardian and Victorian adventurers who conquer virgin territory, who vanquish unconquered peaks. And it's a very sort of militaristic, masculine approach to travel. Whereas Cody Parson's memoir is very sensitive to the fact that it is she who's the one who is out of place, that the creatures that she passes, the strange plants and the landscape she's going through, they're the ones that are natural and.

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She is the one who is trespassing, and it's a very refreshing, different view of how travelling should be done.

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You're listening from Dance Snow's history, it more coming from Sarah Lonsdale after this. Tom Bradley Manning, you've always been someone I've been fascinated with, Leah Manning was a fantastic teacher. She was a teacher first and foremost. She qualified at Homerton Teacher Training College in Cambridge just before the First World War. And she got married just before the First World War as well, and should have actually retired from teaching and was going to retire from teaching. But she was needed in the war as lots of the male teachers went off to fight.

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So she escaped the marriage bar, as it was called then. She was a very committed radical socialist teacher. She taught the poorest children in Cambridge, children who, before they even went to school, had to do milk rounds and bakery delivery rounds. They arrived already exhausted, barefoot, malnourished, and then often had to go off and do a second job or help out with the family after they finished school. And this outraged Leah Manning had a very strong sense of social justice imbued in her from her grandfather, who was a very strong sort of social liberal.

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And she almost lost her job again, actually, as a child in her class, actually died of malnutrition at a time when it was down to the local authorities discretion as to whether they provided milk for children at school. And the Cambridge Education Authority didn't. And this child died. And Leah Manning kicked up a real fuss, invited the newspapers in and told them about this scandal. And she was nearly fired when a sort of network of women's groups in the town that she was a member of, she thought that women's groups were a very good way that women could combine their strengths and their agency and help them break through the sort of obstacles to them participating.

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So lots of women's groups, women's institutes, the National Council of Women, they all came to her defense and she kept her job. She lost her baby at the end of the First World War one and only child. She went into early labor and the baby didn't survive, but she dedicated her life to children. After that, she made her way up the ranks of the National Union of Teachers. And then she became an MP briefly in 1931 on the new teacher's union ticket.

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But she was an MP for a few months because then it was the disastrous 1931 election, disastrous for Labor, and she lost her parliamentary seat. But she didn't lose the connections that she made, and she kept on campaigning for children and children's rights. And so it was quite natural, really, that in the Spanish Civil War that broke out in 1936 that she should have a special concern for the children caught up in the struggle. And it became very clear that lots of children were being made refugees.

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And there was a huge pressure on other European countries to take child refugees. France took thousands and Leah Manning campaigned that Britain should take some. However, Baldwin's government wasn't so keen, he was worried about the burden on the state that these children would represent. And also, he was very worried that taking the child refugees who are children of Republican families, that it would look like Britain was taking sides. But he was prevaricating and Franco's armies were drawing closer.

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Along that northern Basque coast. Leah Manning went to Bilbao to see whether she could help try and organize an evacuation. And still, Aldwin resisted. Even though she put the preparations together, she got doctors and nurses to come out to accompany the children. And it was only really by sleight of hand that she managed to persuade Baldwin to relent when by using a little bit of subterfuge, she got hold of the console's telegram machine and with the second consul, who was Spanish, managed to get a telegram over to England to say that basically it was too late, the yacht was leaving and they finally got the permission they needed.

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And just in the nick of time, so Guernica town just along the coast had been bombed dreadfully by the German condoling a few days before they left and the bombs were coming closer to Bilbao. But in May 1937, she managed to get 4000 Spanish children on board a yacht set sail for Southampton. And they arrived a couple of days later in Southampton and then were distributed amongst the families who'd said that they would take these children literally. Days later, Bilbao was bombed and many of these children's parents were killed.

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But the children obviously were safe and she saved literally thousands of lives that way. She is not really a. But in this country, but she is in Bilbao and there's a beautiful leafy square, the Plaza de Mrs. Leah Manning, in the school's quarter of Bilbao that commemorates her work.

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Fascinating that we hear a lot more about Sir Nicholas Winton with his extraordinary work with the young children Kindertransport rescued from Central Eastern Europe. But so few people have heard of her. And what she did was exactly equivalent. Remarkable.

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Yes. I mean, so what Nicholas Winton did was extraordinary and saved many, many lives. But also what I discovered was that there were many women, Quaker women, particularly working in Germany, working in Czechoslovakia, who also accompanied children by train out of Prague, out of Munich and to the Dutch coast completely on their own, many of them very young Tessa Rowntree of the Rowntree Quaker Sweets family. Her diaries now in the Imperial War Museum. And it tells about this extraordinary journey she made on her own as a young girl across Europe with this trainload of Jewish children coming out of Czechoslovakia.

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But like many other women, they've all gone under the radar.

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In your book, I was fascinated by the story of the radio producer, the BBC radio, because I'd never heard of.

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Yes. So Una Mason was quite an extraordinary woman and suffered from both gender prejudice, sexism and also racism. But nevertheless, she became the first black woman producer at the BBC. So she was born in Jamaica and she went to school. English teachers taught her she learned and fell in love with Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton, and she was completely inspired by the English poetry that she learned. Only later did she realize that at school she had learned nothing about her own country's literature and her own country's history, which was something that she hadn't realized at the time.

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But there was this kind of vast, gaping vacuum about the island that she was born and grew up in. Anyway, when she became a fairly well known playwright and poet in her own right in Kingston, she decided it was time to seek her fortune and go to the mother country and go and get the fame and influence that was waiting for her in London. So she took a boat and sailed across the Atlantic and arrived in England in 1932, expecting sort of intellectuals to clamor around her and doors to be opened when in fact, when she arrived, they were slammed in her face.

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Landladies refused to give her board and lodging. Secretarial employers refused to give her a job purely because she was black and she was thrown on to finding help from the small growing diaspora of West Indians who were coming at that time to live in London. And she joined the house owned by a Jamaican doctor called Doctor Harold Moody, who had arrived in England about 20 years before Una had trained at King's College Hospital to be a doctor, had qualified, but then couldn't find any work at all because he was black.

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He set up in private practice in Peckham and formed an organisation called the League of Colored People and set up a magazine called The Keys, the black and White Keys of the piano being the symbol there in order to try and foster more understanding between black people and white people in the UK and across the world. Annemasse, and became the editor of the magazine and turned it into a campaigning organ where she campaigned against the colour bar. And she also worked very hard to get women's names into their magazine to include women in the growing black public sphere in interwar London.

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She lost her job there. There was sort of lots of discussion about whether a woman should be the editor of such an important magazine. And it's really the story of a lot of these women's lives, the jeopardy that they put themselves in by straying into territory that they shouldn't be in. But anyway, she also got a job at the BBC as the first black woman producer. She, first of all, started actually out in television and then joined BBC Radio and produced a program called Caribbean Voices, which highlighted poetry and writing coming out of the West Indies.

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And then when war broke out, she produced a program called Calling West Indies for the West Indian troops fighting in the British Army. But again, she came up against the forces of conservatism, of obstruction amongst the white West Indian community that was very powerful and had very good links. With the colonial office, and she was forced out of her job from the BBC in 1946 and left Britain to return to Jamaica, and that's just a really strong example of how this intersection here of prejudices of race and gender combined to create this almost insuperable obstacle that unmasked and through sheer force of will power managed to overcome such a remarkable life.

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Are there the lives in your wonderful book? What's the book called Tell US.

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It's called Rebel Women Between the War's Fearless Writers and Adventurers.

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Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing their stories with us. It's just wonderful having historians like you putting these women back into our canon. Thank you very much and good luck with it.

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Thank you so much. Big part in the history of our country. Hope you enjoyed the podcast just before you go a bit of a favor to ask. Totally understand. If you want to become a subscriber or pay me any cash, money makes sense. But if you just do me a favor, it's for free. Go to iTunes or have you get your podcast. If you give it a five star rating and give it an absolutely glowing review, perjure yourself, give it a glowing review.

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I really appreciate that. It's tough. Well, Law of the Jungle out there and I need the fire support I can get, so that will boost it up the charts. It's so tiresome. But if you do, I'd be very, very grateful. Thank you.