Tag Archives: BBC Radio 4

New Feminism is Fabulous

I was recently invited to join the discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme with the wonderful Laura Bates, who launched Everyday Sexism.

Great. But it was set up as the New Feminism achieving more than the boring old feminism…

Madness: the new feminism is fabulous — women improvising political strategies out of their own experience and in the context of new cultures of sexism released by the web. As it should be: each generation confronting its own circumstances and creating its own movements.

The established media, however, suffers from historical amnesia as well as institutional indifference — it thinks of feminism as if it were Year Zero: nothing happened until yesterday. It doesn’t know what’s being going on because it doesn’t pay attention.

Every day the Today programme has a sports bulletin. Actually, it’s a bulletin about boys’ games.

But did you hear the programme interview the nursery nurses and classroom assistants who took on a cartel of 20 councils in Scotland over equal pay — fought them all the way to the Supreme Court and won last month?

Did we hear interviews with cleaners and cooks who challenged Europe’s biggest local authority, Birmingham, over a grotesquely discriminatory bonus structure — and won?

Did we hear the thousands of women trekking through the tribunals to make public authorities obey the equality law? Did we hear government being challenged about their readiness to bail out the banks, but their refusal right now to bail out local authorities facing historical comeuppance and monumental bills for their determined refusal to apply the law on equal pay – in effect, for stealing from women?

Do we hear about feminism’s impact in the last Labour government in radicalising the law on crimes of sexual violence, or its irreducible importance in making new labour introduce Sure Start — the best thing it ever did?

Each generation makes its own feminism — but it is as hard as it is because our national media ignores the feminist activism that already exists.

Thinking Allowed: Remembering Diana

Did Princess Diana’s death lead to a major shift in British culture?

Have a listen to the discussion on BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed:

Beatrix Campbell discusses Princess Diana's death on BBC Radio 4's 'Thinking Allowed'.

Click to hear Beatrix Campbell discuss Princess Diana’s death on BBC Radio 4’s ‘Thinking Allowed’.

Professor of Sociology, Vic Seidler, talks to Laurie Taylor about his new book which analyses the repercussions of Diana, Princess of Wales’, death in 1997. He argues that the public outpourings of grief and displays of emotion prompted new kinds of identification and belonging in which communities came together regardless of race, class, gender and sexuality and helped to make visible changes in what might be called ‘New’ or ‘post-traditional’ Britain. Did her unexpected death see a challenge to ‘stiff upper lip’ reserve and to the typical split made in modernity between reason and emotion?
The writer, Bea Campbell, who has also written about the Diana ‘phenomenon’, joins the discussion. Also, the anthropologist, Henrietta Moore discusses the history and significance of Ethnographic research.

You might also be interested in my book, Diana: How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy.

What Is Wrong With Men?

As part of BBC Radio 4 Today programme’s series about men, Beatrix Campbell, Tim Samuels and Laurie Penny debate how the place of men in society has changed.

You can listen to the broadcast here or by clicking the image below:

BBC Radio 4, Today Programme, What is wrong with men?

Click to hear Beatrix Campbell, Tim Samuels and Laurie Penny debate how the place of men in society has changed.