For the last 70 years, the guests of Woman’s Hour have been entertaining listeners with their compelling combination of wit, warmth, insight and humour. Woman’s Hour has interviewed many of the biggest female names from entertainment, politics, the arts and beyond.
Words from Wise, Witty and Wonderful Women is a collection of quotes and extracts from 70 years of the Woman’s Hour archive, featuring some of the most memorable guests to appear on the programme, from Doris Lessing to Nora Ephron, Hilary Clinton to J.K. Rowling, and Bette Davis to Meryl Streep. Charting the social and political revolution that has taken place in women’s lives over the past 70 years, as well as the perennial aspects of female life, such as love, family, relationships, the workplace, sex, ageing, and food, this delightful book shares fascinating insights and sage advice from the wise and wonderful women that have graced the Woman’s Hour airwaves over the decades.
It’s been such a pleasure for me to read through these wonderfully wise and witty words and remember all the extraordinary women I’ve been privileged to encounter in the past thirty years. Yes, it has been that long. My younger son, who is about to turn thirty, doesn’t remember me being anything but Mum, the Woman’s Hour presenter!
Of course the programme is much older. We celebrated her seventieth birthday in October last year. I was born in 1950, four years after the first edition, and became a listener at my mother’s breast. Feeding schedules in those days were strictly four-hourly and 2 o’clock in the afternoon – the time of transmission until 1993 when we moved to the morning – was perfect for the mother who’d had her lunch, put up her feet and put her baby to her breast.
I must have heard so many of the women in this book because I was a fan of the programme long before I joined. I remember hearing Enid Blyton talking about being forced to play the piano as a child when all she wanted to do was write. I was so impressed by her, and George in The Famous Five is still one of my favourite characters.
I doubt I heard Nancy Astor saying her husband’s wealth was one of the reasons she married him. I would have loved to have interviewed her, she had such a sense of humour, but that interview took place in 1956 when I was only six and hadn’t yet cottoned on to the significance of the first woman to take her seat in the British Parliament.
The subject matter included in this volume is as wide-ranging as the women and their interests. Whether it’s politics or knitting, breast cancer or baking a beautiful cake, these are experiences we all share. We all grew up as little girls, we all worried about family and children – whether we were able to have them or not – we all experience love and relationships and grapple with health and lifestyle issues and I doubt there’s a woman in the world who hasn’t agonised over her body image. It’s always surprised me that even the most beautiful never see in the mirror what we see on the screen.
Jane Fonda, when she was encouraging us all to ‘feel the burn’ with her fitness videos, explained on Woman’s Hour that her father, Henry, had always made her feel she was fat.
Some of the women in this book sat across from me in the studio or I met them in their own homes and I will never forget them and what they had to say. Benazir Bhutto had suffered the execution of her father, exile in England and was planning her return to Pakistan to begin her career in politics. We sat in her aunt’s flat in London as she explained that she had trusted her mother to choose a husband for her. A young, unmarried woman wouldn’t stand a chance in public life in Pakistan. She was the first woman to lead a Muslim-majority nation and was Prime Minister twice. Her assassination in 2007 touched me deeply.
I met Carly Simon in her house in Boston as part of a special programme about the city. She refused to tell me which of her lovers she’d described as ‘so vain’ but talked about her treatment for breast cancer with a sense of humour I’ve found to be quite common among women who’ve had to deal with the disease – ‘I think having two breasts was overrated anyway,’ she said.
Among the most memorable conversations about children and grandchildren were with Hillary Clinton, who admitted finding it hard to muddle through her career as a new mum with a new baby, and Doris Lessing who had left two of her children behind when she escaped her marriage in Africa and raised her remaining son alone in London. It was more difficult, she thought, to bring up a boy without a father than it would have been to raise a daughter.
Then there was Shirley Williams, one of my favourite interviewees of all time, on her grandsons with whom she tried to spend as much time as possible, but ‘they too have had to adapt to the idea of not only young women working, but much older women working until they drop’.
My absolute favourite comment though came from Oprah Winfrey on her difficulties with yo-yo dieting. ‘What kind of life is it without a French fry ever?’ Definitely a woman after my own heart.
If you’re a mother, daughter, grandmother, sister, aunt, wife, partner, friend, young or old there’ll be something in this book to delight you. Enjoy!
Jenni Murray
February 2017
As Julie Andrews famously sang, ‘Let’s start at the beginning, a very good place to start.’
The diversity of the eminent guests on Woman’s Hour is never more evident than in their varied backgrounds and upbringings and it’s those very beginnings that shaped them into the wise and wonderful women they are today.
‘I’ve been in show business for an awful long time. As I say, I was a child sort of prodigy or whatever you care to call it. I think that touring a lot, as I did when I was young, gave me a great deal of discipline.’
Actress and Sound of Music star Julie Andrews, 1974
‘I had a blissful childhood, because I loved Pembrokeshire, and my brother and I more or less ran wild, over the cliffs and studying the birds and scrambling. We would take off from morning and just appear after dark.
‘The War was on and we were being shunted from one school to another and I managed to escape school for whole summers on end. My father [was] involved with a boys’ school, so I went to a boys’ school at one stage, which was quite fun. I was a sort of pet, a sort of mascot.’
Mary Quant recalling her Welsh childhood in 1971
‘I was very earnest when I was fourteen. I thought I was the only one who really understood the ills of the world. I was the only one really feeling it.’
Harry Potter author JK Rowling, 2000
Author Enid Blyton had been a cornerstone of children’s literature since the 1930s but in 1963 she told Woman’s Hour her family had other plans for her talents.
‘My father always wanted me to be a musician. Music is in my family. I had a very clever aunt who used to give concerts and things like that, and my father rather visualised that I would do the same. Therefore at six years old, I had to begin to learn to play the piano and all through my childhood, there was practice, practice, practice ’til I was in my teens, when I was doing four hours a day.
‘Now, if you have to work at something that you have really no desire to achieve anything great in, it becomes a terrible bore. And all the time I still wanted to write.’
Children’s author Enid Blyton, 1963
‘I was in the theatre from the time I was five until I was twelve, and at twelve I was over five feet tall and it was difficult getting jobs acting as a child. The films had a great problem, their photography was so bad.
‘They really needed the youngest kind of faces. Once we used a baby and we saw it on the screen and had to send back to the orphanage where the little one came from and say, “Please send us a young-looking baby!” So I was twelve when I went into films, and played heroines from the time I was twelve until I was seventeen, and then an old hag of eighteen goes into character work and she plays mothers. And by the time I was thirty, I was finished with my film career and back in the theatre.’
Hollywood legend Lillian Gish, 1957
‘My grandmother had a piano that somehow got to our house, but to start with it was a little toy piano that I had when I was very tiny, about three, and my mother realised I could pick tunes out. I guess if someone is gifted musically, it should really show. She said I used to sing myself to sleep when I was young.’
Annie Lennox, 2015
‘Nowadays people do not have unwanted children, at least not very many people have them. The children they have they really want and they really love, and it’s a totally different affair from when I was a child. I lived in a poor neighbourhood and there were many families with twelve and fourteen children they couldn’t feed. These children were not exactly loved, wanted little creatures. They were not wanted, and everybody treated children, especially boys, but even girls, as bad. Children were bad by nature. It was just nature. You had to beat it out of them, and most families did. The fact that my family didn’t made them really an anomaly in our neighbourhood.’
American author Marilyn French, 2006
‘I thought when I was little that honey came from bees. I picked one up and I got stung on my tongue. I must have been quite small. But I remember picking it up and it stung my tongue. It was awful and I screamed and screamed.’
The Great British Bake Off star Mary Berry, 2016
‘At the age of six, I was in bed with the measles. I’ve never really lived down the disgrace of it, but I cut up a bedspread to try and make myself a dress in a completely new shape. It was a bit of a disaster. I used the nail scissors.’
Mary Quant gives an insight into the early years of a fashion design icon
‘The newspaper in our town was done by whites, and my grandmother said “for whites and about whites”. And any time they mentioned anybody black, it was something terrible about the person. You know, that person has stolen something, or robbed or raped or killed, or something terrible. And we had a normal town with very little violence and the people worked hard, black people worked hard, white people worked hard. But the white newspaper did not report that.
‘But once a month, there would be a women’s page in the white newspaper, and my grandmother would ask one of the maids who passed by her store, she’d say, “Sister Hudson, will you bring me the page this time?” and the maid would get the page and bring it back. My grandmother and I would pore over it.
‘We had two paraffin lamps and I would sit there with her and we would take every recipe out of the page and then my grandmother would fold it up, give it to the maid, the maid would take it back to her work, press it, iron it, and put it back in the newspaper, and the white woman for whom she worked wouldn’t even know the page had been gone.’
Author Maya Angelou, 2005
Singer Helen Shapiro shot to fame in 1961 at the age of fourteen, with the huge hits ‘Walkin’ Back to Happiness’ and ‘Don’t Treat Me Like a Child’. Twelve years later she told Woman’s Hour how childhood stardom affected her.
‘My friends always treated me exactly the same as ever and my school friends too. Teachers changed a little towards me and started picking on me a little bit but I suppose they did this to keep my feet on the ground. In the end, we got on OK. Private life, all my friends at that time were starting to go from the youth club up to the West End to all the clubs and this I missed. But it didn’t bother me too much because I was starting to travel and this was an ambition of mine and to me, it made up for everything, I was seeing the world.’
Helen Shapiro, 1973
‘I wish I had been a teenager. But when I was that age the concept didn’t exist, or if it did it didn’t come my way. So I never wore my hair in a pony-tail, or danced to rock n’ roll until I was ready to drop, or wore drainpipe trousers (not then, anyway), or shrieked when I saw pictures of film stars or wore bright pink luminous socks. I dare say I was well enough off without the shrieking and the socks, but the rest I regret.’
Author Iris Murdoch, 1957
‘When Jim [Threapleton] and I got married, in his speech that he made, my dad said, “If any of you know Kate, you’ll know that she goes at things” and he was talking about when my mum gave birth to me and I shot out like, “Yes, I’ve arrived, I’m here.” And I don’t know, I think I’ve just always been a very strong-headed, determined person and also I spend my whole life thinking we’ve got one life, what is there really to lose?’
Actress Kate Winslet, 2000
‘Have a try and also be kind to yourself. I look back at the very angst-ridden girl I was at sixteen, and I just wish I could have given myself a break. It’s such a tough time. I think “be who you are” is really the best advice for a teenager. Be who you are. There’s so much pressure on you from everyone to be something else. You need to find out who you are, and then as Dolly Parton famously said, “Do it on purpose.”’
JK Rowling
‘I was always tall – I was this tall when I was eleven – so I was never physically bullied but I went to a girls’ school and girls aren’t always nice to each other. But I was such a loser as a kid that I had people taking me under their wing. I got the opposite of bullying because I looked so hopeless. I was always getting into trouble because I was late and I was just a basket case. What I elicited was not bullying but pity!’
Actress Sigourney Weaver, 2016, who stands at almost 6ft
In 1975, after a decade of modelling, Twiggy was asked what she had been like ten years earlier, when she was still known as Lesley Hornby.
‘Just an ordinary girl from Neasden. I was at school. I left school in the middle of the term to try the modelling thing. It could’ve all fallen through in a month but I was lucky, it didn’t.
‘My headmistress wasn’t very pleased actually. Obviously I had to have my dad’s permission to leave and he was great because he said, “It may be a mistake, it may be a flash in the pan but if I stop you, you’ll probably end up hating me for the rest of your life because you’d always wonder what would’ve happened.”’
Twiggy, 1975
‘I was brought up on this farm with the women at one end and the men at the other rubbishing each other. Men have to rubbish women if they’re stuck in a farming district, they have to rubbish them to somebody, and women have to say men are terrible, and so this is what I was used to as a girl. You see, feminism didn’t start till the Sixties.’
Author Doris Lessing, 2008
‘When I was brought up there wasn’t much sense of difference between the brothers and the sisters and therefore I never felt that as a woman I had to prove myself.’
Benazir Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan, 1989
Drew Barrymore became a household name at the age of seven, when she starred in ET. Her teenage years were marred with drug and alcohol abuse and at fourteen she wrote her memoir, Little Girl Lost, which she followed in 2015 with a book of autobiographical essays, Wildflower. She appeared on Woman’s Hour in 2007.
‘I think it was just like every young person has to figure out who they are, find out what they want to be, what they don’t want to be. What they want to do, what they don’t want to do. I was a bit younger because I had to grow up so fast because of my job and it was obviously more public than some people have experienced it. But it’s just the same feeling. And it’s the same experience, and it’s the same emotion that everybody goes through which is growing pains and falling on your face and picking yourself back up again. I think every human being on the planet has experienced that. So I’m certainly no different. What a wonderful adventure, nonetheless, for me. And it’s something I’m very proud of and I wouldn’t be who I am today without it.’
Drew Barrymore
‘I would have loved to have been a modern expression ballerina. That was really my sort of passion – dance. And regrettably, my father kept on telling me that I had a brain and that I had to use it. I tried to persuade him it was a very small brain, but he wasn’t convinced.’
Baroness Scotland, the first black woman to be appointed as a QC. She received a peerage in 1997 and later served as a minister in Tony Blair’s cabinet
‘I was born during the War, and my mother sewed. She made our clothes. And we used to go walking round the reservoir to a lady who lived in a remote cottage, to get coats made. And we used to have a Christmas pantomime at the church, and my mother was always making clothes for that. So there was a sewing machine in our little cottage, which converted into a table if you wanted. And I was sewing dolls clothes as a child, making models. Always sewing. Learned to knit. So then I made my clothes as a teenager. As a young person, I spent my money on shoes and made all my clothes.’
Dame Vivienne Westwood on learning to sew, 2014
‘At fourteen I left school to stay at home and help Mum but I soon tired of having nothing much to do, so I decided to go into business on my own. I bought an outfit for leather-making and did a roaring trade with my family and friends with bags, purses and wallets. But when they were satisfied, there were no more customers so I decided to look for a job dressmaking.’
Dame Vera Lynn, 1950
Travel writer Freya Stark had an unconventional upbringing, exploring new territories with her adventurous parents.
‘One just looked at a map of Europe and had no passports to think about and no currency questions and went wherever one liked … We were carried across the Dolomites, my sister and I, when I was about two and a half, by the guides, so that we began very early. I think travel was taken in one’s stride rather in those days.’
Freya Stark, 1965
‘When I was in the third form I came thirty-first in maths out of a class of thirty-two. In the fourth form I came tenth out of the same class, because I’d persuaded a girl on the next desk to do my homework. I didn’t like her. I never gave her anything in return. I don’t even remember her name. But she was my rung up the ladder that would take me to the swankiest class in the fifth form. So I telephoned her every night and picked her brains with a hatchet.’
Journalist Jean Rook muses on her fierce ambition in 1965
In 1976, the then leader of the Conservative Party, Margaret Thatcher, told Woman’s Hour about growing up in Grantham, a small town in Lincolnshire, and living above her father’s grocery store.
‘I think the main difference between then and now is that in those days, of course, there was no television, although we had a radio when I was about ten. I can remember the day when it arrived. And so you had to make a lot of your own amusement.
‘Also in my life we used to do a lot of talking and discussing. Inevitably, being part of a shop, we knew a lot of people. They came in, we chatted. Because we lived over the shop people would often call. In a church background, we attended lots of church meetings. So I was brought up with a background of discussion.’
Margaret Thatcher, 1976
‘I always enjoyed talking to strangers. When I was eighteen months old my mother used to be deeply embarrassed by the fact that I used to wink at strangers from the pram.’
TV presenter Esther Rantzen, 1978
From grandparents and parents to children and grandchildren, the family plays a huge part in the lives of women. Over the years the subject has thrown up some fascinating stories and amazing insights into the very different backgrounds of the show’s guests.
‘The family is the building brick of the community and its strength, and every child is entitled to a good family life.’
Margaret Thatcher, 1993
‘Quite honestly, my horses meant more to me than close family members.’
Jenny Pitman, the first female trainer to win the Grand National
‘My