Reclaiming the voices of women for one day
INTERNATIONAL Women’s Day was marked on air in very different ways.
BBC Radio Three devoted the whole day to female composers, with a Lunchtime Concert performance, under her own name for the first time, of Fanny Mendelssohn’s Easter Sonata, originally attributed to her brother Felix after being discovered in a Paris bookshop in 1970.
Her great, great, great granddaughter, filmmaker Sheila Hayman, was on the Today programme to talk about it, recalling how Fanny had, at the age of 14, played all of Bach’s 48 preludes and fugues by heart for her father’s birthday, only to be told, in effect, that being a genius was all very well but it wouldn’t get her a husband.
Woman’s Hour on Radio Four looked at the plight of Syrian girls in refugee camps, where conditions are so dangerous they’re afraid to even leave their tents to go to the loo; and talked with campaigner Nimco Ali about her inspirational struggle to end female genital mutilation in Africa.
On a lighter note, Al Porter on Today FM continued doing his bit for the sisterhood by chatting with Deirde O'kane as part of his Funny women series. To be honest, Porters new show is a bit of a claustrophobic luvvie nightmare, where every celebrity appears to be friends with the presenter, as well as every other celebrity; I’m really not sure how much mileage there is in this in the long term.
All the same, it was far better than Moncrieff’s almost parodically tokenistic clip of Maya Angelou reading her poem Phenomenal Women set to insipid muzak on Newstalk; or RTE Radio One’s Today with Sean O’Rourke, where, with that dreadful lack of imagination that so often bedevils talk radio, there was another debate about gender quotas and pay gaps.
Important topics obviously, but they’ve been covered many times before and will be again. Why not try talking about something... call me crazy... different?
Mary Beard On Women In Power was a recording of the Cambridge classicist’s recent London Review Of Books Winter Lecture, and examined the durability of Greek mythic stereotypes about mad, bad female leaders, as seen in cartoons during the recent US election depicting Donald Trump as Perseus holding up the severed head of Hillary as the Gorgon Medusa, complete with phallic snakes for hair. As she points out, racism is now underground, but misogyny is still out in the open.
Radio Four has also been running an engrossing, wide-ranging series of programmes about Mars, including Wednesday's We Are The Martians, which explored how the takeover of dead planets allows all the fun and excitement of imperialist expansion with none of the drawback, such as trampling on the rights of indegenous peoples; but my favourite moment came on Following the Martin Invasion Francis Spufford's Programme about HG wells's War Of The worlds, as General Sir Rupert Smith outlined the options available to any ordinary human army facing extraterrestrial attack - "to die gloriously or to run away". You can always rely on an old soldier not to sugar the pill
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