‘Our sex, we share.’ Murray chooses her words carefully in feminist farewell to Woman’s Hour
In her final programme, the fearless broadcaster signed off with a nod to the gender identity debate
For Dame Jenni Murray’s final edition of Woman’s Hour, after 33 years as its presenter, she received one of the highest honours that can be bestowed on a British subject: Mary Berry sent a cake. This was radio, of course, so we couldn’t see it, but the producers posted a picture on Twitter. It was three deep layers of rich chocolate cake, with extravagant lashings of cream, topped with sharp fresh berries. Rich, deep, lavish and sharp. Dame Jenni’s voice in cake form.
But Murray’s last Woman’s Hour wasn’t all sweetness. There was a savoury bite to it, too. Yes, there was a nostalgic package of her “best bits” from over the years: snippets of her interviews with Margaret Thatcher, Hillary Clinton, Edwina Currie, Joan Baez, Bette Davis and more, each a reminder of her fearlessness in asking extremely sensitive direct questions and getting fascinating answers.
Murray was also joined live down the line by four eminent friends from the same generation to discuss how things have changed for women over the past three decades. Harriet Harman, Jackie Kay, Jude Kelly and Helena Kennedy created a festive valedictory atmosphere, combining real affection and admiration for Murray with a gimlet eye for how things have improved for women, and what still needs to be done.
And then, for her closing remarks, Murray chose to give a subtle nod to perhaps the most divisive issue in modern feminism: the interaction between sex and gender identity.
“If you do a programme like Woman’s Hour,” she said, “you have to consistently remind yourself that women are a vast range. There are many, many, many different stereotypes that fit our gender. So there is no one stereotypical woman. But our sex, we share.”
This was a careful and clever choice of words. It’s rumoured that one of the reasons Murray finally decided to leave the programme was that she had been muzzled from talking about the sex and gender debate.
Murray has not presented a programme tackling gender identity since 2017, when she wrote a long and meticulously argued newspaper article, outlining her belief in the crucial difference between gender identity and biological sex. In it, Murray firmly differentiated trans women from, in her words, “real women”. For that, there was an outcry and calls for her to be no-platformed, and since then, whenever the subject has been raised on Woman’s Hour, it has been Jane Garvey, and not Murray, who has always been the presenter to navigate the choppy waters of gender identity. With that silence in mind, we can draw our own conclusions about the significance of Murray’s final remark. Was it the sound of a feminist putting her foot down?
But it was deft and quickly over with, and then she thanked her family and her listeners, before, in a final, emotional flourish, playing I Am Woman, the feminist anthem by Helen Reddy, who died this week. Murray did not introduce the Woman’s Hour drama, as she would normally do, and so the programme ended, with Reddy’s lyrics blazing out: “I am woman, hear me roar, in numbers too big to ignore.”
Jenni Murray is a complex figure. She has spoken and written about the history of feminism, and about her weight, her treatment for breast cancer, and about the struggles for women of juggling work and family life, and she has resisted any label or expectation given to her. She has always seemed to care more about intellectual rigour and truth than just being nice for the sake of it. She has never fitted into any imposed category but her own, and wherever Woman’s Hour goes next without her, that’s an important legacy to preserve.