Someone very famous told me to stick to activism, says Duchess

THE Duchess of Sussex has said that one of the world’s most “influential and inspiring” women begged her not to give up her “activism” on the eve of her wedding to the Duke of Sussex.

The Duchess, speaking on an episode of her podcast Archetypes, which is dedicated to female activism, said the unnamed woman urged her to continue for the sake of all women and girls.

She also spoke in praise of being “woke”, arguing that it is not “disgusting or outrageous” but the simple awareness of injustice. And the Duchess thanked one of her guests, Jameela Jamil, for “fighting back” on her behalf after the actress said she was “outraged” by the “unfathomable amount of s--that you take, Meghan”.

The episode sees the Duchess explain why she has chosen to campaign for gender equity.

Describing the lead-up to her 2018 wedding, she said: “Just a few days before my wedding, a very, very influential and inspiring woman – for her own privacy, I won’t share who [it] was with you – said to me, ‘I know that your life is changing, but please don’t give up your activism. Don’t give up, because it means so much to women and girls.’”

The Duchess’s campaigning for

‘Woke by definition means alert to injustice in society, especially racism. What’s loaded or wrong with that?’

women and girls during her two years in Britain included becoming patron of Smartworks, a charity helping vulnerable women by dressing them for job interviews.

She also championed a charity cookbook with recipes from women in the Grenfell Tower community in London after the fatal tower block fire.

Addressing her listeners at the end of the episode, the Duchess also spoke about the term “woke”, as a word that becomes “unnecessarily charged as it pertains to women”.

She said it is treated as a taboo. “I know I’m saying ‘woke’,” she laughed. “I fully realise I am spoon-feeding the clickbait, but here’s why: because ‘woke’ by definition means alert to injustice in society, especially racism.

“Now, what’s loaded or wrong with that? And when you layer a woman into that seemingly anodyne definition, it becomes, for many, disgusting [and] outrageous.

“But why? What is so scary about a woman having an opinion as strongly as a man does?”

For this episode she also interviewed Shohreh Aghdashloo, an Iranian-american actress, about the women in Iran fighting for their rights and her own work in challenging religious fundamentalism.

New episodes of Archetypes are released on Spotify each Tuesday.