THE ART OF EQUALITY
New BBC Radio 4 series Equal As We Are explores fiction from the
past to find out what it can tell us about modern gender issues.
Presenter Laura Wade picks five works that highlight key themes
Romantic nostalgia
Le Morte d’Arthur Thomas Malory (1485)
“One thing that really fascinated me was
that Malory was writing nostalgically
about the way men and women were
together in a sort of magical, hundreds-
of-years-ago place quite different from
the world he was living in at the time.
Today, people hark back to 1950s values,
for example, and a kind of idealised
world – we have a nostalgic view. And
that’s exactly what people were doing
way back in Malory’s day as well.”
Marital discord
Paradise Lost John Milton (1667)
“Reading about Adam and Eve in
Paradise Lost sparked discussions about
changing ideas of marriage : what it’s for,
the reciprocal obligations of marriage,
the idea of the companionship of
marriage, how much arguing is the right
amount of arguing to have in the
relationship – the same kind of marital
discord people are dealing with now –
and how a relationship deals with the
pressure on it from outside.”
Banter and friendships
Much Ado About Nothing
William Shakespeare (c1599)
“It was interesting thinking about
banter. The idea of ‘negging’ – needling,
pulling someone’s pigtails because you
actually fancy them – was a way into it.
But we also thought about Benedick as
someone who’s returned from war and is
far more comfortable in male company.
The idea of coupling up, for someone
like that, represents a big breach in their
same-sex friendships. That would be a
fundamental shift in his experience of
life, away from what he’s been doing and
his comfort zone. It got me thinking
about the impact becoming a couple has
on your existing same-sex or platonic
friendships.”
Sexual harassment
Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded
Samuel Richardson (1740)
“Pamela is about a servant girl whose
male employer attempts to seduce her,
and is very manipulative in doing so.
It speaks of sexual harassment in the
workplace, which has been so current
in our discourse in the past few years
but was just as present in women’s
lives in the mid-18th century. That
relationship was very widely discussed
in society at that time, and this book
was incredibly popular. So, though
those issues feel new, they’re not – and
even the out-in-the-openness of them
isn’t as new as we might have thought.”Equality in the bedroom
Riders Jilly Cooper (1985)
“This book led us to talk about whether
some couples prefer less equalit y in the
bedroom, and whether growing equality
has rendered sex between men and
women in some way a bit less sexy.
Was the idea of a slightly violent but very
manly man secretly what women were
attracted to? We also discussed the idea
that those ‘bonkbusters’ were essentially
escapist – that we are allowed to enjoy
them in a way that requires us to forgive
their historical shortcomings.”Equal As We Are, presented
by Laura Wade and originally
broadcast on BBC Radio 4,
is now available on
BBC Sounds:
bbc.co.uk/soundsPA PER TR A IL
The diaspora of Jews started with
the exile of the Israelites in antiquity,
followed by successive waves that
spread Jewish culture, knowledge and
faith to all corners of the globe. A new
ex hibition of Hebrew manuscripts at
the British Library in London explores
the extent to which such knowledge
and culture was exchanged between
Jewish people and the communities
they lived alongside, from Europe and
north Africa to the Middle East and
China. These documents contain legal
and religious advice, information on
science and astronomy, and even ideas
of alchemy and magic – and reveal the
tensions between this itinerant people
and the inhabitants of the lands in
which they found themselves.
Hebrew Manuscripts: Journeys
of the Written Word,
20 March–2 August at the
British Library, London
bl.uk/events/hebrew-manuscriptsBRIDGEMAN/BRITISHLIBRARYBeautifully painted images of plants and
animals illustrate a 1472 manuscript of
Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah (or Code of Law)A painting by Joseph Highmore
inspired by Pamela. Samuel
Richardson’s 1740 novel
reflected contemporary
concerns about what we’d now
call workplace harassment