 He zones, everybody. Welcome to Hist Fest Day Two. Hello to everyone in the room and everyone joining us at home as well. I'm Sarah, I'm part of the Hist Fest Team, and I'm absolutely delighted to welcome you to our first talk of the day, The Historical, The History and Myth of Gendered Im options, with Pragya Ergwal, and chaired by Eleanor Cleitors. Just a few little housekeeping bits before we start. I know everyone who was here yesterday would've heard these before, just bear with me. The years ahead will be taking questions towards the end of the sessions. So if you're in the room, have a little think about what you might want to ask as we go along. We'll have hand held mics, which Eleanor will pick out a few people from the audience. We'll have a hand held mic coming round. For those of you at home, there's a question box just below your video stream. So please do submit questions throughout the talk, and Eleanor will pick a couple of those to read out at the end. We have the amazing booksellers from Blackwells out in the foyer, so if you're on-site, please do take a look at the book stand out there and online there are some tabs I think underneath the video, you can buy the speaker's books. Both our speakers today will be doing a book signing after the talk in person and just finally the event will have live speech-to-text captioning and British Sign Language interpretation as well, online you can access by tab below the video. Our speakers, Dr Eleanor Clegghorn is a feminist cultural historian. After receiving her PhD in 2012, Eleanor spent three years as a postdoctoral researcher at the Ruskin School, University of Oxford, working on an interdisciplinary medical humanities project. She now works as a writer and researcher and lives in Sussex. Her own pain and other symptoms were dismissed for seven years before she was finally diagnosed with lupus. Unwell Women is her first book and she's currently at work on her second. The line about lupus there doesn't make any sense if you've not read Unwell Women yet, but go and buy a copy if you haven't. You don't need to read it, I'll just spoil again. I was just randomly disclosing your medical history there. Dr Pragia Agawal is a professor of social inequities, behavioural and data scientist and a research think tank investigating gender inequities. She's the author of four widely acclaimed non-fiction books for adults on racism, gender bias and motherhood and a picture book for raising non-racist children. Her writing has also appeared in places such as The Guardian, The Independent, New Scientist, Scientific American, Literary Hub, Willow Hub Review and Eon. She's been nominated as one of 50 people creating change in the India-UK corridor and one of 100 leading women in social enterprise in the UK. She's here today to speak on her latest book, Hysterical, The Myth of Gendered Emotions. Over to you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Sarah, for that lovely welcome and thank you all for coming this morning. I'm really delighted to be talking to Dr Pragia Agawal about a fantastic new book, Hysterical, Exploding the Myth of Gendered Emotions. Pragia, I'd love to start just by asking you what inspired you to explore the history and sociology of how emotions have become gendered. Thank you so much, Eleanor, and it's such a pleasure to be here. I think it's really a complex question, so there's no straight answer to it. Of course a lot of my work emerges from the personal, so personal is always political. I say that kind of off-repeated sentiment and although hysterical doesn't have a lot of my story like motherhood did, it's not a memoir. It emerges from your experience of being raised in a patriarchal society and being considered too much or too sensitive, or the fact being told or to conform to a certain idea of what a good girl or a woman should look like, seeing a kind of idealised notion of motherhood which is self-sacrificing. So I went through all that, and especially when I was writing Sway, which was my first book about unconscious bias, and then motherhood, I was doing a lot of research and came across a lot of archival work and research on how actually started thinking about how our emotions are the root cause for gender inequality as well, and we don't often talk about it. We talk about the manifestations of it and the impact it has, but we don't talk about the kind of root cause of how emotions are so gendered. As an academic, I had been working on human-computer interaction and developing personalised interfaces on how do we make them more human-centered, and I realised that although we were talking about human-centered technology and artificial intelligence, we weren't thinking about the emotions which make us human, and the more research I did, I realised that actually emotions were kind of considered inferior in academia and nobody wanted to research that. It was only in the last 50 years that researchers started to take it seriously. So it kind of all came together in this book, so that's a long answer. That's a great answer. I think that's really fascinating that emotions have been the sort of Cinderella of academic thinking around what makes us human around our building of ourselves. Just to go sort of right back to the beginnings of western patriarchal constructions of emotion and gender, and of course we're both really concerned about the ways that ideas about our bodies play into these sort of social and cultural binary constructions about who we are and how we should behave. So we know that, when you speak about this, write about this beautifully and hysterical, about the beginnings of some, the emotional root in our bodies, like where is the root of emotions in our bodies and the way that ideas about the emotions being embedded in the body have begun to be used as sort of way of exerting social control. So wondering if you could just take us back to classical Greece with the beginnings of some absurd and fantastical stories about the womb. Yeah, I mean you're so absolutely right. We think that emotions are detached from our bodies because we see the manifestation of them in terms of feelings, and there's been a whole narrative of the notion that I think therefore I am, so that the brain is the most centre of what makes us human. But the more research you do, and it's actually true that the Greek literature or the philosophers did explicitly talk about emotions, but the more research you do you realise that actually they are talking about emotional behaviour and emotional codes and norms in very strange ways. And this kind of notion, idea of masculinity and femininity sets roots very, very early on with Aristotle, he's talking about how women are cold-blooded and they can't handle temper or the strong emotions, and while men are warm and they have the capacity to handle some of the stronger emotions, and we also see that courage is associated with men, so there's a morality code being associated with it. But in talking in terms of womb, we know that there was this whole misconception because the female bodies were seen as inferior to men. We have to understand that those were mostly men writing about bodies and about medical science, and we see that even now that female anatomy is seen as a subset of the male anatomy, so when we look at medical textbooks now we see the bodies being labelled, the perineum is a part of the female anatomy and it is the female perineum, so it's always the subset of the male anatomy. So they were considered inferior and so Hippocrates and other people writing at the time thought that the womb was basically flapping around in the body and just roamed around, it's called the wandering womb, and it roamed around and it was the basic root of all the illnesses that were associated with women, and they didn't really go into any more of that except that. Also there was this idea that women were very strongly associated with the reproductive reproduction, so the womb was part of an identity of a woman because that's what made there were women according to them. So this notion that all these ideas of women being cold-blooded and fragile and not being able to handle strong emotions, but also they experienced stronger emotions because they had this flapping womb and uterus wandering around and so they were irrational and they were illogical and they experienced strong spectrum of emotions which was linked to hysterics or hystericals, what became hysterical. No prizes for guessing what the cure for a wandering womb was in ancient Greece, of course. Getting married, having lots of marital sex and being pregnant was the cure. So the womb in classical medicine and classical social thinking is almost kind of coincident with the female mind. The two are strongly linked through, they believe that there was like a tube or a channel that connected the vagina to the mouth. Yes. So there was this, they were almost sort of one organ linked, so the reproductive function, the social function that patriarchy wanted from their women in classical society was also the cure for this sort of quieting down of the body that was also the quietening down of the emotions. And there was this little short, Hippocratic text called something like the disease of virgins, where they talk about, very specifically about delirium and mania and hallucinations and even thoughts of self-harm or suicide in young women who aren't yet married and are sort of purging their bodies, like purging their menstruation. So the urge was to get married and reproduce really quick as a cure. So yeah, this idea that reproductive function, the social function, patriarchal duty, is the cure for this sort of rumruliness, is fascinating. I know it's something that fascinates both of us. Absolutely. Just moving on to one of my favourite chapters in the book, which is called Chamber Pots. And I'm going to read out the quote from which Pragy took the amazing title of this, so buckle up. So this is a quote from Marcelio Fegino. I'm sorry if I bungled that. The Renaissance humanist philosopher who said, women should be used like chamber pots, hidden away once a man has pissed in them. What a gem. Yeah, it was actually writing this book. It was emotionally exhausting and made me quite hysterical. But this chapter is fascinating because you really explore and write beautifully about some of the classical mythological representations of women's emotionality. And it always strikes me that in many of the Greek myths there are some transcendent incredible displays of female emotion, especially connected with mothering, maternity, motherhood, both sort of positive and negative. So thinking about Demeter's, her rage at Persephone being abducted by Hades is so intense that she changes the world. She makes the world succumb to a famine. That's the power of her emotion. There are these incredible cultural representations of the force, world-changing transformative force of women's emotions. But yet at the same time these myths were these kind of cultural cautionary tales, warnings about what can happen if emotional women are allowed their own autonomy. So I wonder if you could talk a little bit more also maybe about Medea, one of the most notorious perhaps representations of female emotion that we have in culture. Yeah, absolutely. I think art and literature, when you start looking, we see that how much of that is being shaped by the male gaze. And the fact that while we talk about some of them as kind of feminist telling of the feminist narratives at the time, and some of them were actually kind of overturning some of those stereotypes that men were more rational and stoic and logical. So they were allowed a space in the public and political domain. And so you have to understand that those kind of emotional norms and stereotypes also determined which space that women and men occupied, which has some of that has kind of seeped into a society even now. But even when we saw representations of ideas like rage in women, which women were not allowed to show, so maternal feeling is something again linked to women's role as a reproductive kind of, their primary role was reproduction. And we have, we know that those ideas have carried on now about maternal instinct and maternal what are the, and we don't see much of rage in it in women. So Medusa or Medea, even when we see her getting angry, it is like a cautionary tale because we see that what happens when a woman gets angry is harmful, is harmful to society. It has really big consequences for society in terms of her killing her children or in terms of taking revenge. So even when we see these kind of representations, we are always seeing, it comes with the notion that if women are allowed these emotions or if a woman experience or express these emotions, then it has harmful consequences for society, that it will topple the social hierarchy or the codes or the norms that we have established and it will be destabilising for society. And in the Indian context as well, if you look at Indian mythology, there is a goddess called Kali and if you are familiar with that representation, and most of Indian goddesses in Indian mythology are very calm and kind of have that aura of all the kind of feminine emotionalities. But Kali is the one who is shown as this goddess who is angry. But in her anger, although she becomes the representation of female anger, of women anger and a lot, kind of a feminist representation that we grew up seeing, it is also a cautionary because she is shown with her consort, Lord Shiva, prone in front of her and she got her leg or foot on him that in her rage she doesn't distinguish who is a friend and foe and in her rage she is also harming her partner and her lover. So there is that kind of notion that women can't control that rage because their bodies are fragile, their bodies are cold blooded, their bodies are not strong enough to deal with this. That is why they shouldn't be allowed to have these. So it's kind of an inherent paradox in there because what literature or historical texts are telling us is that women are overexcitable and they experience these strong emotions more than men because men have more regulatory powers. But women, when they experience them, it has a harmful consequence. So there is that notion that they can't control it if they experience it. They shouldn't be allowed to experience it. Sorry, that's fascinating. I worry about Carly and Shiva. I was thinking about the parallels perhaps between Medea and Jason because Jason abandons and betrays Medea but she is then put in a position where she has to be strategic. She has to think about how she can live, how her children can live and then of course they do not. And the way that what she does, her act, her transgression, her act of violence is sort of staged in the Euryphides play as something that removes honour or destroys Jason. But of course also what it was fine interesting about that play, about the tragic play is that Medea is allowed to speak out about the injustices of being a woman in patriarchal Greece with her fantastic monologue where she sort of decries patriarchal marriage and childbearing and the violence of it. But it's because she is transgressing. Again, if we look through all the historical texts, we find that who is allowed to transgress the norms is also very much associated with power. And so it is according to the hierarchy. These hierarchies were very much set and who had power and privilege was allowed to transgress these norms without any consequence. But whoever was lower down in the hierarchy, they weren't allowed to transgress those norms. Even when they did, it was, as you say, and it is a cautionary tale that if they transgress these norms, it's a destabilising effect. So Jason's a man and he's doing all that, but he has power as a man in that society to be able to do all those things and he doesn't suffer the same consequence or the judgment or the punishment associated with it. Because his honour in that context of that society is more important than her grief. Also of course Medea is othered. She's othered because of her race. She's othered because of her powers of witchcraft, of sorcery, and those two things are very linked. This is another ring of a woman who's seen as a barbarian. This is what she's couched, because she comes from Colquys on the Black Sea. So that moves me kind of clumsily along to the next point I wanted to ask you about, which is to kind of transport us forward into the late Middle Ages, the early modern period and think about the witch trials and the ways in which the witch trials were weaponising women's emotionality against them in a very punishing sense and also the way that hysteria as a medical diagnosis emerges out of this crisis of apparent witchcraft being performed by angry women. There's a book that is here in the British Library by an early 17th century chemist and physician named Edward Jordan, who was tasked with defending a woman who had been accused of bewitching a young teenage girl. He put forward the hypotheses that symptoms of possession, symptoms of witchcraft in women were actually this natural disease. Again, the flapping womb was coming back. It's flapping back along that it was the womb sending up these distempers so that widowed women, older women and then younger women, this sort of unmarried younger women, were most at risk because their wombs were not being used in the patriarchal correct sense. So from this literal hysteria social panic around witchcraft we begin to get in English at least discussion of hysteria. The historic medical diagnosis becomes a plausible explanation for witchcraft. So I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit about this persecution, this huge moment of the persecution of especially female emotionality. I loved looking at that book, seeing that book and writing about it. It's so fascinating. Although he wrote to defend this woman called Jackson, she was called, but she did end up being hanged so she couldn't really save her. I was also saying outside that I'm trying to, with my small children, they're just on seven, I'm trying to make them kind of flip the narrative around the word witch because they've been reading a lot about witches and one of them got scared at night that what if the witch is around. So I was trying to say that actually witches are not always bad and witches are not bad. They're just women who are very strong. So I'm trying to tell them about the empowered way and that fact and then now they think, are you a witch mummy? I was like, yeah. I like, I can be. But yeah, I mean the whole story of, I think, the whole thing about witchcraft and the fact that they were punished, they were hanged, the dunking, all that kind of thing was happening, was this public display again of what happens when women can't control their emotions and can't conform to a moral code of conduct that has been set out for them. So around this time there were all these code of conduct books that were coming out and there were some for men but mostly it was for women as is now that women should do this or should do this. And the women who were not conforming to those who were transgressing again in terms of sexual liberation or in kind of women's rights were also coming out, that time women were starting to talk about it. There were some other books that were coming out. And so there was again this kind of fear that this will dismantle the system that they had kind of very carefully established, the patriarchal hierarchy. And we see that again and again through history but we see that in contemporary society as well. Any time there's a fear that these kind of social norms will be overturned, people who have the power or have the privilege or benefit from these social norms actually try and impose a code of conduct on other people and say that these codes are good for our society. So this is what was happening in the witch trials as well that women who were speaking out against religious beliefs or women who were talking about sexual liberation or showing emotions or screaming or some of them were punished because they were caught screaming on the streets or all those kind of things were being public. And it was a very, this public display was the big part of it to give a message to others that this is what happens. So women were also reporting women as well because they were benefiting from patriarchy in a way that if not her that it could be me kind of. And that happens even today. We see those kind of effects even in contemporary society. And so a lot of the witch trials were, I think, against women's emotionality and women's behaviour not conforming to these codes that men had set out for them. And we see in the notion of medical diagnosis of hysteria also there was this idea that women were basically, and we know that Freudian ideas about women were unhappy that they didn't have some of the male anatomical features and so they were inferior and so they were struggling against it and which was one of the reasons for hysteria. But at this time also we start seeing about how the intersectional effects were coming into play as well. So we start seeing that during the medieval and the Renaissance period and later on we start seeing that men, upper class men had more freedom to express some of these stronger emotions and so this range of emotions while women of colour, black and brown women, minoritised communities but men of colour as well were seen as kind of barbaric or savage and that they didn't have as much control over their emotions and so they were, all those communities that people, colonists were going into, they were representing those communities as people who showed their emotions quite widely like in terms of dance or song or screaming or wailing and that's what the representation we see in a lot of historical records when we start looking at colonist records and paintings and writings and diaries as well. So even though they're not talking about emotions, they're being judged for the emotions all the time as well. That leads perfectly into my next question which was about this issue when the idea about who is allowed to have emotions, who's allowed to feel in the first place, really emerges into social thinking and into medical thinking around the 18th and into the 19th century when it's the age of emotions. As you say, emotional display, what emotion is, what it can create and do is really fascinating culturally but also in medicine there was this big thing about where are emotions, what are they? Are they something we can track, trace, feel? Are they spirits, where are they? Are they little wind messengers, what are these things? And what you see in the medical literature of the time is this real attention to, with of course colonisation and imperialism, having such an influence on systems of power like medicine, you see a real turn in ideas about who is actually capable of feeling. So in the sort of golden age of hysteria the archetypal hysteric woman who was a white upper or middle class woman who had exposure to all the spoils of colonial wealth so she had coffee and chocolate and leisure and clothes and she was having under all this nervous kind of stimulation all the time. So she was being bombarded and she was unwell and then there were physicians who imagined this almost sliding scale of civility. At the end of this scale were black, ethnically diverse women, colonised women and racialised women who were deemed incapable of feeling anything and this is of course rooted in racist biology, racist anthropology but it ricochets. So it's really a myth that's really really embedded. So I wondered if you could speak to this. I mean we see that those eugenic theories were basically scientific theories or myths were created to colonise people to say these people are superior, these people are better than the others and because for instance black women had, there was a whole theory around the size of their skulls or the thickness of their skin and they could feel as much pain which meant that it was easier to justify colonisation and oppression and there's all these scientific myths that were created and if you see the diagrams from that time they perpetuate or reinforce those kinds of myths that were created being created by the colonisers. Again we come back to who had the power and the privilege to write these texts and to print, access to print in, access to public information and opinion basically so they could sway information and opinion according to their beliefs and attitudes and it becomes so deeply embedded in society that even now of course we see that that is very much rooted in the kind of racial bias that's in the medical domain about and how the impact it has on who gets diagnosed and who gets treated and the right racial disparity in our medical and healthcare domain as well. But at that time, yes, I mean, basically even though it's kind of the fact that it's being racialised and yes black women could feel all these emotions for instance black and brown and minoritised women couldn't feel as much as white women but it is still kind of a benevolent sexism and notion of what they were trying to protect white women from being swayed by their emotions and not performing their role as child bearers or giving or having children and especially because at that time women's rights and suffragettes and women's rights were coming up they were worried that women, white women in particular were not having as much children and that links in very much to the great replacement theory because there was this idea that the minorities because they were going into these communities where they had these beliefs and I write a little bit about in my book Motherhood as well about it about how they thought that black and brown women or minoritised, colonised women could have children very easily and so they were giving birth very easily and they could recover and start working in fields the next day, they were writing in their diaries but also the fact that they had large families. White women on the other hand were considered frail and fragile because they were not as strong, sturdy their skins were not as thick or their skulls were not as small so they felt more and they were worried that the better people would become less in our society and that happens even now the whole idea around reproductive justice and is this fear of great replacement theory about the fact that white women were not giving birth so by protecting them from those kind of external stimuli there was also an attempt to protect the racialised hierarchy in our society as well You mentioned reproductive justice there and of course we've seen over the last year especially the way that there is this real retrenching of the idea that women are reproductive units and that our emotional relationship to ourselves in terms of our mothering, our individuality is again being called into question by systems of power who want to do exactly what you're saying which is entrench a hierarchy, a reproductive hierarchy and as you write in your introduction and throughout the book and I know this is something that's very important to you we know throughout history that when women express emotions that they can be seen as unstable and they risk losing body autonomy and agency and just recently in fact just in the last couple of days the politician Stella Creasy was reported to social services by a man who believed that her outspoken feminist beliefs were a danger to her children Absolutely We also know in the states I'm not sure if it happens here but there are women especially women of colour who fear reporting feelings of postnatal depression or mental health because there have been many cases in which children have been attempted to be taken away from their mothers with these perceptions of maternal fitness coming into question so I wonder if you could think or sorry if you could talk a little bit about your feelings about this connection between gendered emotions and the control of bodies specifically around reproduction I mean it's such a deeply important topic about how controlling women's emotions is an attempt to control their bodies very much so United Nations talks about that everybody should have bodily autonomy in their agenda they don't mention that everybody should have emotional autonomy as well but those are very much interlinked in terms of who's allowed to take decisions, make decisions about their bodies how valid their own opinions are and often women's opinions are invalidated by calling them hysterical or over excitable or over emotional and that's been the case through history we see that in historical records we see that in contemporary society we see in medical domain as well and you give the example of Stella Creasy and that's another attempt to one monitor what maternal emotions should look like and what women are allowed to say and speak but also keep women out of the public domain and have opinions because that has always been the kind of no patriarchal framework the whole idea that because men were more rational and logical in control of the emotions they were allowed and had the ability to make important decisions while women because they were over excitable and not in control of the emotions were not capable of making important decisions and that's very much linked to in workplaces how leadership bias that we see as well so we see that women are not this notion of gravitas is also again linked to hierarchy as well and so in terms of kind of moving away from autonomy but yes, again there's a racialization in it and I have personal experience of it I felt deeply uncomfortable talking about the fact or saying anything that I was struggling with motherhood or early motherhood or I had any mental health aspect or issues because I was very worried about the judgments that are imposed on especially as a brown woman on me about my fitness or suitability to mother even things like very simple things like going for a trek or hike I fear, I face more public judgment in terms of what I allow my children to do for instance if they're shouting or screaming I've been told to go back where you come from because if you can't control your children or the fact that they need to use the toilet I always ask my husband who's white to take them into the trees because I'm not doing this because I know that I'll be judged more as a brown woman instead of as a white man because he has the power, the privilege and that kind of privilege to do so so I do think that the notion of how we navigate our space and our world is as people our bodily autonomy and our emotional autonomy are very much interlinked and the kind of judgments that are placed on us are very much interlinked as well very much the uses of anger you touch a little bit on suffrage there just of course another example of a sort of coincident with the witch trials of women's emotions being especially women's emotions being weaponised against them and women's political, social work in public space activism being sort of pathologised and reduced into this you know hysteria there were so many articles in the newspaper around the time of the fight for women's suffrage that would like these women are just hysterical virgos and you know they're all suffering from some nervous instability and they will leave us with armies of wasted spinsters that you know need so there was this real fear again of any sort of mobilisation because the power of emotion is known right this is why it's so fit this is why it's pathologised this is why because we know that it's so powerful that it changes the world but also the collective power is much more it's got power the collective notion and the collective rage especially in women and when we mobilise that together as individuals you might feel like we cannot navigate the world and break those step outside of social norms we cannot transgress those norms sometimes in workplace in society at home but the collective power is something that patriarchy fears you know and that's why then women got together against the productive justice this outpouring of kind of anger against abortion taking of abortion rights across the world not just in the US but in other places what happened in Iran recently the collective power is something what patriarchy fears the most and I think when we mobilise that we've seen it time and time again that is what that is how we can actually seep in that can seep into the kind of individual subconscious and we become more empowered to step outside these codes that have been set for us so I think yes I do think that mobilising that collective power is something that we need to do time and time again and again I think why people fear that is because around these ideas of social contagion as well and the witch trials for that as well that one if this idea spreads then women are becoming more hysterical and hysteria especially was linked very much to social contagion and that everybody will start behaving like this and then how are we going to control and oppress them you know and throughout hysterical you really brilliantly explode this myth that there's anything natural or biological or evolutionary about the gendering of emotions this is very much social cultural constructs and learning about how our emotions become gendered I think it's crucial as you point out for imagining an equitable emotional feature for all genders so I wanted to know how do you envisage an equitable emotional future what does it look like yeah thank you so much yeah what does it feel like I do think that we need to shatter this dismantle this binary of masculinity and femininity first of all because when we are trapped into that that there are some ideas of what is masculine and what is feminine are so deeply entrenched in our society that children from a very ungaged are conforming to this notion of what a girl should behave like what a woman should behave like what a man should behave like and that the women that you don't do that you are judged for it but we also internalise those expectations as well and there is a lot of research which shows that even now in workplaces certain attributes are considered masculine and certain attributes are considered feminine so men are supposed to have gravitas men are supposed to be self driven motivated, authoritative all those kind of things which are very positive emotions but they are always considered inferior in terms of leadership capabilities so when women and that's why we see women don't are as much represented on boards or in leadership positions and there is a whole debate and discussion we can do around what happened with Jesse Darden or Nicola Sturgeon and how that manifests in our society as well so I think dismantling those ideas of what is masculine and feminine so that when those kind of morality aspects associated with it those kind of superiority hierarchical aspects associated with are dismantled along with it as well which means that every person has the freedom to choose what emotions we feel and how we express them and it seems like a bit kind of oh it's going to be such a chaotic world that they live in that we are going to all show our emotions but I do think that those ideas those binary ideas and those rules that we establish in our society also establish those kind of display rules in our society because we experience emotions but we always regulate and suppress them according to the display rules so right now if I'm feeling extremely angry I can't start I mean I can but I can't start screaming right now because I feel like okay this is a professional domain and display rules here so we always kind of monitoring these display rules but we also know from research that women are hyper aware of these display rules because they know that there's more judgment and punishment associated with them transgressing those display rules so once we start dismantling those ideas or those binaries which is so deeply rooted in our language in the verse we used in the images everything in the media, political messaging we then actually start challenging those display rules that have been set in our society and so we start becoming more egalitarian and individuating people rather than pushing them into groups like okay this is a black woman so we can associate an angry black woman trope with her or this is a man so boys can't cry and that he's being feminine if he's crying or that if a woman is showing anger then she's being hysterical so those kind of labels can be dismantled along with that as well and I think once we start owning our emotions and being able to have a healthy language around our emotionalities then perhaps we move towards a more egalitarian world Thank you so much Prager I'm sure that there are some brilliant questions hands are going up what I like to see, yes I'm going to go in what I thought was an order so forgive me we have a rovin mic coming so this use that with the beautiful head headband Hello Thank you so much for being here One of the things that I was most horrified to read after the 2016 election in America was the number of white women who voted for Trump How do we build a coalition with women who seem to be benefiting from the status quo if it's that coalition that change will depend on That's a brilliant question Thank you so much I do think that yes when we talk about women obviously not all women are equal and there's a hierarchy within women and we start acknowledging that as well that some women benefit more from patriarchy or proximity to patriarchy as well and I do think white women perhaps benefit more from patriarchy because they don't face those racialized racialization and the associated judgment and penalization and punishment that comes with it so I do think that even like within data science I think we start sometimes looking at data and I start looking at data and I see that in diversity inclusivity initiatives everything women and men if we have appointed 40% women we are doing really well but some women white women benefit more from it for instance as an example there are around 20% women professors in the UK the data might have changed in the last 2-3 years but only around 2% of women of color so we have to start desegregating that data and start looking at the kind of intersectional aspects and I think that's where intersectionality comes into it as well as to your question about coalition I think that can only happen when people every person starts acknowledging their privilege and saying that even though I'm a woman I have certain privileges even though I'm a brown woman I have certain privileges compared to other and again intersectionality comes into it so I suppose this discussion has to be intersectional everybody has to start acknowledging their privilege and saying how do I leverage my privilege to help others who don't am I benefiting from patriarchy and there's a lot of internalized misogyny because we grow up internalizing those notions and norms and saying there's nothing wrong with it and we know that even in my book I wrote about in Germany they were trying to figure out satnavs and the voices a while ago and a lot of women thought that they wanted typically traditional masculine voice because they didn't like a woman giving them orders about where to go so that is again a form of internalized misogyny because women think men make better leaders in this research to show that as well I mean it's a long answer to your question about how do we build coalition but yes we have to start thinking about what our privileges are and how we leverage those I'm blinded a bit so if I miss anyone so it's a question here thank you thank you it's been amazing to hear your thoughts on so many issues I was just wondering about how these ideas of gender emotions particularly within history and mythology ties into how we approach the LGBT community particularly lesbians and our attitudes towards lesbians historically and maybe the different way the way we always consider them other women and the way we ignore them frequently particularly within politics I was just interested in your thoughts yeah I mean that's again the intersectional aspects of it and again I think that very much links to these kind of very narrow ideas of what a woman is and what a woman's role is and how a woman is supposed to behave and I think our patriarchal framework is very heteronormative because it benefits patriarchy and so so there are always people of women within the group of larger group of women who are pushed to the margins and fringes because they're not conforming to those kind of social codes of heteronormative society I do think I mean it's not an area that I've done a lot of research in but I would say that when you start looking at the intersectional aspects and discussion around those ideas of what a woman is they are very much linked to the template of what a woman is also very much linked to a white woman so even when we think these are biological facts that a woman has a certain level of testosterone or a certain level of estrogen or a certain level of that those narrow confines are there a lot of women as well who do not conform to them because they belong to different ethnic groups or different racial groups but their behaviours might be different as well or the way they dress all of those kind of things are linked very much to our perception of what a woman should be like and should look like like yeah I think that's that's kind of my if I may before hormones were named as such and when what would now be called endocrinologists were thinking about these substances in the human body that kind of contributed to the essence you know strength to sexuality to the sort of essence of human and when doctors were thinking about what these things were they were very much coded as masculineising or feminising so feminising feminising so some of these sort of late Victorian doctors were talking about what we now know to be estrogen and testosterone and saying you know there is this again this kind of sliding scale of femininity so a woman with the most estrogen or what they called then you know the female sort of glandular substance was very nurturing passive, silent, you know loving, plump lovely cheeks, big breasts and women who lacked the estrogen tended to be ambitious smart, not want kids or masculine masculine so coded more masculine it was always on this sort of scale of nurture these sort of idealised patriarchal feminine qualities so I think that that really played into the idea of how at least how I know about the medical history of how lesbian identity was conceived of in a sort of pathological sense of a kind of lack of this feminising substance I think the closer to masculine notion I thought of as again it's very much linked to those bindries and even now when we talk about testosterone everybody talks of them in terms of male hormone but actually women have testosterone as well it's not that it's just a male hormone so I think those scientific myths or kind of misconceptions very much contribute to that and it was you know these signs often emerges with myths first myths storytelling first huge sticking power have a question from one of our audience members online throughout history were menopausal women viewed as being more or less likely to suffer from hysteria and wandering wombs so menopause is not something that was talked about quite a lot openly but it was very much linked to this kind of notion of grandmother hypothesis that after a certain age women had to stop childbearing because they had to kind of look after the children that their daughters were bearing so they were supposed to be grandmothers and pass on their kind of genes and carry on the race so the survival of the fittest and so they had they needed to have certain kind of role to still survive, to be alive otherwise if they're not looking after children or having children what is their role in society really so what is their value so yes I think older women were seen to be more hysterical because obviously they were dried up, shriveled all those kind of things that were used in for them in historical text they didn't have as much feminising hormones they weren't as close to the feminine ideals of reproductive powers still their value to society and so older women, widowed women younger women who were not married having sex or having children all of these women were more likely to encounter or have hysteria and be hysterical so I think we went one, two, three I think, yeah hi, thank you for doing this it's so important I think just even having the information out there for women to read the history I might empower women to continue to tell their own stories just I don't even know where to start I have loads of questions but I might ask too as a reader reading your books it made me really angry and I had to put the books away for a little while and hide them and take them back out so as the writer is how did you mind yourselves writing these books and the other question what was my other question was about menopause do you think we're in the midst of a revolution where women's healthcare is concerned and just your answer on that one as well thank you thank you so much yes as I say in the book this book might make you sad or angry or neither or both everything is okay and yes I do think that when I do a lot of research and I read about it it makes me extremely angry it makes me extremely sad at times I feel all those emotions sometimes I have to really also reflect on my own biases and prejudices as well while I'm writing I have to reflect on the language and prejudices are too heavy it's a heavy burden to carry and I think sometimes you have to hide it away not come to it take a step back look after mental health it's an exhausting process and I'm sure you'll agree it's an exhausting process to write about such topics and I keep saying that I'm going to write a really funny book very soon where I don't have to think about any of these things and I'm going to just write a really which I'm sure is exhausting to try and be funny but yeah I do feel like when you feel so strongly about something and if you don't write then it has to be said as you say and if it mobilises women other women to share their stories and I think that's one of the biggest happiest thing for me when women contact me and say actually I felt seen or felt heard or felt that I can share talk about my experience as well and I think that's really fantastic and in terms of your second question in terms of men who pause or generally about women's health I do think that the conversation is opening up like the motherhood, like choice like bodily autonomy, like the ability so we're challenging some of those things absolutely I do think still we are not talking about it in an intersectional way I don't think we are talking desegregating the data so even when I was writing motherhood in the UK that was 2020 when I was writing it in 2020-21 the data was still not desegregated in terms of women's infertility there was no data on black or brown women at that time about how many went through IVF cycles and I think as a brown woman going through some of those infertility struggles I felt very alone and isolated because I didn't see anybody like me or being talked about me or even knowing that I was not alone similarly about breast cancer similarly about menopause as well I do think that we need to without going into biological essentialism we do need to talk about the intersectional aspects of it yes, we are having some racialized discussions but we keep talking about the same thing and repeating the same thing like the fact that black women die four times more in maternity and child care we've been talking repeating the data for five years now, four years and I think what happens next I think that going over that hurdle and taking the next step is a big thing and I do think that policy makers have to come on board and the government has to come on board There is actually a question from an audience member online asking about this exact issue that black women are four times more likely to die during or after childbirth and as you say this is I don't know how many reports and articles appear in the press I think it was 2018 there was a report the Royal College of Obstengining put out this huge report and the government said we should do something and we are now so much more aware of this discriminatory biases and the way that they affect people say it is time now for way overdue time for genuine policy change and real action so we know but what exactly as you say what next but also as you say Elina this came out in 2018 and I wrote about it in my books wave and I wrote it in 2019 and since then I have done more research in medical textbooks and we realise actually this is not something that can be just tackled on one front it has to be tackled whole systemically and structurally because even in medical textbooks this language, this discriminatory attitudes are so deeply embedded in the way that pain is talked about the way that women feel pain or not or the way they over-exhibit their pain and some women are seen more or the fact that some women can give birth more easily so they are not giving as much pain relief during childbirth and those medical textbooks the language, the way the doctors are trained the healthcare professionals are trained that has to change as well because those are the people who are going to make real change I think really if there is genuine systemic changes that happen it needs to think about the way that these enduring social and cultural biases sort of uphold policies and biases in systems like medicine where people's lives are at stake and feel like the only way forward maybe is to completely rewrite medical curricula by people who are most affected at the intersections of these biases Thank you for a great question You talked earlier on about working on human-computer interfaces and I guess one of the things that's coming up there is the modern fashion for artificial intelligences and the danger of gendered biases getting into how those things are trained I was also wondering about science fiction stories when men create artificial beings from Hephaestus making Pandora all the way through to films like Metropolis and Ex Machina where the man creates an artificial being in the form of a woman and this is a robot so you would think that it would be devoid of emotions but somehow having been gendered female it ends up being unstable and dangerous Thank you so much for that question absolutely and one of the last chapters of the book hysterical is about emotional AI it's about sex robots it's about how that is getting ingrained in our technology and I think that for me besides all the historical text and reading about chamber pots was one of the most difficult chapters for me to write because I had to troll through some of those forums and read some of those discussions and comments and it's actually I'm feeling just chill just thinking about it because you think this is what's happening now this is not in the past this is what's happening now and this is what's the future what does the future hold for us so yes I wrote an article about emotions and emotion AI in Wired magazine recently but technology and bias is something that I'm really deeply interested in and I've worked on for quite some time about racial bias and gender bias and wrote about it in Suea in my book but yes I mean the idealised notion of womanhood that's being created through those sex robots means that are being created the behaviours that are embedded even what we see in media and films and in TV are actually a danger a threat because those are the kind of synthetic women are kind of being portrayed as this idealised as I say idealised women so what are the consequences for real women about in terms of our expectations and norms around them and that's a question that I raise here as well about how do we how do we make sure technology is free of bias but also how do we challenge some of these idealised notions or behaviours that are being embedded in these sex robots about and I'm all up for sexual liberation but it's something that we need to question if they are designing these robots in very idealised traditional feminine attributes of passiveness of just serving the man and those behaviours and norms will get seeped into and at the moment it's a very small thing it's not so widely spread but there's a real danger as we go more into towards technological development and advancement we've seen that widely in even the voice assistant systems about how they were feminised about how they were to design Alexa, Siri, they were all designed in a very traditional feminine way of women being subservient and serving men and serving others, their role was that there was also a whole report done with the United Nations and we did some research in the fact that when these voice assistants were given any kind of sexual harassment statements or any kind of sexually explicit commands, they did not stand up or they thought they were designed in this kind of very passive form model and the most I think Alexa or Siri one of them said was I'd blush if I could and that is it and so we looked at across all the number about and I think some of that has changed Microsoft has done some work on it but those again the notion of traditional feminine attributes and what the role of women is in society is being seeped into the technology as well I think we might have time for one more quick question sorry if you didn't get your... I think there's somebody at the edge sorry if you didn't get a chance but thank you for bringing it Oh now I feel it's a real edge of responsibility bend on my high I'll try As someone who works in the field of education and spends quite a lot of their time with young people there's a real kind of interesting I suppose I don't know I'm not quite sure what the right term is with a lot of the young people that I work with they seem in comparison to and forgive me I don't mean to cast aspersions on the audience I think most of us are out of second education in university there seems to be a real kind of with some of the young people that I work with their views around LGBTQ plus or trans it's almost like they sort of look at older generations so what is the big deal which is fabulous the idea of around pronouns they're kind of like yeah okay that's how they choose which on the one hand is wonderful but simultaneously with there's a sheer overwhelming access to things like social media and this almost kind of like enforcement of expectation and it's not just with adolescent girls I mean that is by far in a way the thing that is discussed most in the media and such like but we see it with adolescent boys as well this notion of emotions and regulation and expectations and the such like and I'm just interested in your thoughts as to how do we as people who are I suppose did not live that experience of this constant bombardment and constant access to what societies all over on the one hand are championing and wanting to push forward around exploding these myths simultaneously you also have at the click of a button people really doubling down on these expectations around how women and men and those who do not feel they occupy either of those spaces how we should I mean also check our own biases and privilege but how we help younger people navigate that space when it really is a kind of unknown world yeah thank you so much for that brilliant question something I obviously feel very strongly about as an educator as a parent and I work with a lot of schools and universities on this yeah absolutely the new generation gives me a lot of hope and optimism I'm so hopeful and I'm so energised by them whenever I speak with young people because they're just like it is like it's not a big deal just respect people's identities you know and they can dismantle some of those things but there is a lot of small misinformation around them people like Andrew Tate was not the only one but there are other people and they have access to this on TikTok on Instagram around body image but around those ideas of what is masculine how to be a man, how to be a boy are very much like but those ideas are passed on in a very kind of benevolent way so I was in a taxi after actually the launch of hysterical I was in a taxi in London to the taxi driver about he asked me why you're here and I said I just did a BBC recording for this about gendered emotions and he said what do you think what Andrew Tate and I was like how long do you have and he was like have you ever listened to him he actually says some really good things about how to look after women I was like do women want to be looked after in the way that you want to look after them and so we had a discussion for 15 minutes gave me a lot of thought in terms of how they pass it on in a very benevolent way as well about that we're doing good for women I think that how do we help them navigate is by developing critical faculties I think critical thinking skills are so so important that curriculums don't handle schools don't really have time and energy to invest in but from an early childhood if we help our children understand that any information they get they can't just absorb it without critically analysing the social, cultural context who's saying this why are they saying this and be sceptical I think a little bit of scepticism is good in children it does become varying when my own children start asking why are you saying this are you sure about this don't apply those rules on me but I think critical thinking is so important in this age of information, misinformation but also more information and knowledge around fake news and misinformation how to handle this barrage of information because we know that we cannot rationalise all the information we are getting so yes I think critical thinking in the curriculum thank you so much you've been an absolutely brilliant audience I'm sorry if you didn't get your question answered but thank you all for your fantastic questions and to say a big round of applause to Dr Prager Eglon Prager Eleanor thank you so much really fascinating discussion I work in the pregnancy charity sector during the day so I read all these reports by birthrights and 5 times more and Muslim women's network on the disparities in maternal deaths and stillbirths and it's really shocking and it's going backwards it's not improving maternal deaths went up last year that's time in a long time and it's very to answer your question my usual way of dealing with it is like four glasses of white wine but it's getting angry as well is really really important and spreading the word as well and making sure that it's not just an echo chamber of people within the pregnancy sector and those reports are led by black and Asian minority ethnic women and it feels like that echo chamber that everyone's just talking to themselves it needs to get out there it needs to get as much publicity and hopefully the government will do more than just silence on the subject at some point next year when they're voted out thank you so much both Eleanor and Prager are going to be outside signing their books and of course if you're watching at home you can buy copies online we can't magic you a signature across the airwaves but yeah thank you so much and thank you to everyone who's sent us into today's talk if you have any photos or any thoughts or any questions we've got a hashtag hisfest 2023 and you can tag us at hisfestuk as well and have a whole big history conversation if you're wonderful thank you so much take care