Michael: Alright Kevin, quick challenge. Name three brilliant women from British history who weren't a queen or a writer. Kevin: Uh... Florence Nightingale? Does she count? And... oh boy. I'm drawing a blank. My history teacher apparently forgot to mention them. Michael: Exactly. And that's the entire point. It's this giant, gaping hole in our collective memory that today's book dives into headfirst. We're talking about Bloody Brilliant Women: The Pioneers, Revolutionaries, and Geniuses Your History Teacher Forgot to Mention by Cathy Newman. Kevin: Right, and Newman is a veteran journalist, not a traditional academic, which you can feel in the writing. It's packed with stories, almost like an investigative report into a historical cover-up. The book was widely praised for its fresh perspective, though some readers found the sheer volume of stories a bit overwhelming. Michael: It’s definitely dense, but in the best way. It’s like she’s trying to correct centuries of omission in a single volume. And that feeling of a 'cover-up' is exactly where the book starts. It asks a simple, powerful question: where are all the women?

Kevin: That’s a question I think a lot of us have asked, even subconsciously. You look at the statues in a city or the names in a textbook, and it’s overwhelmingly male. Why is that? Where did they all go? Michael: Well, Newman kicks off with her own personal "eureka moment." She was reading a standard "History of Britain" book and realized that, apart from the Queen and Margaret Thatcher, women were practically invisible. They were footnotes. It sparked this frustration that led her to dig deeper. Kevin: I can relate to that frustration. It feels like you’ve been given a puzzle with half the pieces missing. Michael: Precisely. And this isn't just a feeling or an anecdotal observation. The book provides cold, hard data. In 1885, the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography was published. It was meant to be the definitive record of every significant figure in British history. Sixty-two volumes. Guess what percentage of the entries were for women. Kevin: Oh, I'm bracing myself. I'm going to guess something low, like 10%? Michael: Lower. Kevin: Five? Michael: Three percent. Kevin: Three?! That's not an oversight, that's a policy. That's a deliberate choice. How do you even justify that? Michael: You justify it with an idea the book returns to again and again. Women were packed away in a metaphorical cupboard marked ‘Lowly, Ancillary Roles; Housewives, etc.’ Their contributions were seen as domestic, secondary, and therefore, not 'history.' History was about kings, wars, and politics. Everything else was just… life. Kevin: So, the definition of 'history' itself was the first barrier. If it didn't happen in Parliament or on a battlefield, it didn't count. Michael: Exactly. And this was reinforced by what historians call the 'doctrine of separate spheres.' The idea was that man's world was public—work, politics, war. Woman's world was private—the home, the family, the emotions. A man’s job was to achieve; a woman’s job was to support his achievement. Kevin: That’s incredibly limiting. But surely there were women who broke out of that sphere. Michael: Absolutely. And that's where the book shines. It uncovers these figures who defied the narrative. Take Ada Nield Chew. Ever heard of her? Kevin: Can't say I have. Michael: She was a working-class woman in the 1890s, working in a clothing factory in Crewe. The conditions were abysmal, the pay was a pittance, and women were paid far less than men for the same work. She was furious. But what could she do? She couldn't vote, she had no political power. Kevin: So what happened? Michael: She started writing anonymous letters to the local newspaper, the Crewe Chronicle. She signed them "A Crewe Factory Girl." And these letters were electric. She laid out, with forensic detail, the economic exploitation, the hypocrisy of the owners, the sheer injustice of it all. She became a local sensation. Kevin: Wow. So she was an activist before that was even really a thing for women of her class. Did it work? Michael: It worked in the sense that it blew the lid off the whole operation. But her identity was eventually discovered, and she was promptly fired. The factory owners couldn't stand the exposure. But her story is the perfect example of what the book is about. She wasn't a duchess or a general. She was a factory worker with a pen and a conscience, and she was a revolutionary. Yet, she’s almost entirely forgotten. Kevin: Because her revolution happened in a factory and in the pages of a local paper, not in the halls of power. She was outside the 'official' sphere of history. Michael: That’s the anatomy of hidden history right there. Her story, and thousands like it, were deemed not important enough for the official record.

Kevin: It's easy to think of history as this straight line of progress, especially for women's rights. You know, things were bad, then the suffragettes came along, then things got better, and so on. But it sounds like the book argues it's much messier. Michael: Messier is the perfect word. And the book makes a truly shocking point to prove it. It argues that in some very specific and important ways, a woman in Anglo-Saxon England, around the year 800, had more legal rights and autonomy than a woman in the year 1800. Kevin: Hold on. You're telling me a woman in the so-called 'Dark Ages' was better off than a woman in Jane Austen's time? How is that even possible? Michael: It sounds completely counter-intuitive, but the evidence is fascinating. In Anglo-Saxon society, when a woman married, her husband had to pay her a morgengifu, a 'morning-gift' of property and money. This gift was hers alone. She had total legal control over it. She could sell it, bequeath it, whatever she wanted. Kevin: Okay, that's already a big deal. What else? Michael: Divorce. An Anglo-Saxon woman could walk out of an unhappy marriage. And if she took the children with her, she was legally entitled to half of the marital property. Kevin: That is staggering. By the 1800s, a woman was basically her husband's property. She couldn't own anything, couldn't divorce him easily... So what happened? How did things go so far backward? Michael: The Norman Conquest in 1066 was a major turning point. The Normans brought a much more rigid, patriarchal legal system from continental Europe. Over the next few centuries, these rights were systematically eroded. So, the path of progress wasn't a straight line up; it was a peak followed by a deep, long valley that women spent the next 800 years trying to climb out of. Kevin: That completely reframes the struggle. It wasn't about gaining new rights, but about reclaiming lost ones. But even within that climb, the book points out it wasn't a unified movement, right? I was fascinated by the idea of powerful women who were actually against women's suffrage. Michael: Yes, this is one of the most complex and brilliant parts of the book. It resists the temptation to paint all these women as proto-feminist heroes. It shows them in all their complicated glory. The prime example is Gertrude Bell. Kevin: The name sounds vaguely familiar. Michael: She was an absolute force of nature in the early 20th century. A polymathic explorer, archaeologist, writer, and political officer. She spoke multiple languages, trekked across the Arabian desert on a camel, and was so respected by tribal leaders that the British government relied on her intelligence. After World War I, she was instrumental in drawing the borders of the modern state of Iraq. She basically helped create a country. Kevin: Okay, so she's the definition of a 'bloody brilliant woman.' A trailblazer. She must have been a huge supporter of women getting the vote. Michael: She was the first secretary of the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League. Kevin: Wait, what? The woman who helped create Iraq was against women voting? How does that even compute? Michael: Her perspective was that women's suffrage was, in her words, a "silly distraction." She was focused on the grand imperial project, on shaping nations and global politics. To her, the domestic issue of the vote seemed trivial in comparison. She believed women's power lay in other spheres. Kevin: That's such a fascinating contradiction. It shows that there wasn't one single idea of what 'female power' or 'progress' looked like. Michael: Exactly. And she wasn't alone. The explorer Mary Kingsley, who traveled through West Africa, also argued against suffrage, saying there were more important issues. These women weren't simple villains in the suffrage story; they were brilliant, powerful figures with their own complex worldviews. The book forces you to grapple with that complexity. Progress isn't simple, and the people who drive it are even less so.

Kevin: So when you put it all together, the story of women's history isn't just about what was forgotten. It's also about the complicated, sometimes contradictory ways women themselves navigated power and defined their own roles. Michael: Exactly. The book isn't just a list of forgotten heroes to add to the history books. It's a fundamental re-evaluation of what we even consider 'history' and 'power.' It argues that power isn't just about being a king or a general. It's about writing anonymous letters from a factory floor. It's about designing a textile pattern that brings color into a grey, post-war world. It's about discovering pulsars in the night sky, even if a man gets the Nobel Prize for it. Kevin: Right. It’s about the women who ran the codebreaking operations at Bletchley Park, the women who drove ambulances into the heart of war zones, the women who invented life-saving devices for fighter planes, like Beatrice Shilling and her 'Miss Shilling's Orifice' that fixed the Spitfire engines. Michael: Yes! All those stories are in here. These 'small' acts, these 'ancillary' roles, collectively built modern Britain. The book's ultimate argument is that by leaving these women out, we haven't just been telling a story that's unfair to women. We've been telling a story that's fundamentally untrue. We've been missing half the plot. Kevin: It’s a powerful and necessary correction to the record. It makes you see the world differently, to look for the hidden figures in every story. Michael: It really does. And it leaves you with a crucial question. It makes you think, whose brilliant stories are we forgetting today? Kevin: That's a powerful question to end on. We'd love to hear your thoughts. Jump into our community channels and tell us about a 'bloody brilliant woman' from your own life or history that more people should know about. Let's keep adding to the story. Michael: This is Aibrary, signing off.