From thumbscrews to Tupperware, the Amazon rainforest to the plantations of South Carolina, Simone de Beauvoir to Beyoncé, this is the story of women as never heard before.
There is a neglected history. Not a sweeping, definitive, exhaustive history of the world but something quieter, more intimate and particular. Now in this episode, journalist Annabelle Hirsch reveal that history: a single journey, picked out in 101 objects, through the fascinating, too-often-overlooked, manifold histories of women, to show that the past has always been as complicated and fascinating as the women who peopled it.
From the objects you thought you knew, like the Bayeux tapestry, to those of domesticity, pleasure (a sixteenth century glass dildo) and subjugation (a thumbscrew), we uncover together the women celebrated by history and of women unfairly forgotten by it alike through its objects and learn that progress is not a linear progression from suppression to emancipation, but beyond all, a history of trying.
