The Financial Times: The Diary: Amanda Foreman

Illustration by Luke Waller

Illustration by Luke Waller

More than $5tn has evaporated from global share prices since China’s market meltdown began. Everyone’s asking the same thing: “When will it bottom out?” But, as I watch the wild fluctuations in the markets, I can’t help wondering why the experts weren’t just a tiny-teeny bit more suspicious about the euphoric economic data that was previously coming out of China.

When I was in the country recently, the signs of Potemkin-like prosperity were everywhere. I was travelling with a film crew to shoot the four-part history series The Ascent of Woman for BBC2. Yes, I soon realised, Shanghai has dozens of swanky hotels and practically every shop that you’d find on the British high street, including Cath Kidston. Yet the sight of a Prada bag or two shouldn’t be overblown. Far more important in a modern economy is having indoor plumbing. I suppose there’s some remote cottage in Britain still being serviced by an outdoor privy.

But whole villages relying on communal latrines? In a word, no. China may be on course to become the world’s number one economic power, but what does that mean exactly if its citizens are still waiting for flush toilets?

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Daily Express: Lifting the veil on our past

Here’s a snippet to make the jaw drop. The women of Ancient Greece (you know, the place that created democracy) were so restricted in what they could do that they were no better off than the poor women of Afghanistan under the Taliban.

Meanwhile just down the road in Ancient Egypt women were treated almost as equals of men, so much so there were six lady pharaohs… who would have thought it?  All this and more came to light during the brilliantly inter- THE ASCENT OF WOMAN (BBC2) which took as its eminently reasonable thesis the fact that although women have always comprised half the human race we don’t seem to have  featured very prevalently in the history of mankind.

The noted historian Amanda Foreman set out to find out why. Unfortunately, as scholarly and thought- provoking as this new four- part documentary series was, I’m not sure she ever really answered the question.  In the earliest known societies, as far as anyone can tell, men and women really did live equally, sharing all manner of But this all changed pretty sharpish when society became more prosperous, resources  were not shared equally and some people started to have greater status than others.

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The Times: TV review: The Ascent of Woman

TV review The Ascent of WomanBy Andrew Billen

The Ascent of Woman
BBC Two
★★★★☆

Even the most overpaid enemy of wimmin’s herstory will earn his money if he manages to ridicule Dr Amanda Foreman’s The Ascent of Woman. Here, last night, was Foreman on Assyrian law in the 12th century BC. “In my opinion,” she said, “this is a harsh society where the law has become a charter for male oppression.” She had just told us that among the 112 laws recorded on a surviving tablet were death penalties for abortion and adultery, and permission for the wife of a rapist herself to be raped in punishment.

I loved “in my opinion”, not because it was a rhetorical flourish but because other evidence indeed suggested Assyrian women enjoyed rather more freedom than the tablet’s engravers would have liked. Although the first part of this new history of women strove to counter existing narratives of incessant female oppression or, perhaps worse, female irrelevance, it was never strident itself. “It is important not to prejudge the veil”, Foreman even said, having traced the headscarf, the wimple and the nun’s habit back to the Assyrians too (2,000 years before Islam). It gave, she pointed out, Assyrian women the chance to be in public. Repack episode one and you have a show called The Veil Unveiled.

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The Independent: The Ascent of Woman, TV review: The story of how a feminist hero came to legitimise misogyny

In this scholarly yet pacy BBC documentary, Dr Amanda Foreman started her search for answers a long, long way back

In this scholarly yet pacy BBC documentary, Dr Amanda Foreman started her search for answers a long, long way back

By Simon Usborne

In the current debate about the new feminism, and daily assaults on equality, I do not recall anyone stepping back very far from the contemporary world of pay gaps and thigh gaps to ask the most basic question: why is this a thing? Where do the roots of sexism lead, and how long are they? In the first episode of The Ascent of Woman, a scholarly yet pacy four-part documentary, Dr Amanda Foreman started her search for answers a long, long way back. As far as archaeologists can tell, Catalhöyük, a 9,000-year-old city in modern-day Turkey, was an equal society, and God was a seated woman attended by leopards.

Then things got bad. With agricultural surplus came currency and power, the harvesting of which chiefly became the concern of men and their bloodlines. After the Anatolian leopard woman, a figurine of whom Foreman observed, her binder of game-changing women were exceptions to the patriarchal rule.

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The Daily Mail: The historical heroines you’ve never heard of: From the Sumerian priestess poet to the English queen who revolutionised literature, the women who deserve to be remembered

By Ruth Styles

From Boadicea of the Iceni to Queen Victoria, there is no shortage of women who have made their mark on history.

But for every Eleanor of Aquitaine or Elizabeth I, there have been many more whose efforts have gone unrecognised, largely because of their sex.

Now a new BBC series, the Ascent of Women, aims to change all that and shed light on the forgotten heroines of the past.

From the start, says presenter and historian Amanda Foreman, men have ‘conspired’ to control speech while women, lacking the educational opportunities of their male peers, have failed to realise that ‘speech is power’.

But not everyone has been content to remain silent. From the Celtic warrior queen who kept the Romans from her door to the Sumerian priestess who invented literature, meet the women who deserve to be remembered.

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The Telegraph: Why I’m shouting about the 4,000 year campaign to gag women in our history books

Photo: Everett Collection/Rex Features

Photo: Everett Collection/Rex Features

Speech is power. That is the message of the upcoming film Suffragette, starring Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan, about the women who followed Emmeline Pankhurst to prison.

It’s such a simple message. Yet for women this issue has never been simple. Leaving aside the traditional hostility towards women who speak out, our own fears and anxieties are sufficient to keep us silent. A recent survey found that many women were more frightened of public speaking than either dying or death.

I will be honest here: I know how they feel. I get extremely frightened whenever I take part in a public debate. All my life I’ve suffered from ‘Five Minutes Syndrome’ – the right answer comes to me five minutes after I’ve spoken.

I can write perfectly fluently but I can’t speak that way in public. I just wasn’t born with the gift of the gab; the same way I’m rotten at sports.

For every Emma Watson, Sheryl Sandberg, Nicola Sturgeon or Margaret Thatcher – women who all, in their different ways, have proved their ability to hold a crowd and transmit a powerful message through the spoken word – there are untold millions of others who are more like me: women for whom the challenge is to separate out the negative voices in our head from the real ones outside.

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The Telegraph: What’s on TV tonight?

Photo: BBC/Silver River

Photo: BBC/Silver River

The Ascent of Woman

BBC Two, 9.00pm; Wales, 11.15pm

By Catherine Gee

“There has never been a better time to be born a woman,” says Dr Amanda Foreman as she opens this four-part documentary series about the fairer sex. True, of course, but gender equality eludes women in many parts of the world and that is the premise of Foreman’s series – that the history of women is one of swings and reversions rather than a linear march of progress. She kicks off tonight’s opener with a fascinating explanation of the ebb and flow of women’s status through time – archaeological finds from Neolithic times in Anatolia, Turkey, for example, suggest a society in which women enjoyed near-equal status with men; ditto the ancient Sumerian culture in what is modern Iraq, until their privileges were stripped by Egyptian invaders in 2300 BC.

Dotted throughout are segments in which Foreman meets modern women from the areas she’s exploring to discuss the plight of their ancestors – it doesn’t bring intellectual weight to her argument, but their anecdotes do pack an emotional punch. Foreman is knowledgeable and her attention to historical detail impressive; it’s a compelling look at a subject worth exploring. VP

The Sunday Times: Pick of the day: The Ascent of Woman

Photo: Amanda Foreman

Photo: Amanda Foreman

The Ascent of Woman (BBC2, 9pm) 

The historian and biographer Dr Amanda Foreman really does want to rewrite history. In this series she sets out to show that a story of the world that excludes women “is an untruth that must be challenged.” In this first episode, titled Civilisation, her case studies include an Anatolian statue of a fleshy mother goddess, the Sumerian poet Enheduanna, who became the first author to be known by name, and the “ice maiden” preserved on the Russian steppe.

It is depressing, however, to see how quickly societies became obsessed with controlling women: the first law on veiling was written in Assyria 3,000 years ago; and it is hard to detect any female voices in ancient Athens because women, considered to be “imperfect”, were silenced. It is a serious look at a serious subject, its only gimmick a smart one: speaking to modern women from these grand civilisations about their feelings on the past and present.

The Sunday Times: Women’s equality dream comes true – 8,000 years ago

Photo: The Sunday Times

Photo: The Sunday Times

As a graduate student at Oxford I remember writing a throwaway sentence about Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, being a dilettante much addicted to “unhelpful dabbling” in politics. That was the standard line on her then: rich, pretty, oversexed, undereducated and willing to trade kisses for votes on behalf of the Whig party. Naturally such a person was unworthy of any serious study, especially anything to do with politics or power. If I’m honest, I think I was rather embarrassed by her. Georgiana seemed to be the kind of woman who confirmed every male prejudice about our fitness for public life.

I never questioned my own opinions until I was deep into my PhD thesis on attitudes to race in 18th-century England. I was interested in learning more about Earl Grey, the prime minister who as a young man in 1806 had proposed a motion to abolish the slave trade. While delving into his life I discovered his affair with Georgiana and her private letters about it.

 

The first time I read them it was like having a bucket of cold water thrown over my head. It was immediately apparent that everything I thought I knew about her was false. Worse, it was a vicious caricature of a brilliant, effective and tragic woman. I realised I had inadvertently colluded in the trashing of her reputation.

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