YouSaid · the spoken record

Kate Mosse

lines on the record: 56
first: 2025-09-21
most recent: 2025-09-21
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I've got loads of things wrong, and there'll be lots of people in the book that people don't like, and I'll get lots of letters saying, why didn't you put such and such in? But it doesn't matter. The point is that the thing that will save us all, as it always has been, is talking and words and communication. And provided we keep talking to each other and listening to each other, then I kind of learnt to put myself more into the picture. And maybe that's just age. Maybe it's just age. You know, I'm a granny now. But it's not to do with feeling I have a different stake. It's not that. It's more that I've had great times and I've had terrible times. And you know what? They're all part of the same story.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bold enough, or I suppose, to tell the truth of your experience if you want to shine a spotlight on an experience that you feel matters for other people. And so having written that book, then when I wrote Warrior Queens in Quiet Revolutionaries, I used the research into my own great-grandmother's story to describe that. And with feminist history for every day of the year, I'm very much saying here I am an older feminist, saying to all of you, You can change the world guys. Don't let them make you feel that you can't speak or that you've got to be someone you don't want to be or that it's all just too hard. Everything that's worth having is going to be hard at some moment.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eight million of us in the UK, if we all down tools, you know, the amount of money that you'd have to pay if carers were paid would be probably equivalent to the NHS budget. And care for me is a feminist issue. Because the vast majority of carers are women. And waiting for that book to come up, I did feel utterly sick with anxiety about not anxiety, but nerves about being so myself. But of course, you in the end. You have to be.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's a really astute question because actually until I wrote It's not really a memoir, but until I wrote a book called An Extra Pair of Hands, which is my own story of being a full-time carer for now 17 years. And I was asked to write it by The Wellcome Trust, who were looking for people with lived experience of key social issues of our time. So not clinicians and not professionals working in these areas. And because I have talked about being a carer and how that impacts and everything, they approach me and it took me a long time to decide whether to do it because I don't normally put myself on the page. I see my role as creating imaginary characters to tell stories and also to make space for other women to tell their stories. But it felt very, very important because carers are everywhere hidden in plain sight.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Try to make a difference in the way that you can make a difference. Some people are best on a stage speaking. Some people are best behind the scenes. The great American librarian, Dorothy Porter, who very quietly, completely decolonized librarianship in America before her. She worked in Washington for 40 years, all books by black authors were either in colonization or slavery. And she just gently read the whole library so that they were in biography and environmental science and in literature and in history, in other words fairness, just treat people fairly yes.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And again, in the book, within all of the book is a plea for people to respect other people's priorities. The example I give, which is deliberately not political, is I put all of my fundraising efforts and support efforts in the medical side into Parkinson's. Because my beloved dad lived with Parkinson's and died from Parkinson's. It doesn't mean that I look at people who support cancer research and say, well, you're terrible because you're not supporting Parkinson's. I respect that their priority has come somewhere else. There are things that we all need to react to, genocide in Gaza. Deliberate starvation in Sudan, femicide in Afghanistan, of course. But in a broader sense, Honoring other people's priorities is a very important thing. Do something.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things that are of very significant importance to people in other parts of the world, to global majority country, all of these kind of things. That's why the book is global. Obviously, it is skewed in that I only speak English and French. And so I am reliant on other people if I'm trying to write about a person from South America or whatever, but I have done my best to include people from all sorts of global communities because everybody has different priorities. This place is something else that I say in the book and I hope people will Embrace, if not necessarily enjoy, which is that. We have different priorities. That's okay Somebody is not speaking out on one issue, it doesn't mean that they're terrible”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The environmental holocaust that is going on, climate change, global warming. And so I see it within the book as my job to say, did you know that global warming was first identified by a woman who has been written out of the history books? But it was Eunice Newton Foote, who in 1836 wrote a paper about what we would now call greenhouse gases. So in other words, I think I want to respect what are the focuses for campaigning and issues now. And also introduce”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think, well, at the moment, I would say very strongly the two are trans issues and environmental issues. I have a lot of environmental campaigners in the book, but going right back to the great Rachel Carson Silent Spring and her writing that changed the whole pesticides policy really globally, but America in the first instance. So I would say those are the two that come out particularly when I go to schools. And it's just very interesting. That's very interesting because you're much younger than me. So the issues of my coming of age in feminism were absolutely pornography, but also we were all very, very focused on nuclear war. We were frightened. We thought that at any moment there would be another Hiroshima. And it's not that young people are not alarmed about the state of the planet, but the focus is different. It's about the...”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of clearing up after other people and leaves her kitchen and goes to a shed at the end of her garden. She was an inventor. And with the immortal words, I suppose if no one else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I better do it myself. And she invented the dishwasher, which is pretty much the machine that we have today. And she set up her own company, Cochrane Garris. Garris was her unmarried name and was this powerhouse. But I just love the idea and how appropriate the dishwasher was invented by a woman. I'd enough”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yes, I have a silly favorite entry and a sensible favorite entry. My sensible favorite entry, I think, is Pauli Murray. I read her autobiographies, two volumes of them. I looked at the pattern of her life, the way that she never stopped fighting for justice and fairness. And she was not somebody that I knew before I embarked on all of this. She was somebody recommended to me by, in fact, an American woman, I think a woman, it was hard, I couldn't tell from the name in my woman in history campaign. So she was, for me, a new, not discovery. So she would very much be one of my top 10. In the silly category, it would have to be Josephine Cochrane. Because I just love this story of woman middle class woman in Chicago late 19th century has clearly just had enough, like a lot of us had.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the reasons that it's easy to divide people is because there are no longer shared common narratives. But one of the shared common narratives that does still exist is sport. And so I think sport is very important in community and in cohesion and in showing that we can all make a difference simply by supporting the lionesses. The nightmare is, obviously, because the lionesses did so well this summer, my S is already out of date. I will have to update it in the reprint.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Secondly, they said that any football club that lets the women play on their pitches will be banned. In other words, the FA banned women's football and killed it Stone Dead, and that was still in place in the 70s. So the story of women's sport is not that women have never played sport or people, men, women, everybody didn't want to watch it. It was a deliberate jealousy and lack of control. And so these stories, again, when you tell that story, people go, but that's terrible. And I say, yeah, it's really terrible, but look what's happening now. And that has happened because women have continued to say, but we want to play sports too. And now we are in a time where women's sport is, it's not yet on a par, but compared to my childhood, it's a new world. And so I feel that it's a really powerful story because in this very fractured and disjointed world.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And the FA didn't like it. They had no control and they didn't want it. And on Boxing Day in 1920, there was a famous match between the two biggest sides Dick Curr ladies and Helens. And Lily Parvers and Dick Curladies. And there was a gate of something like 55,000 people watching that women's room. And it was men, women, boys, girls, everybody. It wasn't just women watching. And so the FA the following year did two things. They said, firstly, We do not consider football is safe or appropriate for females. These are the women who'd been working in munitions factories. And frankly, we have children. But football was dangerous to our femininity.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But when you learn the history of Lily Parr and women's football during the First World War, where women's football was something that kept the nation going, And they all had their own football leagues. And Lily Parr was a superstar, actually, superstar. When the men came back from more, the men and women continued to watch women's football.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I've always liked watching football. And so therefore there is an essay on women's sport and there are certain sports women through the book. My interest started with Lily Parr, who is the most prolific British striker, male or female that has ever lived. And it was an illustration of how women in history happened. My question to myself was, how does it happen that women disappear so easily? And of course there are many answers. Some is just benign neglect. Some is the people writing the history don't know any women and they don't put them in. Well, they don't care. But there's also the more sinister stuff as we've seen in Afghanistan, which is deliberate erasure. There's also what you might call spite and jealousy. And that is the story of women's football. Because when I was growing up, when I would watch football with my dad on the television, and I would say, there's no ruins football. And my dad, in good faith, would say, well, it's because nobody wants to watch.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I put it's ironic because I was hopeless at all sport. I now love running now and cycling and all of these things, but I was the last person to be picked for every team sport for all of my school career. It scarred me forever.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Within an archive, then you can't legitimately include it. But if women's evidence of women's work and contributions is not being kept and therefore is not in the archive, but we know common sense tells us that they were there and these things were happening. Have to find a way around that. You have to find a workaround. And so that's part of the point about the images as well, that you can. Suggest and imply and bring to life women of the past for whom there is very little documentary evidence.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In her time. And what we know from many sources is that when the Taliban went back into Kabul in August 2021, one of the things they did was start to erase images of her from walls. Her image hold very particular image of her was seen as a woman writing. And so many of these priceless, very early paintings and her tube have been destroyed. There's nothing that we can put in the book. But Sophie from all the descriptions can do a drawing. And so that was the other thing, particularly when I go back into much earlier history, you know, the first women doctors, all of these kind of things. Obviously, Sophie has had to animate those and bring them to life because we have no records. That's the problem with women's history is that there has always until relatively recently been the idea that unless something is verifiable from original”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, we did. And with the publishers, that because this is a book to dip in and out of, and exactly, I know it's such a lovely thing you said about accessibility, so that there is pleasure in the book itself, not just in the words on the page. We wanted to have images that represented certain trades and professions and some of the women, obviously it's why you can see, you know, take measures and some sort of building tools in another or a space helmet, but also, of course, there are some photographs in the book. And there are some images of people that are very important book for whom we have no images. So I would say, you know, one of the most important, possibly the most important Afghan writer is a woman called Rabiya Balki, who was 10th century writer. And very, very fundamental writing and hugely respected writing.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you have to put her in. And of course, there are women from many different countries in the world for whom some people will see them as terrorists and others will see them as freedom fighters. But that is history. And I think that until we get back in all of these issues, whether it's the trans right issue, whether it's questions of saints or sinners, whether it's the case of ethnicity, we have to get back to a place in history where we embrace the complicated and the contradictory otherwise it cannot be called history at all.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Views on race. Really terrible views on race. And they weren't typical of the time. People of the time were like, whoa, Florence. That's really going a bit too far. The point is, but did she do things that transformed women's lives? Yes. It was she and Mary Seacole between them helped create an alternative way for women to support themselves in a profession and be paid for it that wasn't being a governess.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have all the men in history, the sinners and the saints. We have to as women be brave enough to put back all the women into history. Another good example would be Florence Nightingale, who was incredibly significant in nursing. She wasn't the only one. Mary Seacole was equally significant. She was a brilliant mathematician and statistician. She, in fact, invented the pie chart. I mean, I could do without the pie chart, to be honest, but I mean, good on her. Her letters wrote about how frustrated she was about being a woman, how she wasn't allowed to do things. She was sanitized into the sort of woman that the British Empire wanted to admire, which was the lady with the lamp. She was, so far as I've been able to understand through anything I've ever read written by her really furious all of the time about the furthest from a maternal nurse that you could possibly imagine. She also had appalling.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back to the same word fairness. If Your project, as mine is, and many of ours is to put women back into history. You have to put them all back. If it's about the people who were there, the women who were there and the significance of what they did, you cannot pick and choose and only put people in that you agree with. This is the problem of the timer and at the moment that people have forgotten how to debate with people they don't agree with. It's entirely possible to respect and admire and be grateful for certain things that people have done. Mary Stopes is a very good example of that. It was transformational for some women's lives. The other side of her beliefs are awful. And I don't agree with them at all, but both things are true, that she made a significant difference to many women's lives, and she had some terrible views that I absolutely wouldn't agree with or subscribe to. But we allow men to be complicated and complex and contradictory.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“First black female Episcopalian priest in America. However, Nobody knows her. My contention would be the reason they don't know her is because she described herself as an in-betweener. Probably now what we would call a non binary person, but possibly we would call a trans person because again, this is the point that this doesn't really matter what people are called. And consequently, that was seen as quite challenging for the civil rights movement to have a figurehead like that. And she has, I think, the best quote in the book, which is, I have lived to see my lost causes found.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sure, listeners will know that the Freedom Riders Rosa Parks is probably the most famous. So they were people black Americans mostly, men and women, part of the civil rights movement, who would ride in the wrong quote part of the bus during the racist Jim Crow laws in America, which treated white citizens completely different from black and brown citizens. And Rosa Parks was very famous in the Montgomery Alabama bus protest. But Paulie Murray was actually arrested in 1940, so a good 15 years before Rosa Parks. When she was released, she didn't take it lying down. She went to law school. She became one of the most senior and most respected black voices within the law. People like Ruth Bardiginsberg say that without Paulie Murray, much of civil rights law would not have happened. But as she later in life became an Episcopalian priest,”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Debate within feminism was pornography. An earlier generation, it was equal pay. For this generation it's trans rights. I think that every single human being should be treated with dignity and respect and that that is utterly unnegotiable. Everything else is about Politics and society and common sense. And I invite everybody who reads the book to just be interested in those individuals in the book. One of the women that I most admire who's in the book is a woman called Paulie Murray. She was a freedom rider.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My feeling is in a book like this, that I am celebrating extraordinary women girls and everybody, people who define differently, from history and the present day, I am not making a judgment of whether I think I agree with people's politics, agree with what they do. Some of the people in the book are deeply unlikable, but they did something that made a difference. And that is a key thing about history, for example, that you have to put everybody in. and then allow people to make their own decisions. But there is an important issue here that because this book is aimed at a younger demographic, it is an extremely important issue for this demographic. And therefore, honouring and respecting their priorities is part of this in the same way that I would hope that for women of bi generation, the big”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You look back 10 years, when you look back at the people who introduced the legislation in the UK, this conservative party, nobody was paying any attention to this. So if you like, in a way, it has been a deliberately inflamed and manufactured argument, which nobody can win in now. That's what's happened. And people who are very, very, very vocal on all sides of things have been pitted against one another.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, it's one of the people in the book is somebody called Eleanor Reichner. Lena Richana was arrested in London in the medieval period. And when she went to trial, it became clear that she had been physically born a man, had lived her life as a woman. So somebody we would call a trans person now. I do not get involved in these discussions in terms of Again, what I would say is a deliberate attempt to divide people over this issue who would 10 years ago were not arguing about it. The only thing that has changed in many of these debates about trans issues is I would suggest that the anti-feminist Christian right in America realized that it was a possible fault line for women uniting and feminism.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We all have much, much, much more in common. And so really it's everybody who has an interest in allowing anybody to be who they want to be and have the opportunities that they believe they deserve for themselves versus the relatively few people who unfortunately are very powerful at the moment who believe that certain people don't matter as much. You know, I'm married to a man. I have a son. I have a grandson. All of my life has been about expanding the way that things work, not shrinking it. And so that I say is very important. And it calls out some of the men who do wonderful things and should be praised and called out for doing it, you know, divided, we fall. It's as simple as that.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lie put about in order to try to keep people divided. Truthfully, everybody, whoever they are, who believes in equality, in fairness, that's the F word really, not feminism fairness. Whatever age they are, whatever background they come from.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Deliberate policy of divide and rule, so separating people that have a lot in common in order to drive the coach and horses through the middle, it has always worked. And everything about putting women back into history is not and never has been about taking brilliant wonderful men and boys out of history. It's about, as the great Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to run for the presidency Democratic nomination to be president of the United States. She said, you know, if they won't give you a seat at the table, bring your own folding chair. So everything about putting women and girls back into history is about getting a bigger table. It's not about reducing anybody else. And I think that it's a very effective thing to say, oh, you know, I grew up with this. Feminists don't like men. Or, you know, you're all anti-men.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“True. So once you understand that some people just don't want to agree with you, they don't want to listen to you. And that's okay. Then you can take back some of the power. So the essay on shame is very important because it's an issue that comes up time and time again when you talk to younger people. And that's very important. And the essay about boys can be feminist too. To my earlier comment about how”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some of this, not all of it, but some of this is in your own hands. If you refuse to be pushed into the shadows, if you refuse to be made to feel ashamed and you turn that venom, I suppose, that emotion onto the people who were trying to belittle you, then you will, it won't solve all the problems. It won't stop people being horrible online to you if that is what's happening. But it will give you a sense of power because powerlessness is an enormous issue in girls and women in particular being silenced. The idea that you can't do anything, you can't say anything, whatever you do will be held against you. There is still a thing, I think, for girls and women that if you do all the right things and you explain yourself well enough, then everybody will agree with you and like you. But that isn't”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's an essay on shame. But her very powerful comment when she came out, it is not for us to feel shame. It is for them to feel shame. And that essay is very much because every young person, I'm afraid, girls particularly, but boys too, and people who are defining differently in terms of gender. Every single one of those people will have come up against trolling and bullying and people who are trying to shame them for whatever reason for their body image, for what they think, whatever it is. And it's important, therefore, that essay to say,”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, thank you. It sounds absurd that he had passed me by, but he had. Just because that's not particularly necessarily where my focus was. So, one of the things I say in the book is very much that we should be listening to the older generation and we should be listening to the younger generation. In fact, in other words, that what we are seeing at the moment is a time of shouting and opinion and a loss of listening and wisdom. Because knowing things is not understanding things and understanding things is not wisdom. So that way of listening up and listening down to different generations, as well as beyond your obvious own community, was also part of how I put the book together. I have a wonderful young editor and deputy editor at my publishers who are a completely different generation to me. And they were terrific.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, this is going to be really embarrassing. I've got one of the essays I have is Boys Can Be Feminist Too. We'll probably come back to that because it's extremely important part of this. But the extremely famous actor that everybody is always talking about. Whose name has now completely gone out of my head Pedro”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then I thought, well, who am I going to choose and where am I going to put the other one? So it became this absolute nightmare. I'm terrible at spreadsheets and things like that. It's not my strength, but I ended up having to do these, it was like some extraordinary mathematical problem. And obviously, so some of the decisions are governed by that when I think, well, we haven't had a living woman for a while A living girl, and I want one. And so at that stage, I would start to do some research into, I would speak to my young nieces, for example, and say, just, you know, are there any people that I wouldn't have heard of that you really, really admire? Because, you know, when they say to me, Taylor Swift or Beyond, you know, I know. I live in the world. But sometimes they would say somebody that I didn't know.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, the Cathars, the Huguenots, I'm now writing about the Normans. I spend a lot of time in archives. But the thing with this kind of book is that it is a celebration. I wanted it to be global. I wanted it to be all periods of history. I wanted it to be all types of woman. So in different fields. So the scientists, the artists, the people who've changed the world in practical ways, but also the people who change our lives, the quality of our lives through their music, through their art. I had to have somebody for every day of the year. And it's quite extraordinary how certain days everybody was born on that day.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I mean, I had a great resource from all the people all over the world who had been in touch with me through the Woman in History campaign. I mean, thousands and thousands and thousands of people. I also, I mean, there was a practical issue to it. It was the most complicated book I've ever researched in my life. And I have done some big research.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Namely, that she with her husband and friends were, you know, had fled England and they were in Europe. And it was known as a year that the sky turned black. And that was because there was a volcano erupting and nobody saw the sun for the whole summer and it rained all the time. And there was a challenge that everybody should make up a ghost story And for me, that tells the reality of what it means to be an author, that you don't know what will stimulate your imagination. You don't know what is going to come of it. You just start telling a story.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Started with Mary Shelley because partly because this book is aimed at a younger readership, although we know that much older people and their young people's parents and teachers and carers and so forth are going to be engaging with it too. But Mary Shelley was a kid. She wrote this extraordinary novel when she was a teenager. And it appeared without her name on it in the first edition. There was something really glamorous somehow about it being published on New Year's Day. It is, I mean, I have another person in the book, Margaret Cavendish, who truthfully is the first person to write a piece of what we would now call science fiction. And that was in the 17th century, 1666. But Mary Shelley is often seen as the creator of this new genre, a kind of”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There is a clear evidence at the moment that people's attention spans are shorter than they used to be. It's very interesting as somebody who's been in publishing for more than 40 years. Not mine, but other people's novels, novels getting shorter. Short stories are becoming more popular again. And so the idea of having a book where each day it's a potted history that you can dip in and you can dip out of. It's a book that you carry with you as a companion, not a book that you sit down and read from start to finish. And that's why I'm very much looking forward to being out and about. And I'm doing quite a lot of visits into schools.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I never knew about her. I never knew about that particular moment. I never knew about this piece of history. And I'm interested. So it's not about a history lesson. It's a kind of tickling, the taste buds almost, if you like. And it is intended for a younger audience because there are great demands on everybody's time. There are, of course, brilliant things with technology as we're proving doing this conversation now and wonderful things about social media and connectivity and all of this. They're also very challenging things.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It absolutely is. It's intended for a YA audience and above. And the potted history element is important because everything about systemic and sustained change comes from deep roots and conversation. So the idea of the book is very much, you know, I made the joke, but it is what's happened every time that people turn to their birthday. Or sometimes the day of the week that they're interviewing me. It's supposed to say, The power to research this is up to you. I'm saying here are 366, actually there are more because I've snuck in people, you know, several days have two people or three people or an entire, you know, like the women's watch in Cretoria in the 50s, you know, in South Africa. But by and large, that's the way that it works, so that someone will read and think,”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When I speak to young women and girls today, most of them haven't heard of it. So history is cyclical and people have short memories. So feminist history for every day of the year, one of that is a kind of a memory building exercise saying you don't realize that actually 50 years ago, if you were married, you would have had to give up your job or you would have had to have your husband's permission to buy a washing machine. And young people brilliantly go that can't be true. not in the UK. Go, well, it is.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has been fought for by somebody. And we are living in a time where certain rights for women are being rolled back by countries that one would not have expected to do that. And therefore it's just about sharing the history, sharing the history. You know, it was very interesting for a feminist of my age. The biggest issue for me when I was a baby feminist and learning about this discourse was Greenham Common. I went there, I didn't ever live there. I went there at weekends and joined in some of the bigger embrace the bases. And it was fundamental to that period of feminism.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So it's not why now, it's that this is a continuous story. The only thing that I think makes not just my book, but many other books in this area particularly important now, is that the pressures on young people are extreme because of technology and social media, the misogyny inbuilt into all of those things, the misogyny, I'm afraid, of AI and who is controlling all of those kind of aspects of our lives. And consequently, reminding people that women have always been there, have always done everything, that everybody who has made a difference has probably had to fight for it, has probably not had a load of people saying, here are the doors, open up the doors, in you come, is important to remind people that every right we have”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Simply tell all of history. I wouldn't say it's revisionist history because when you study this, you see perfectly that in almost every period of history, many of the very famous women that I have in the book were extremely well known in their day, but it's the writing of history subsequently that has left them out, not the living of it. So if you think that we are Looking into millennia, really, of the tools of writing and expression being mostly in the hands of men and mostly in the hands of quite a narrow band of men, the fact that we've made so many inroads in 60 years is a miracle.”
2025-09-21 · Intelligence Squared · Who are the Trailblazing Women Hidden From Our History? With Women's Prize Founder Kate Mosse · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT