The herstory girls: Jenni Murray on the great women who shaped British history

Having interviewed Dame Jenni Murray two weeks earlier, I felt the urge to put that question to her, but it proved impossible to get hold of the journalist and broadcaster. It appears she may have gone to ground. This is hardly surprising for, since her Sunday Times piece provoked seething anger, as well as some support. Rachel Cohen, campaigns director of the lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans organisation Stonewall, described Murray's comments as “hurtful”. Trans activist Kellie Maloney said they were "unhelpful from someone in her position”.

A BBC spokesperson even made a statement saying that the broadcaster had "reminded her that presenters should remain impartial on controversial topics". It’s a surprising warning to the long-time presenter of BBC Radio 4's Woman’s Hour, who has spent much of her working life speaking out about controversial issues and never seemed to have an impartial bone in her body. She has a long history of pushing limits. Not long ago she triggered a small storm by suggesting that young people should be made to watch porn at school and analyse it as they would a Jane Austen novel. Recently, her questioning of Nicole Kidman over how she dealt with husband Keith Urban’s alcoholism drew a retort from the Hollywood actor: "God, you guys are personal." But this latest episode seems to have been a partiality too far.

Yet Murray must have known the piece might cause controversy. After all, she wrote: “I know that in writing this article I am entering into the most controversial and, at times, vicious, vulgar and threatening debate of our day.” Still, she weighed in, saying that her concern is for “the impact this question of what constitutes 'a real woman' will have on sexual politics. And for who has the right to be included in gatherings or organisations that are defined as single sex".

"The first time I felt anger when a man claimed to have become a woman," she wrote, "was in December 2000, when the Rev Peter Stone announced he had undergone the radical surgery to transition from male to female and was now called Carol. Her primary concerns, she told me, were finding the most suitable dress in which to meet her parishioners in her new persona and deciding if she should wear make-up or not." Murray's point was that womanhood wasn't "all about frocks and make-up". Rather, "it was about sexual politics and feminism – ideas of which she [Stone] seemed woefully unaware".

When I called for our arranged interview, a fortnight before the furore broke over her comments, it was one of Murray's days off broadcasting and she was listening to Woman’s Hour. Radio is at the centre of her world, and the set is on almost all the time in her home. It’s also the means through which she has met many of the people we talk about. It’s where she interviewed trans TV presenter India Willoughby, who perplexed her by not taking a feminist stance on the Dorchester Hotel’s grooming standards, of compulsory make-up, shaved legs and manicures for female employees.

It’s where she, on Woman’s Hour in 1993, asked former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, the feminist question: “How did you deal with the Tory grandees who couldn’t treat a woman as an equal and the constant references to you handbagging wrongdoers – no-one ever says a man has briefcased someone? Then there was Alan Clark writing in his diaries how much he had lusted during Prime Minister’s Questions over your finely turned ankles?”

Oddly, she recalls in her book, the former PM gave no reply, and one radio critic described the interview as the “only time ever his radio had frozen over”. Later it dawned on Murray that perhaps Thatcher had been so protected by her press secretary Bernard Ingham, that she was oblivious to the sexism Murray had mentioned.

“For ages,” Murray says, “I couldn’t understand how I had asked her a question to which she had had no response at all. Because that wasn’t Margaret Thatcher. No matter what you asked her, she came straight back at you.”

Thatcher is one of the 21 women featured in Murray's book, whose final entry is Nicola Sturgeon, a politician who, so far, Murray hasn’t interviewed, but whom she describes as “very impressive, a feminist and a powerful communicator”.

Murray says she would like her book, which also includes suffragettes, Ada Lovelace, Scottish scientist Mary Somerville, the artist Gwen John, Queen Elizabeth I, Barbara Castle and others, to be “required reading in schools”. Though academics have long been digging up the all-too buried female stars of history, little of this, she observes, has fed through to the young women and men growing up today. “I have had so many emails and tweets,” she says, “from people saying, ‘Oh my daughter loved this book. She’d never heard of any of these people.’ These were 16, 17, 18-year-old girls. They’d heard of Elizabeth I, but many of them hadn’t heard of Margaret Thatcher. So they’re not getting it in school.”

It was perhaps inevitable that Murray would eventually weigh in on the heated transgender debate. After all, gender is her territory, and she has strong feminist views on how it works. Her Sunday Times article cites research that suggests “all children are born with the potential to develop their own unique characteristics of behaviour, talent and personality, regardless of biological sex”. Murray is even an advocate of the idea of schools teaching “gender studies”, including an examination of the roles that men and women have played in society and how stereotyping works. “What was expected of men and women in the past? What kind of rules applied?”

Her book kicks off with a quote from Steve Biddulph’s Raising Boys, which declares: “In an anti-male era, it’s important to remember that men built the planes, fought the wars, laid the railroad tracks, invented the cars, built the hospitals, invented the medicines and sailed the ships that made it all happen.”

Murray's response? “Rubbish!”

She highlights this quote, not just because women have done things too, but because Biddulph’s writing tends to a particular view of what a boy is. “It’s directing boys into that awful stereotypical laddish behaviour. But boys don’t all love football and want to play rugby and so that annoyed me.”

Murray herself had two sons with her husband David Forgham, whom she married only after many years of relationship, “because of inheritance tax”. She wrote her own book, That’s My Boy, about bringing them up. One son is now 33, the other 29; their latest family outing, she says, was to see Trainspotting 2 together. She recalls reading Biddulph’s Raising Boys when she was bringing up her sons, and thinking: “Oh come on. This is just about how to enable your boys to be lads.”

Her own sons “do not fit any stereotype, either of them, that was why I wrote the book”.

“The younger one loved clothes and rugby," she adds. "My older one is a vet. He was passionate about animals from being a tiny little tot. So all of these things that are assumed to be expected of boys, that they will be rough and tumble and won’t care about being smartly dressed, are nonsense.”

When Murray wrote this book in 2003, she was a trailblazer – there was little like it in the mainstream. “It’s now much more discussed because of the gender debate,” she says. “The whole question of can you be born in the wrong body has been raised. What does gender actually mean? People have started to consider that there is biology and there’s gender, and gender is entirely from the kind of conditioning you get, the assumptions that are made about what you’re going to be like.”

Murray believes the feminist revolution depends as much on how we raise boys as girls. “We need to bring our boys along with us," she says. "Make sure your boys can cook and do dishes and load the dishwasher and all that. My two were with me at the weekend and they cooked all the food. There’s a very small kitchen in the London house and they say, ‘Oh Mum, this kitchen’s far too small for both of us to be in it. You go and sit down and put your feet up’.”

They are, she says, better cooks than she is. “That’s a real achievement. They earn their own living, they’re happy and they know how to cook.” They're not perfect domestic gods, though – Murray still jokes that one of the pleasures of them no longer living with her is not finding “boy’s droppings”, shoes, keys, coats, dropped wherever they land, through her house.

In raising their family, she and Forgham reversed traditional roles. Having left the navy, he decided what he really wanted to do was look after their sons. “He said, ‘Look, I think one of us ought to be at home looking after them," she recalls, "and I don’t think it’s going to be you, because you have something you’re passionate about for work. What do you think of me staying home and looking after the kids?’”

Today, both sons have a close relationship with their father, and it was him, not her, who experienced empty nest syndrome. “He has many more difficulties than I have now they’ve grown up and gone away and the thing that he’d like most is for them to say, 'We’ll come back to the Peak district and live in the house and maybe do farming or something – which is never going to happen.”

She and Forgham live together, “but separately”, with him mainly based at their Peak District home, and her mainly in London. This is her second marriage. Her first was to Brian Murray, whom she met when they were students at Hull University, and married in order to avoid “living in sin”.

She often credits her own success and drive, as a young woman whose family were only one generation removed from the pit – her grandfather was a colliery winder – to her “extraordinarily pushy mother”, who directed her energies at Jenni, her only child, as well as her education at Barnsley girls' grammar school.

While Murray’s book acknowledges there has been significant progress on women’s rights, it warns that this could be rolled back or taken away; that even in Western democracies, women’s rights are vulnerable. “When I was a student there were women in Afghanistan who were studying medicine at university, wearing skirts as short as mine and assuming that they had complete equality – and look what happened there. We have to be vigilant.”

She sees Donald Trump as a threat. “One of the first things Trump did was take American finance away from Planned Parenthood and organisations that provide contraceptive advice and abortion across the world. There’s deep threat to the right of American women to have power over their own fertility. I say in the book – look at the countries where it’s happened. All you need is one powerful individual who changes everything around.”

Murray, who turns 67 in May, has always been open about her health. Famously, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2006, she signed off her last programme before taking a break for treatment, saying: "I shan't be around for a while in the new year because I've just been diagnosed with breast cancer. I'll be having treatment in the coming weeks – the prognosis, by the way, is excellent – and I plan to be back as soon as I feel up to it."

One of the most remarkable chapters of her book is about the writer Fanny Burney, who had breast cancer. It contains an excruciating description by Burney of a mastectomy carried without anaesthetic. Murray recalls coming across it around the time of her own diagnosis. “I thought, Oh my God. Imagine. And I just thought, thank goodness I live in the age of anaesthetic.”

Murray is in good health at the moment. “Fingers crossed," she says. "I’ve got a bit of a cold but that’s just seasonal really. Everybody gets that. The breast cancer seems to have been dealt with.” In 2014, she had gastric surgery to help her lose weight. “I’ve lost a lot,” she says. “It's great. You can still enjoy food, you just have to eat very small amounts. I’m much fitter than I was before.”

“I can’t see any point in trying to conceal these things,” she says. “If you have things done, say so and say why. Because being obese is really dangerous, but also it doesn’t mean you’re a fat, greedy, horrible, lazy person. A lot of it is to do with hormones and genetics.”

One of the things that comes across strongly in her book is just how badly some of these women were treated: Boadicea was raped and beaten; Elizabeth I was, argues Murray, abused as a teenager. “I think all of these women lived in times when women were treated appallingly,” she says. “And actually so have we.”

There is still a long way to go, she believes. “We have not altogether changed our culture. You look at some of the things that have happened in places like Rotherham or Oxford, where young girls have been treated absolutely abominably by a gang of men. But where the culture differs now is that those cases are now brought. And when people behave abominably we now publicise that. We now say this happened and it’s not acceptable. And in that way the culture is being changed.”

A History Of Britain In 21 Women is published by Oneworld, £16.99 Jenni Murray will be talking about the book at Aye Write!, Glasgow's book festival, in the Glasgow Royal Concert Hall on Saturday, March 18 at 4.45pm www.ayewrite.com

Seven of the best: Jenni Murray on ...

Boadicea (died 60/61 CE)

"I was 10 years old when I came across her, and she became the first woman to make me realise that the designate future of a girl born in 1950 – to be sweet, domesticated, undemanding and super feminine – did not necessarily have to be the case."

Mary Seacole (1805-1881)

"It's generally assumed that the profession of nursing owes its respectability to Florence Nightingale, usually known as the true heroine of the Crimean War, but her place has recently been somewhat superseded by Mary Seacole, voted in 2004 to head the list of 100 Great Black Britons ... Mary's humanitarian efforts are pretty incredible for a woman with no proper training or, most importantly, influential connections. The blue plaque at her address at 14 Soho Square in London honours her as 'Jamaican nurse, heroine of the Crimean War'."

Emmeline Pankhurst (1958-1929)

"On July 2, 1928, the second Representation of the People Act gave voting rights to women over the age of 21 on equal terms with men. She was buried in Brompton Cemetery in London and in March 1930 the Conservative Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, unveiled a bronze statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in Victoria Tower Gardens ... There she is, to be remembered forever, close to the Houses of Parliament, whose closed doors she had made such efforts to open to women and win for us all the right to take our place a full citizens of Britain."

Barbara Castle (1910-2002)

"Her determination to right the wrong of unequal pay had begun early in her career. She told me she'd been appalled when she first became an MP [and] visited companies in her constituency ... "The blooming bosses would put these sheets of paper in front of me with a printed-out pay scale. And they were proud of it. At the top was Managerial, then Skilled, then Unskilled, then Women. Right at the bottom, as if that were perfectly acceptable. I determined even then that I would do something about it ... The Equal Pay Act that she steered through Parliament received Royal Assent in 1970."

Mary Quant (1934-)

"Her influence on the way British women looked and moved is incalculable ...Thank you, Mary Quant, for bringing us tights and black leggings and Chelsea boots. My wardrobe, freedom of movement, confidence and, I guess, liberation, and that of so many of us, would be the poorer even now without your genius."

Margaret Thatcher (1925-2013)

"Her political philosophy has shaped the nation in a way no other has. Privatisation of essential services, the reduction in public housing, the free market, deregulation of financial services and a culture where a person is expected to stand on their own two feet. The state we're in was shaped by her."

Nicola Sturgeon (1970-)

"Nicola Sturgeon's mother, Joan, said of her daughter: 'She's always been very driven. Nicola will always achieve what she wants to achieve.' ...The impact of Nicola Sturgeon on the history of Great Britain, if her mother's prediction was correct, will be profound. The Daily Mail's 'most dangerous woman in Britain' may well take Scotland away."