The Earth Transformed | Her Story and the Natural World | 1

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Sign up at legacy.supportingcast.fm. Before we start, Afua, I think just a very quick overview to those of you who think we've made a spelling mistake, because you and I know exactly what Herstory is, but maybe not everybody does.

What is Herstory? Why we call this episode Herstory?

OK, so when I was growing up, history... really lived up to its name his story it was a chronicle of the activities particularly the military conquests of men through the ages whichever era you're looking at whether it's The ancient world, with maybe one or two very notable exceptions, like Cleopatra, on whom we did an amazing series, which you should listen to.

We did.

Whether it's the medieval age, whether it's the age of empire, whether it's the Second World War, it was the story of these male leaders.

And one of the things that has really visibly changed, I think, in the last decade or two has been the visibility of historians who have been... not just reinserting women into the record, but actually taking a different framework to our understanding of history and acknowledging that women have always been a kind of fundamental part of the story.

And so her story, you know, it's sometimes a little tongue in cheek, but it's just a way of recognising that history has been approached in Western societies through a very male lens.

And that not only is that kind of rude, but it's also distorting.

It deprives us of the opportunity to have a more nuanced and complete understanding of past events.

So I think it's just a really useful term to remind us that history is actually much broader than that, and that there is so much we can learn by thinking about the roles, experiences and events that are at which women have been central.

And Peter, it's one of the things I love about The Earth Transformed is that it never feels like you're doing that in a tokenistic way.

It's just a powerful example of how you can't tell a really useful story without centering it.

these questions and you don't just look at women but you look at big themes at which women are the centre like reproductivity and gender roles so I am really excited to get into that in this episode with how you came to have that focus in The Earth Transformed and what it means.

Well, that's so sweet of you, Afua.

So first of all, I am aware that even the idea and the word herstory triggers people.

I suspect probably if you're a legacy listener, you're probably on the side of the angels because you're on Afua and my side.

But it is something that is considered quite provocative.

The idea that half the world's population haven't really been written about that much, and perhaps there's a way of looking at the world from a gender point of view that is different or rewarding, is for some reason very threatening.

I mean, if you work as an academic, if you're a writer, trying to say something interesting from a different perspective would seem to me to be quite interesting anyway.

And your observation of whether history is all about men fighting each other and winning or losing... doesn't seem to be far off the kind of history that I learned.

So some of it, I think, is about the way in which we're much more inclusive about how we write about history.

Some of it is, I think, also about the ways in which the roles that men and women have played in history have changed and also to understand why.

So when I wrote The Earth Transformed, I mean, apart from the fact that I like to think that I'm even-handed when I try and be inclusive about different ways in which societies work.