Susanna Rustin discusses with Ivan six things which should be better known.
Susanna Rustin is a leader writer on social affairs at The Guardian, where she has worked for more than 20 years. Before that, she worked at the Financial Times. Sexed is her first book.
1. The “Reform Firm” – the group of women’s rights campaigners with Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon at the centre of it, in the middle of 19th century. They organised the first big suffrage petition presented in the House of Commons, ran a magazine for women from Langham Place (just off Oxford Circus), campaigned for jobs and education – Bodichon co-founded Girton college with Emily Davies and she was George Eliot’s dear friend. But apart from feminist historians and biographers, hardly anyone knows about them. Victorians are deeply unfashionable for some very good reasons but there is lots to admire about them as well.
2. Feminist evolutionary biology – feminists going all the way back to George Eliot were deeply and justifiably suspicious of his theory of natural and sexual selection, which they realised would be used as an argument for the naturalness of male dominance and authority, and female passivity and inferiority. But there is the most wonderful tradition of research by female evolutionary biologists and anthropologists – many of them American but some important Brits too – who from the 1970s onwards published research that presented a radical, alternative view of female primate and human behaviour, and countered the masculinist bias in evolutionary science up to that point. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s book Mother Nature first published in 1999, 25 years old this year, is a beautiful and deeply illuminating book. I think people educated in social sciences/ humanities need to take off their blinkers when it comes to the ways in which humans have – like every other life form! – been shaped by evolutionary forces.
3. Winifred Holtby – wonderful novelist and essayist; overlooked feminist thinker. She died aged 37: her posthumously published South Riding is a wonderful, sweeping, romantic novel about local government in Yorkshire. a writer for an era of devolution and the return of deep poverty.
4. The law that enables people to set up parish councils (also called town councils and community councils), in the area they live in – and collect taxes locally – known as a precept – to spend on neighbourhood improvements and services.
5. The gender gap in higher education – girls now significantly outnumber boys at UK universities and this isn’t discussed enough.
6. The history of psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in Britain
Better Known 