00:00There has never been a better time to be born a woman.
00:06There are more female heads of government and more women leading organisations and running
00:11businesses than at any other time in history. Yet in many parts of the world women do not enjoy
00:19the same legal rights as men. They are relegated to unequal spheres without access to education
00:25or employment and for many the right to live free from physical and sexual violence is still a dream.
00:34My name is Amanda Foreman and as a historian and biographer I have spent my career studying
00:41women's lives. The simple truth is that our story has never followed a straight line from darkness
00:47to light. The real history of women is full of swings and reversions with liberties gained and
00:53lost from one era and one society to the next. I also think that you can judge a civilisation by
01:00the way it treats its women and the degree to which women have authority, agency and autonomy.
01:07In this series I want to retell the story of civilisation with men and women side by side
01:13for the first time and in so doing I'll ask some difficult questions. Why did history become almost
01:21exclusively male? Why has almost every civilisation set limits on women's sexuality, speech and freedom
01:28of movement? And what makes the status of women so vulnerable to the dictates of politics, economics or religion?
01:42But it will also be a celebration of the women who have confronted these limits and created their own
01:48roots to power. From Empress Wu, China's only ever female emperor. And Christine to Pizan, the first feminist.
02:01To the revolutionary women of France, Russia and beyond. We'll look at the women who wrote their own
02:08history to change the world. And to those who think that women haven't played an active role in history
02:16or that ours is simply a mindless narrative of oppression, I want to throw down the gauntlet.
02:22Because I believe that any history of the world that excludes women or simply pushes them to the margins
02:28change the world, isn't just a distortion, but an untruth that must be challenged.
Comments