A Skirt Through History

- Season 1

(1994)

"Anne Lister, an outwardly conventional gentlewoman living in Halifax at the beginning of the last century, had a secret life that would have shocked local society. Her diaries, written in such a complex code that they were not deciphered until the 1980s, reveal that she was really a lesbian Don Juan." (Radio Times, 30/4-6/5/1994).

"The drama documentary series about the lives of extraordinary women continues with a look at two pioneering journalists. In 1858, Victorian editor Bessie Parks founded the first newspaper run by women for women. Fifty years later, Emilie Peacocke became one of the first women reporters to work in Fleet Street". (Radio Times, 7/5-13/5/1994).

"The remarkable story of two women who became the subjects of experiments by men. Dr James Barry was born a girl but lived most of her life disguised as a man. And Hannah Cullwick, a working class woman turned into a high-class lady". (Radio Times, 21/5-27/5/1994).

"In 1912 Sarah Benett, aged 52, and 54-year-old composer Ethel Smyth shared neighbouring cells in Holloway Prison. Their crime was breaking windows - a tactic used by suffragettes to draw attention to their fight to win votes for all women. Sarah Benett's recently discovered diary sheds light on their remarkable tale". (Radio Times, 21/5-27/5/1994)

"Seventeenth-century Italian painter Artemisia Gentileschi has been remembered more for being a loose woman than a talented artist. At the age of 17, she was raped, and the record of the trial reveals how her reputation as a woman and a painter was ruined." (Radio Times, 14/5-20/5/1994).

"The only two British women to write first-hand accounts of slavery: Mary Prince, who was born into slavery in 1788 and left her owners after moving to London, and Lady Maria Nugent, the wife of a slave owner in Jamaica in 1801'. (BBC Active, video synopsis, 2005).