The most radical thing about the American Revolution? The sudden politicisation of colonial women, argues Dr Carol Berkin, author of "Revolutionary Mothers" and one of the preeminent historians of women in the early United States. Women were the main organisers of the boycotts of British goods, which fanned the flames of revolution. They were involved in every aspect of the war – except in high politics, from which they were barred.

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• (00:00) - S2 Ep01 Carol Berkin

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In part 2 of our exploration of the American frontier, Megan Kate Nelson introduces two women who belie the homesteader image conservative "trad wives" like to harken back to. Polly Bemis was a Chinese immigrant who built a life and a community in Idaho, despite intense prejudice and stringent anti-Chinese immigration policies. Ella Watson was a self-made homesteader and small rancher, a so-called cattle queen who got on the wrong side of cattle barons in Wyoming and paid the price.

Read more: How Chinese women were barred from the American dream 

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• (00:00) - 08 Megan Kate Nelson part 2

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The Western frontier is a foundational myth of the United States. Historian Megan Kate Nelson is here to complicate it with the stories of women who do not at all fit the image of the American pioneer you probably imagine. In part 1 of this two-parter conversation, she (re)introduces us to Sacajawea, the Native American woman who led the Lewis and Clark expedition to the Pacific, and Gertrudis Barceló, an infamous gambling entrepreneur who became one of the richest people in the New Mexico territory.

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The ancient Greeks believed a woman's womb wandered through her body and made her ill. Medieval Europeans believed a woman's orgasm was necessary for conception. And the Victorians believed masturbation would drive you to madness. Sex historian Dr. Kate Lister — host of Betwixt the Sheets and author of Flick: A History of Sexual Pleasure — joins me for a tour through the wildly strange, often infuriating history of women's sexuality. For most of that history, women were believed to be the more sex-crazed gender. What can we say, girls will be girls...

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Paris, 1897. The Bazar de la Charité blaze killed 118 women and girls. Where were the men?

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Don't work but don't get married and don't count on a living pension. This is an audio read of The gender pension gap of 1539, or how women got screwed by the Dissolution of Monasteries.

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Julia Cooke, author of Starry and Restless, joins me to bring back three women who were household names in their day — Rebecca West, Martha Gellhorn, and Mickey Hahn — pioneering journalists who covered wars, crossed borders, and revolutionised literary nonfiction decades before the men usually credited with inventing it. We talk about why these women's fame didn't survive them, the challenges of resurrecting female legacy, and what it meant — then and now — to want both a roaming career and a life with people you love.

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In the 1970s, Wages for Housework demanded pay for cooking and cleaning without any illusions about making it in the workplace. What if work was never our liberator? 

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• (00:00) - 03 Wages for Housework (Emily Callaci)

"We raise them like saints, then hand them over like fillies," she said of 19th-century girls. Her best-selling novels were an indictment of arranged marriages and the female condition. At home in France, her contemporaries – Hugo, Flaubert, Balzac – considered her a giant of literature. In England, she outsold Hugo and inspired the Brontë sisters. Today, we don't read her. She's fallen out of the literary canon. If she's known at all, it's for her private life, a scandalous reputation that pop culture has overblown.

A new biography of George Sand by British academic and poet Fiona Sampson reveals a thoroughly modern woman, who was centuries ahead in claiming nothing more and nothing less than the freedom to be a complete person. 

Creators & Guests

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Forget the cliché that women suddenly joined the workforce in the middle of the 20th century. They've been active in the economy as long as there's been an economy and not anecdotally. 

Guest: Victoria Bateman, economic historian and author of Economica: A Global History of Women, Wealth and Power.

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