Reading Against the Grain

What is left unsaid and who is missing from historical archives? Reading against the grain is a way of thinking about these questions and in the week when Woman's Hour marks 80 years of broadcasting, Radio 4's Friday night round table discussion programme about ideas traces the way thinking about representation has changed through the decades.

Matthew Sweet is joined by:

Sally Alexander, an activist with the Women's Liberation Movement and founding editor of the History Workshop Journal, where ideas like reading against the grain were developed and put to use;

Suzannah Lipscomb, whose book The Voices of Nîmes uses overlooked sources to reconstruct the lives of women in Early Modern France;

Adjoa Osei researches women singers and performers who made their names in Paris and on stage in the 1930s including Josephine Baker; the Afro-Brazilian erotic acrobatic dancer, Miss Bartira; the Malian performer Melka Soudani; the British Tiller Girls; the Afro-Guadeloupean dancer and muse of Man Ray, Adrienne Fideline and others;

Hetta Howes is the author of Poet, Mystic, Widow, Wife: The Extraordinary Lives of Medieval Women;

Sophie Oliver's book What The Dresses Know: A Women's History Of Modernism Told Through Clothes will be published in November

Producer: Luke Mulhall