Use BBC.com or the new BBC App to listen to BBC podcasts, Radio 4 and the World Service outside the UK.

Find out how to listen to other BBC stations

Episode details

Radio 4,23 Jun 2014,43 mins

Joyce DiDonato and Julie Bindel on Women Behaving Badly

Start the Week

Available for over a year

Tom Sutcliffe talks to the director Erica Whyman about a series of plays by the RSC which focus on the idea that 'well behaved women rarely make history'. The historian Helen Castor looks back at the Middle Ages to some of the earliest roaring girls, while the soprano Joyce DiDonato brings alive Mary, Queen of Scots, the tragic hero of Donizetti's opera. The political activist Julie Bindel has been behaving badly since she came out as a lesbian in the 1970s. She looks at what it means to be gay in 2014 and whether the genuine gains that have been achieved in the last forty years have castrated a once-radical social movement. Producer: Katy Hickman.

Programme Website
More episodes