Woman’s Hour: From Joyce Grenfell to Sharon Osbourne – Celebrating Sixty Years of Women’s Lives - review by Valerie Grove

Valerie Grove

Ladies on Longwave

Woman’s Hour: From Joyce Grenfell to Sharon Osbourne – Celebrating Sixty Years of Women’s Lives

John Murray 378pp £20 order from our bookshop
 

Woman’s Hour and I were born in the same year, 1946, a vintage babyboom crop. When Woman’s Hour was twenty-five they had a special edition, and I was invited on it. When they were thirty, I was back to talk about being thirty. Now we are sixty and here is a dippable bedside book that is rather like the programme itself under Jenni Murray’s charge: brisk, unsentimental, well-informed, produced at speed.

Along with Desert Island Discs, Woman’s Hour is one of the staples of Radio 4: taken for granted, but unearthing insights and revelations, reflecting fantastic changes in six decades. It began when housewives had no choice but to keep the home fires burning until the master returned from breadwinning. So

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