Our host Vick Hope is joined by Ashley James.
Ashley is a broadcaster, author, DJ and advocate who first appeared on our screens in the early days of Made in Chelsea back in 2012 and has since gone on to be a feminist campaigner and social commentator. Her popularity spans major networks and channels, including her regular role for ITV’s This Morning as political and social affairs correspondent. She also appeared in Channel 5’s all-female Celebrity Big Brother’s Year of the Woman series in a salute to a centenary of women’s suffrage and Celebrity Mastermind where her specialist subject was 19th century suffragette Lady Constance Lytton. Praised by Carol Vorderman for being a difficult woman. Her debut book Bimbo is number one Sunday Times bestseller and has been described as a rallying cry for every woman who’s ever felt too much or not enough covering the many themes of feminism and the labels that box women in.
Listen to the full episode here and read on to discover Ashley’s five most influential books by women.
“I feel like this is the first book that put into words how I unknowingly felt as a teenage girl at an all boys school where there was a real hypocrisy and double standards around our freedom, our sexuality, the way we expressed ourselves, and I remember reading this book and finding out that everything she wrote in it had happened somewhere in the world.
I think it might also be the first time I discovered what the term dystopia meant and […] it was the first time I’d really considered how politicised women’s bodies are. And back then, I very much believed, like, aren’t we so lucky to live in the West and to be living in a period of progress? It’s funny now because obviously…it feels less like a dystopian nightmare and more like a warning and a reminder of how fragile our rights are. So I feel like it’s really grown with me as my own understanding of feminism and politics have developed and a reminder that we can’t be complacent so that’s why I picked it because from when I was 17, and now as a 39 year old woman, it’s stayed in my heart.”
“When I was at university, I studied English and French literature and I came across this book, La Place (English translation: A Man’s Place). It’s the first time I’ve ever seen anyone write or talk about alienation that is a part of class mobility. I won a scholarship to a boarding school when I was eight years old and my older brother had also won a scholarship so he was the first person in my whole family that ever studied past GCSEs, and I suddenly found myself straddling two class systems. My mum’s a hairdresser and my dad’s a farmer and they live in the northeast. I found myself in a school where I was the only girl in my year to not have a title. Annie changed social class through education and marriage, and whilst that usually is rewarded and praised in society, there’s this idea that you never quite feel like you belong in either, but also how you might have very different political opinions suddenly to the people that you grew up with, your accent’s different and trying to navigate that feeling of being really proud of where you come from, but also not quite identifying with it anymore.”
“This book makes us all realise that so many of our individual feelings of failure are systemic. And whenever I’m on TV and there’s a topic that is anything to do with sexism, whether it’s sexism in the police force, or sexism in media, or language – I’m like what’s Laura Bates said about it and she is so research driven and she has one of the most impressive minds and I think everybody should have to read her books.”
“It was this real light bulb moment for me that it’s actually the system, it isn’t set out for us to thrive and I’d feel envious that my husband could just go back to work and shut the door, whereas I was trying to work, but through breast pumping and you’re exhausted. It would it be much better if there was more open discussion about the real identity change, so when I heard the word matrescence I was like that’s the thing that I felt I was alone with, and it’s this real thing that no one talks about because everybody’s worried that someone will think that you don’t love your child, and I always say if it wasn’t for the love of my child, I would have walked. And I felt so guilty that I was feeling all of these things in my mind. And I think that’s why this book for me is transformational. There’s something so powerful about giving a word, giving language to a feeling that we’ve quietly been dealing with, but not felt able to say anything about. The knowledge of that just feels… powerful and helpful and so many women will be experiencing early motherhood and beyond without that word perhaps and suffering silently as we so often do.”
“It annoys me when I see this romanticisation of the past, or of the 1950s again. Women were working after the war and when they realised that there weren’t enough jobs for men, they glamourised us getting back home. But you know we forget how recent so many of our rights are, like the right to leave, or if your husband rapes you for that to be considered a crime, to have financial autonomy so when you see people promoting this, romanticising traditional gender roles, it’s so problematic. I get it so many women are burnt out because of the world that we live in now, that actually for lots of people the idea of being able to just be at home and live a slow life and be with your children is appealing, but we forget a lot of these influencers are making money by telling you to not work and to quit your job and to serve your husband. And at the same time, many young boys are being fed the manosphere and being told that a wife and a good woman should be submissive.”
