In this second programme Amanda Vickery describes the paradox for British women of a female queen who thought women's rights campaigners deserved a good whipping. But during Victoria's reign extraordinary women gradually changed the lives and opportunities of their sex, despite successive governments furiously resisting giving women the vote.
Vickery introduces us to the spurned mistress of a prime minister, who lost custody of her own children but won the first piece of modern feminist legislation - child custody rights for mothers. Plus a passionate campaigner who raised the age of consent and overthrew pernicious laws against prostitutes, a Cambridge undergraduate who proved that girls could even be better at maths than boys and undermined the centuries old prejudice that a Cambridge education was for men only, and a certain Mrs Pankhurst and her daughters, who decided that after so many years of women campaigning for the vote, it was now time to resort to deeds rather than words.
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