Angela Saini's Reading List

"Fara’s book couldn’t have been published at a better time, around the centenary of women getting the vote. She looks at the sometimes forgotten history of women who took up ‘men’s’ work in science and industry during the First World War. What she shows is that they did just as well as men did in these jobs—sometimes very dangerous and dirty jobs. “Reading the research changed my life and gave a fresh dimension to my feminism” The tragedy is that despite proving themselves perfectly capable, once the war was over, they were expected to leave work and go back and be housewives. And this was a position supported by the trade unions. It’s a book that I think fills an important gap in our understanding of the history of suffrage. It wasn’t the first time, because some women had worked alongside their husbands, fathers and brothers in labs for a very long time. A few had even worked independently, if they had the means. What was special about this time was not that a few women were excelling as much as thousands of women proving that working in these fields as a matter of routine posed no threat, that they could function just as well as anyone else, and get the job done. It was the ordinariness of women in munition factories, in chemistry labs, just doing everyday work—that was the big revolution. They helped to redefine femininity."

"We forget what the decades in the run-up to women finally getting the vote were like. There was a huge amount of intellectual debate amongst women. Darwin’s theories played an important role in helping to rethink what it meant to be female. Evolution painted a new story of the past that countered religious narratives, and in some ways liberated women from conservative religious expectations. Although, of course, Darwin also believed that women were the intellectually inferior sex, almost less evolved than men. Hamlin beautifully captures the state of debate at the time, and profiles the incredible women thinkers engaging with these fresh scientific ideas."

"Nelson’s book isn’t a history or a biography, but an account of a strange encounter. She spent a long time travelling with and recording Wally Funk, one of the first female American astronaut trainees, for a radio programme. Although Funk had passed her training with flying colours, she was never allowed to go into space because it was decided at that time early in the space programme that only the men should go. It was sexism, of course, and an injustice that seems to have haunted Wally her whole life. Nelson shows how Wally still lives in the pure hope that she will one day go into space, that her dream—her right—to be an astronaut will somehow happen. It’s heartbreaking and touching, but also inspirational."

"For me, this is one of the most important science books ever written. Sarah Hrdy overturns centuries of orthodoxy and assumptions about female behaviour and sexuality, with clear, logical, crystal-sharp reasoning, using not just good science but also historical evidence. I had the honour of meeting her when I was researching Inferior and found her a brilliant thinker. She is among the first feminist scientists, and I consider her books—not just this one , but also Mother Nature —part of the canon of both evolutionary biology and feminism. The main myth she overturns is that of female sexuality being somehow more limited or modest than in males. It’s a myth we still live with today, that women are somehow naturally monogamous and men are naturally promiscuous, but she beautifully undermines this idea. As a work of science, it’s a masterclass, it for me it is also a work of feminism."

"For me, this is a book that demonstrates the misogynistic lens through which some male biologists have viewed the past. Morris routinely and repeatedly peddles the view that women have evolved to be monogamous, stay-at-home caregivers while men have pushed up human intelligence through their actions as hunters and providers. As we know now, this is most probably not how things happened. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s certainly not how modern-day hunter gatherers tend to live. The lesson for me in all these books is that our understanding of the past is always at the mercy of the present. We can’t help but project our biases and assumptions into the distant past. I’m just finishing a new book about race science, which will be out in summer 2019. In some ways it’s a similar beast to gender, but of course race research within biology is considered taboo and the history is incredibly dark, so it is very much more political. Race is such a slippery concept and yet it feels so real. My challenge has been to get to the heart of how and why scientists try so hard to make it real."