‘Extraordinary’: 101 women narrate A History of Women in 101 Objects audiobook

Miriam Margolyes, Kate Winslet and Gillian Anderson among those giving voice to objects including a femur, a thumbscrew and a glass dildo

‘I think it’s terribly funny that men have these weird dangles between their legs – I wouldn’t like that at all.” The actor Miriam Margolyes is talking about male genitalia and dildos – subjects she assumes must have been causing amusement for millennia. “I think from the very beginning, women have been just hooting with laughter.”

And yet – how would we know? So often, women’s voices have been squeezed to the margins of history, their thoughts on all kinds of subjects disregarded by those who got to narrate the past. As Margolyes puts it: “Women have had to fight for space from the beginning.”