‘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.”
An ambitious new project in which the actor has participated may just challenge that. The French-German writer Annabelle Hirsch’s book A History of Women in 101 Objects, published to acclaim in the UK last year, is now being released as an audiobook, and Margolyes has narrated one of the chapters – alongside 100 other, equally distinguished women.
It is quite a list: publisher Canongate has recruited actors (including Olivia Colman, Kate Winslet and Cynthia Erivo), writers (Margaret Atwood, Siri Hustvedt, Leïla Slimani), politicians (Julia Gillard, Nicola Sturgeon) and many others to read a short chapter of the book, each focusing on an item which illuminates women’s experiences from the past.
The actor Gillian Anderson narrates the opening chapter about a 30,000-year-old healed human femur, perhaps the earliest proof that a human (very probably a woman) had cared for an injured other. The Iranian artist Shirin Neshat reads the last, which focuses on a bunch of hair, in tribute to Neshat’s countrywomen who have dared to show or shave theirs since the 2022 protests.
And in Margolyes’s case, it is a glass dildo dating from the 16th century, hence the discussion of penises and Margolyes’s belief that “people should be prepared to laugh at sex and not take it unbearably seriously”. Although, as she tells the Guardian: “I’ve never used a dildo. I mean, I know I’m a lesbian, but I’m not interested in that sort of thing. But I’m very proud to have been asked to take part in this extraordinary venture.”
For Hirsch, the book was initially conceived as an attempt to add texture and intimacy to the slowly re-emerging stories of women from the past. “In the last few years, we have tried to rewrite history with a female perspective, we have all these rediscoveries of important artists, important inventors,” she says. “But I felt we are still lacking something that would give us a sense of how it has felt to be a woman in the past.”
Historic objects are a useful vehicle for this, she believes, “because they are mainly part of the intimate space, which has been where women have had a bit of power, let’s say, in the past”.
As well as being a little overwhelmed, she admits, by the starry list of contributors to the audiobook (“Margaret Atwood? Obviously I was like, Oh my god”), she says the use of multiple voices illuminates exactly what she hoped for from the book. “I didn’t want to [write] a one voice story in a way - I wanted to show different shades of being a woman.”
His impressive contacts book aside, Jamie Byng, Canongate’s chief executive, admits it was no small feat recruiting and recording 101 narrators for a single launch – requiring the use of 18 studios in 12 countries over three months. “Like many things, you think at the beginning, ‘Ah, that’s a great idea,’ and then the reality sinks in when you are at it,” he says.
“But it felt to me from an early stage that to have one woman read the entire audio book would be wrong, as well as a missed opportunity [to reflect] the incredible range of cultures, epochs and themes” of the book. He cannot think of another audiobook project that has tried anything so ambitious, he says.
Released to coincide with International Women’s Day on 8 March, the audiobook is being sold in aid of the domestic violence charity Refuge; separate editions are being launched in Canada, Australia and (in several languages) continental Europe.
The crime writer Val McDermid narrates a chapter about a 17th-century thumbscrew – which Hirsch says is similar to the device used to torture the Renaissance painter Artemisia Gentileschi after she was raped and dared to publicly accuse her attacker. It was her testimony, needless to say, not his, that was tested by torture, although unusually in this case, Gentileschi stuck to her word and won.
McDermid researched instruments of torture for one of her early novels, The Mermaids Singing, and says she was struck at the time by a note in an Italian museum of criminology that read: “The soul of torture is male.”
“That chimed with me, because so many of the implements of torture are designed to take effect on female genitalia, or on women’s mouths, like the scold’s bridle,” she says.
“And of course, the thumbscrews are another powerful example of this. The notion that Artemisia Gentileschi was tortured in precisely the way that would have most effect on the continuation of her art was a really powerful thing – that suggestion that you put women in their place, and if they won’t be put in a place, then you torture them into their place.”
From the billets-doux lovers could scratch on to the whalebones worn in women’s corsets, to the perfume that Coco Chanel designed to make her “smell like a woman, not like a rose”, “so many of the entries in this book immediately set the wheels turning for the storyteller”, says McDermid.
The chosen objects illuminate “what women’s lives were”, she says: “These small things demonstrate the secrets of women’s lives, but also the significance of women’s lives that were so often overlooked.”
A History of Women in 101 Objects is available in audiobook from Audible. Readings from the book will form part of Women of the World’s One Night Live on Friday 8 March at Shoreditch Town Hall in London.
