Woman's Hour

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Woman's Hour: Youngest Afghan mayor, Romanticising your life, surviving WWII Japanese prison camp, Big tech & sexuality

Youngest Afghan mayor, Romanticising your life, surviving WWII Japanese prison camp, Big tech & sexuality

BBC Radio 4 - Woman's Hour, Youngest Afghan mayor, Romanticising your life, surviving WWII Japanese prison camp, Big tech & sexuality

Should we all be romanticising our lives more?

From buying yourself flowers, to going on that dream holiday solo, what have you done for yourself? Or, maybe, not felt able to?

Today marks two years since the re-taking of Afghanistan by the Taliban. We speak to Afghanistan's youngest female mayor, Zarifa Ghafari, who was elected mayor of the conservative central city of Maidan Shahr in 2018, aged 23, and survived three assassination attempts while still living in the country. During one of these attempts, her father was killed. Following the Taliban’s return to power in August 2021, she fled Afghanistan along with her husband, mother and siblings. But she still receives daily death threats from the Taliban despite fleeing to Germany two years ago.

Across social media, everyday activities such as making dinner for yourself, going for a walk or buying yourself flowers have been transformed into acts of feminist empowerment. The hashtag for the trend - ‘Romanticise your life’ - has over 1.5 billion views. Should we all be romanticising our lives more? Journalists Ellie Muir and Chanté Joseph look at the pros and cons of the trend.

Women with poor mental health have an almost 50% higher risk of having a pre-term birth, that's according to a study of 2 million pregnancies in England. The research found that one in 10 women who had used mental health services before their pregnancy had a pre-term birth, compared with one in 15 who did not. We hear from one of the reports authors, Louise Howard, who is professor emerita in women’s mental health at King’s College London. 

Today is VJ day which marks the surrender of Japan and therefore the end of World War Two. Olga Henderson was 13 in 1945, starving in a camp in Singapore alongside other young internees. Now 91, Olga will join us in the studio to talk about her time in the camps recalled in her new – and first - book, In the Shadow of the Rising Sun.

Journalist Ellie House is bisexual. But before she had even realised that, it felt like Big Tech had already worked it out, with some sites regularly recommending her LGBTQ content. Ellie joins Nuala to speak about her quest to understand how recommendations systems really work, and the risks and rewards of being queer online. She’ll also tell us about speaking to people for whom these kind of recommendations could become potentially life-threatening. 


Presenter: Nuala McGovern
Producer: Kirsty Starkey

00:00 Opener
02:00 Afghanistan
11:38 Romanticise Your Life
21:04 Pregnancy
30:54 Olga Henderson
45:47 Big Tech

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Youngest Afghan mayor, Romanticising your life, surviving WWII Japanese prison camp, Big tech & sexuality

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