3 - Everyone Knows

Peggy’s song Everyone Knows begins with a list of the stereotypical reasons why women cannot be trusted with power, hormones and all. Delivered deadpan, she then turns every one of them round on the men.

Her own relationship with sexism is more complicated than the song, and she is frank about it with Kate Molleson. She lived and worked with Ewan MacColl, twenty years her senior, for 33 years, and interviewers always held the microphone to him first, which she put down at the time to his being more articulate.

It was I'm Gonna Be an Engineer, written in 1971, that brought her into the women's movement, because feminist meetings asked her to sing it and then asked for another, and she had to write some. Kate puts Brecht's idea to her, that you soften an audience with humour and then punch it in the belly with realism, and Peggy offers a less polite version. We hear this at work in My Friend Pat and in Give Him an Inch, which began with a cartoon of a midwife holding up a newborn boy.

Recorded on location at Peggy's house in Oxfordshire.

Presented by Kate Molleson
Produced by Victoria Ferran
Sound Engineer: Mike Woolley

Special thanks to Sara Jane Hall

A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 3