Bad Women Presents Stolen Sister · Pushkin Industries

BONUS: Hallie Rubenhold and Julia Laite on We Have Ways...

December 15, 2022·44 min·3 clips

Since 1885 it has been illegal for two women to solicit together, meaning sex workers have been legally prevented from watching out for each other — a law still in force today.

Alice starts with a handoff for Bad Women listeners. The season's stories belong to World War II London, she says, and some of them still catch experts off guard. Hallie Rubenhold joins Professor Julia Laite and James Holland for a slower, serious conversation on We Have Ways of Making You Talk. They talk about a city where the usual guardrails had slipped. Police were short staffed and less focused on the center of town. Blackout conditions, possible smog, wartime strain, and cheap drink made the nights feel looser and more dangerous. Soho and Fitzrovia do a lot of the work here. James Holland says those streets can still leave a person suddenly alone in an alley at night; in wartime, that feeling had sharper teeth. The shelters complicate the idea of safety too. They protected people from bombs, but they also hid people from view. One murder happened underground. A former servicewoman's memory gives the point a chill: she believed refusing to enter a shelter after a frightening man reached toward her may have saved her life. The episode ends quietly, with James saying the conversation has given him plenty to think through.

As heard by us

A clear-eyed wartime conversation that looks past Blitz shorthand to the risks women faced.

This episode of wartime Britain works because it stays close to the lived texture of London at night. Hallie Rubenhold and Julia Laite join James Holland to talk through blackout streets, understaffed policing, smog, and the ordinary danger of being out after dark.

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Why you'd press play

For a Blitz-era history listen that digs into what familiar war stories leave out.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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