Lucy Worsley has said she would “put women in charge of the world’s money” if given the chance.
The historian and TV presenter, 48, spoke to Good Housekeeping about how women’s lives have changed over the past century as part of the magazine’s 100th anniversary.
She said “the chance to make a wider range of choices in life” was the greatest change in women’s lives.
“People being worried about me working. I mean, that seems so restricting – giving up your job when you got married, which women used to have to do. It seems unthinkable.
“This is what would bother me personally, but what about not having a vote, what about not having birth control? Things have really come on in 100 years,” she added.
Asked what she would like to see change for women, she said: “I would actually put women in charge of the world’s money: I think we’d see very different spending priorities, such as less on war, more on education.”
Worsley also spoke about her upcoming series on BBC Two, Lucy Worsley Investigates.
“It covers four different historical events and we see each one through the eyes of someone who was at the heart of it.
“The stories include a woman who lived through the Black Death, which wiped out her father, husband and brother, and we also see a woman who was accused of witchcraft in the Scottish witch-hunt in the 1590s and ended up being garroted and then burned in Edinburgh.”
Worsley’s love of history began at a young age, and she graduated with a first-class honours degree in ancient and modern history at New College, Oxford, in 1995.
She went on to host several historical TV programmes including If Walls Could Talk in 2011, which explored the history of British homes, and American History’s Biggest Fibs in 2019, which looked back at key moments such as the American Revolution and the Cold War.
Worsley said: “(History is) just fun and fascinating and you can be nosy about people’s lives.
“I think history provides us with hope for the future because you realise that things don’t have to be the way they are.”
The February issue of Good Housekeeping will be on sale on December 30, and will feature the full-length interview with Worsley.