Woman's Hour - 07/01/2010

With Jenni Murray. The launch of Woman's Hour 'Winning Women's Votes'. With the unofficial general election campaign well underway, the early skirmishes about the role of marriage have made it clear that the family will form a crucial part of the electoral battleground. Meanwhile politicians of all hues are lining up to enlist the support of women, with Nick Clegg the latest political leader to link up with mums in cyberspace. In the first discussion of the series Jenni is joined by Seema Malhotra, director of the Fabian Women's Network, Conservative blogger Iain Dale and Ceri Goddard, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, to discuss the importance of the female vote to politicians. Nadifa Mohamed grew up listening to her father's stories of walking for days without food, wading through the Red Sea and meeting Mussolini's fascists, who at that time controlled parts of East Africa. She began to record his memories and has now used them as the basis of a novel, Black Mamba Boy, in which she uses her imagination to recreate some of the extraordinary times, people and places her father encountered. Elinor Carucci is an Israeli-born New York-based photographer who has spent her life recording the intimate moments of three generations of her family. No area of her home life is off limits, and her delicate portraits are revealing and at times provocative. She captures herself sitting semi-naked with her father, a row with her husband, lovers embracing, her own belly hair being bleached, her mother crouching in the bath as she washes. And her most recent work explores the pleasures and stresses of motherhood, photographing kisses, messes, tantrums and her own changing body. Elinor talks to Jenni about making the supremely personal open to public gaze, and the responsibilities of the mother-photographer.