Woman's Hour - 20/05/2009

With Jenni Murray. The artist Alice Instone has painted portraits of some of Britain's most successful women. Now she has turned her attention to their shoes. For her latest exhibition, 'Interview with a Shoe', she has painted a series of portraits of well-known women through their favourite footwear, including Nicole Farhi, Bianca Jagger, Elle Macpherson and Baroness Neuberger. Alice Instone joins Jenni to talk about the women she's painted and about what a pair of shoes can say about the person who owns them. Women make up around half the UK work force, but has this brought the economic independence that previous generations of women might have dreamed of, or does it come at a cost when it comes to torn loyalties over who raises our children and runs our homes? Jenni asks whether 'having it all' is a myth. Dalia Grybauskaite has become Lithuania's first female President, with 70 per cent of the vote. Referred to as the 'Lithuanian Obama', expectations of the new president are high. But the country has an economy in crisis and an unemployment rate that has risen more than ten per cent in a year. Jenni discusses the challenges facing the new Lithuanian leader. Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Rita Dove talks about her poetry, and how she came to tell the story of a nineteenth-century virtuoso violinist in her latest book.