A new podcast offers reappraisals of history’s much-maligned “other women.”
Presented on Audible by Kate Lister and Jameela Jamil, Mistresses offers a woman-centered retelling of the lives of such figures as Marita Lorenz, Fidel Castro’s secret lover (who may have tried to poison him), Malintzin, a courtesan-slash-interpreter for the conquistador Hernán Cortés, and Wu Zetian, a former concubine and China’s first and only female emperor.
“Larky and fun,” Lister and Jamil’s approach begins with the idea that traditional historical accounts — written mostly by men — have seen polarizing women “erased, sidelined or embellished through a lens of disapproval and misogyny,” the Financial Times wrote. But this time around, “women get the benefit of the doubt.”