Staying true to our values in challenging times

“Don't try and pre-judge your future: try to connect with your passions and your values, that's going to be what brings you happiness. Enjoy - find what you love.”

Writer and journalist Natasha Walter is a feminist and human rights activist. After studying English at St John’s, where she gained a double first, and at Harvard on a Frank Knox Fellowship, she began a career in journalism at Vogue magazine. She moved on to write on the arts, feminism and other issues for a range of publications, including the Guardian and Independent, as well as appearing regularly on television and radio. In 1999 she was a judge for the Booker Prize and in 2013 a judge for the Women's Prize for Fiction, and in March 2015, she was the Humanitas Visiting Professor of Women's Rights at The University of Cambridge.

In 2006, Natasha founded the charity Women for Refugee Women, which supports women seeking asylum and campaigned against the immigration detention of children in the UK (a practice the government announced it would end in 2010). Her play – Motherland – based on the experiences of immigrant women and children, was performed at the Young Vic in 2008, directed by Juliet Stevenson.

Natasha, 56, wrote two non-fiction books on feminism: The New Feminism (1998, Virago) and Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism (2010, Virago). In this podcast, the second episode of Souvient, the Cambridge Podcast from St John’s, she tells College Master Heather Hancock that her first book was published at a time of “a lot of optimism about how liberal values could triumph”, with reforms taking place around childcare and domestic and sexual violence. By the time of her second book, just 12 years later, much had changed. It was “a much more chastened look about how hard it is to make change, and about how difficult things were in 2010 and still are, I would say, for young women trying to reach for full equality.”

Souvient is taken from Souvent me Souvient, the medieval French motto of St John’s College founder, Lady Margaret Beaufort, the matriarch of the Tudor dynasty. Souvent me Souvient, usually translated as ‘I often remember’, or ‘remember me often’ and is illustrated with little forget-me-not blue flowers.

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