‘I want to show that behind every naked woman is a real thinking woman’

Victoria Bateman is neither just a brain nor just a body, and she rejects the naive distinction between the two. She talks to Andy Martin about her latest book, in which she explains how women made the west rich

A drawing of Bateman, the inspiration for Anthony Connolly’s painting (Victoria Bateman)

It was a lovely spring day,” Victoria Bateman recalls. A Friday shortly before Easter of 1994. She had just come top in a geography test. When her mother came to pick her up from school, with bags of clothes in the back of the car, she thought they were going on holiday to her grandparents’ caravan in Wales. In fact, her mother was leaving her father and they were driving away to a new life.

Growing up in Oldham, Victoria Bateman was always an outsider. She was too bookish to be part of the in-crowd. And she was “small and delicate” so she got bullied too. She was also broke. Once, when mugged by a hardcore mob of girls, she had her few pathetic coins thrown back in her face because they weren’t even worth stealing. Rejecting the label of “deserving poor”, she was too proud to accept free school meals.

“You want to hang on to your dignity and self-respect,” she says. Now, aged 39, and a Cambridge economist, she wants to have control over her own life and asserts the right to strip in public and give conference talks naked and be painted nude (as she was for the first time in 2014 by Anthony Connolly).