The 33rd annual conference, which will take place on 4-5 September, 2025 will explore and celebrate women in the archives, libraries and museums and the challenge of uncovering their presence. We encourage approaches that foreground marginalised voices and imaginative approaches. Papers which address aspects from all nations and time periods are welcomed. More details about […]
The WHN Annual Conference
Latest News and Blogs
Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician – Alice Rothchild
My memoir, Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician, is both a chronicle of my life in the 1950s in a first-generation Jewish family, coming of age in the 1960s, and my embrace of feminism as I encountered outrageous contradictions and outright sexism in college, medical school, and residency. It is both a […]
Health, Death and Trauma in Middling Sort Women’s Letters during the Eighteenth Century – Isabella Smith
Sources taken from Karen Harvey’s Social Bodes project which contains transcribed letters between c.1680-1820 categorised by state, emotion and body part.[1] Why do we study old letters? What is it about them? Or as historian Susan Whyman asks, ‘filled with mundane details and commonplace language, why have ordinary letters captivated readers for centuries?’[2] These ordinary […]
WHN Prize News
Women’s History Network Book Prize Winners
We are delighted to announce the winners of our annual book prize for 2021 and 2022. The 2021 winner is Siobhan Hearne for her book, Policing Prostitution: Regulating the Lower Classes in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford University Press) There are joint winners for the 2022 prize: Jane Freeland for her book, Feminist Transformations and Domestic Violence Activism […]
WHN Independent Researcher Grants for 2023/24
The Women’s History Network is delighted to announce the results of this year’s Independent Researcher Grant. This year, the award received a record number of applications and we were thrilled to see the amount of interest in women’s history from people of all backgrounds. It did, however, make choosing incredibly difficult – if only it […]
Activities
Infants and Institutions: Representations and Memories of Residential Homes in Twentieth-Century Europe
CALL FOR PAPERS International Conference funded by AHRC Network Grant ‘Institutions and Infant Care. Foundling Homes and Residential Homes for Babies in Twentieth Century Europe’. London Foundling Museum, 15-16 May 2025 Keynote speakers: Prof. Clair Wills, University of Cambridge, UK Dr Nelleke Bakker, University of Groningen, the Netherlands Foundling hospitals, first established in the Middle […]
Independent researcher
Hello Can you please add an event to celebrate a book launch at the Women’s Library at LSE? The book about Chrystal Macmillan has been published by Edinburgh University Press, the first in a series of ‘Scottish Women Making History’. Tickets for the event are free and can be booked on Eventbrite The Historical Biography […]