Women’s History Network 33rd Annual Conference Thursday 4 & Friday 5 September 2025 Hidden in Plain Sight: Women in Archives, Libraries, Museums and Personal Collections See more here
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Anna Maria Garthwaite: One of the few 18th century British female silk designers – Elizabeth Strange
This blog post focuses on Anna Maria Garthwaite who was a silk designer in 18th century England. A silk designers’ purpose was to create designs that showed weavers what colours and decoration they should weave on their loom. Anna specialised…
Women’s History Today – Spring 2026 Edition
The Spring 2026 issue of Women’s History Today is now available. This issue brings together research examining women’s participation in the built environment, with a particular focus on educational institutions, professional formation and uneven career trajectories. The digital version of…
Sign up for our next seminar, ‘Female Theatrical Entrepreneurs: Women Versus the Nineteenth-Century French State’, with Dr Sophie Horrocks David
The first session of our Summer Seminar Series will take place on Tuesday, 5 May at 4pm GMT. Our speaker for the session is Dr Sophie Horrocks David, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leeds. Sophie will…
Undergraduate Dissertation Prize 2025-2026
We are awarding £250 for the best undergraduate dissertation on women’s or gender history written in the 2025–2026 academic year. Entries need to show original research and be submitted to a UK university, graded 2.1 or higher, with a strong…
A three-generation family story through Gwent Archives’ collection – Bec Howarth
Whilst preparing social media content for LGBTQ+ history month I came across the Welsh County LGBTQ+ timelines. Scanning the Newport timeline, one individual caught my eye – Amelia Vella. The timeline wrote how Amelia’s mother, Fanny Vella, was in the…
Summer Seminar Series 2026
We are thrilled to announce the programme for our Summer Seminar Series 2026 and hope you will join us for this wonderful line up of seminars and roundtables. The sign-up link for each session will be publicised here on our…
Boudoir Laments: Reading Gender and Spatiality in the Lyrics of Seventeenth-Century Chinese Gentlewomen – Yuemin He
Late Imperial China is often described as a society structured by strict gender hierarchies. Elite women were expected to remain within the domestic inner quarters, devoted to family duty, moral virtue, and household management, while public life and most forms…
Winner of the 2025 MA Dissertation Prize
We are very pleased to announce Sophie Weinberg’s ‘The Matrilineal Printing House: Recovering the Printing Lineage of Widow Stationers in the Seventeenth-Century English Book Trade’ the winner of our 2025 MA dissertation prize. Sophie examined two examples of intergenerational female inheritance of print shops: the…
Sign up for our next seminar, ‘Controlled Leisure: Women Shop Assistants in London before 1914’, with Dr Kellie Bradshaw
The final session of our Spring Seminar Series will take place on Tuesday, 21 April at 4pm GMT. Our speaker for the session is Dr Kellie Bradshaw, a Professor of History from Germanna Community College in Virginia. Kellie who will…