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Biography, Blog, Politics, Source, Women's History

Remembering Ellen Harris

In the 1920s and 30s, Ellen Harris played an instrumental role in organizing the Children’s Theatre Group in Winnipeg, where she grew up. As a radio broadcaster with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, she was the host of “Morning Visit” from 1944 to 1952. Ellen Harris established herself as a public figure in Vancouver and throughout the province and participated in a number of other radio programs and broadcasts. She was also the President and driving force behind the BC Ballet Society. Dance was one of her passions.

Event, General, Politics, Women's History

Revisiting Home Fronts: Gender, War & Conflict – Part 3

Everyday life had to go on, despite the challenges, privations and sorrows of this new kind of ‘total’ war. Yet it is clear that whichever combatant nation one looks at, there was a diversity of experience on the home front dependent on place – hence local home fronts – but also on class, on age, and particularly on gender. And that these experiences varied over time.

Calls for Papers

Organising Women in WWI

10:30-3:15 Saturday 21st March 2015 at Bantock House Museum, Finchfield Road, Wolverhampton, WV3 9LQ 2015 is the centenary of the formation of the Women’s Institute Movement in Britain and the publication of the Maternity Letters by the Women’s Co-Operative Guild. To commemorate…

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Event, General, Women's History

The First 40 Years – The Working Women’s Charter

Elections are often won and lost on women’s swing votes … What better time to start a serious debate on the things that matter to women – and to working women in particular? Of course, this debate is already taking place across the country in organisations from Mumsnet to the 30 Per Cent Group, and from the Fawcett Society to many employers. Just this week, Asda finds itself forced to into the debate via a legal challenge from thousands of its women employees embarking on a new battle for equal pay and recognition. And in Newham, the women activists of Focus E15 may have ended their occupation of empty flats but their battle for basic housing continues.A new Working Women’s Charter could transform these debates – not because a new list of new demands will change anything on its own but because it could harness the energy and promise of growing ‘third wave feminism’ …

Biography, Event, Politics, Women's History

Vale Leonore Davidoff (1932-2014)

She dedicated almost a decade to the meticulous research and writing that culminated in her final book Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780-1920, published by Oxford late in 2012 just before her 80th birthday. This pioneering study is yet to receive its full recognition. Leonore demonstrates the significance of sibling relationships and their key role in the extensive family networks that provided the capital, personnel, skills and contracts crucial to the rapidly expanding commercial and professional enterprises of the era, and how these changed as families became smaller from the end of the 19th century. Through studies of particular families (including the Freuds, Gladstones, Wedgwoods and Darwins), she explored sibling intimacy and incest, and some famous brother-sister relationships.