Shaw embodied women’s expanding opportunities in the 19th and early 20th centuries for education, work and politics, as well as the challenges they faced. An immigrant raised in poverty on a Michigan farm, from an early age Shaw worked to financially support her family, teaching school in addition to her unpaid hard physical farm labor. When she was called to the ministry, her family didn’t approve. She went it alone. She worked her way through college and seminary in the 1870s, fought for ordination, headed two parishes, and earned a medical degree, before giving all of it up to become a freelance lecturer, activist and organizer.
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Molly Hadfield – A Radical Warrior Woman Remembered
… when Molly Hadfield was 10, she was told that nursing was not for her – ‘you can’t do the exams’ – but she would be welcome to work in the nurses’ dining room. She took the job. Under the rules lunches were set out on tables for nurses, but sisters and matrons’ meals were kept in the oven. Sisters and matrons sat down to piping hot fare. Cold and cooling meals waited until nurses finished their shifts. The unfairness of the hierarchical system struck Molly Hadfield then and stuck with her, as did the distinction made between kitchen and nursing staff which prevented her from meeting on the premises with cousins and friends who were nurses.
Raging for Wages – An Extract
‘Even at the early age of three, I had some instincts as to the relations of cause and effect, and the basic need to remove the cause of the trouble.’[1] Her words become an epitaph in Kay Keasey’s spirited Australian…
Entertaining the Harvey Girls … A New Documentary Experience
The Fred Harvey Company, in reaction to growing tensions between staff and customers, decided to bring out women from the East and Midwest to stay in dormitories and work in their restaurants on an initial 6-month contract. The Harvey Girls were an instant hit, and many women stayed on, requesting further employment and marrying locals. Ultimately, this workforce spanned almost 100 years and involved over 100,000 women … many of the Fred Harvey Company’s most prominent restaurants and buildings which were designed by their chief building designer, Mary Colter. Colter was way ahead of her time, not only in her chosen profession, but also in her unique aesthetic which fused Native American and Hispanic Southwestern traditions. Colter’s work is still in evidence at The Grand Canyon in Arizona, La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona and at Union Station in Los Angeles, California.
Fashionable Diseases: Medicine, Literature and Culture, ca. 1660-1832
An International Interdisciplinary Conference Newcastle and Northumbria Universities 3rd – 5th July 2014 Between 1660 and 1832 books such as Cheyne’s English Malady and Adair’s Essays on Fashionable Diseases created a substantial debate on the relationship between fashion and sickness,…
On the Strength of Invisible Hands
The struggle for equal pay dates from way before the nineteenth century. Women have campaigned rarely knowing of the women who have gone before. The identities of many are lost in the past, although reinstatement has sometimes come through…
No More Rights to be Won?
Youthful arrogance is not limited to eras, individuals or generations. It permeates political movements, particularly where past oppression and greater disadvantage colour the work and its record. History reflects this for women in all periods, all battles. Conventional history, ways of working, and recording herstory colour women’s demands through centuries and how women’s campaigns are see.
Forgotten Heroes
Why do some women receive publicity and public recognition of their achievements and others remain completely ignored? This is the case of Ellen Wilkinson MP, discussed in an earlier blog, and also her friends the birth control pioneers. There was an…
Saving Women’s History : The Employment Tribunal Archive – Pt 2
How a strategic approach to discrimination claims has shaped what is in the Employment Tribunal Archive Most early cases of sex discrimination involved recruitment or access to promotion. Recruitment cases were comparatively straightforward: was the claimant better qualified than the other candidates;…