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.
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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;…
Saving Women’s History : The Employment Tribunal Archive – Pt 1
Derby has much to do to set up the Archive in a way which enables its richness to be fully explored but it will be worth it. On some matters it may be possible to set information from the Archive alongside contemporaneous research and to discover, for example, whether early case decisions back up research findings that women who experienced sexual harassment tended to be those who were about to break into a male preserve – in other words, the harassment was not about sex, it was about power.
Cultures of Exclusion: Illicit worlds of Indian dance – Pt 2
In today’s India, classical performers are counted amongst the respectable middle classes, and usually belong to upper castes. However, before modern reforms, being married and performing in public or in front of men were entirely mutually exclusive social roles…
Cultures of Exclusion: Illicit worlds of Indian dance – Pt 1
From the 1990s, dance bars in Mumbai and other parts of the state of Maharashtra mushroomed into prominence. In these bars, girls dressed in glitzy though traditional clothes, danced to Bollywood songs and entertained almost exclusively male audience members.…
CFP: XXIInd CISH Congress,Towards a Global History of the Girl
XXIInd CISH Congress, Jinan, China 23 to 29 August 2015, In recent years, there has been a steady accumulation of publications on the history of the girl. Historians of women have begun to utilise age as a category of analysis…
MARY QUAILE – Activist, Agitator, Trade Unionist
Mary Quaile Early in the 1900s, Mary Quaile arrived with her family in Manchester. They had come from Dublin, and Mary became a stalwart in the labour movement in Manchester. She led a café waitresses’ strike, going on to work…
Standing On Their Shoulders!
When appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President WJ (Bill) Clinton in the 1990s, Ruth Bader Ginsberg said: I would not be in this room today, if it were not for the women and men who…