Bedding rituals have been a popular part of a wedding in many parts of the world and can be found in societies dating back several thousand years. Although the nuances of the ritual vary from place to place, a bedding…
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Katherine Cecil Thurston – From a Will to a Death
If middle-class women lived humdrum lives, it was clearly a relief to read about the sensational. But the one among Thurston’s novels that became notorious in the light of its author’s end was The Fly on the Wheel, whose Irish heroine, torn between two men and hemmed in by the restrictions of being a woman, commits suicide by poison.
Elizabeth Smith – No Ivory Tower
Elizabeth Smith is a splendid example of the way that learning could provide a challenge and an outlet to women whose daily lives were by modern standards terribly cramped … She is also an example of the women’s tradition: though she died before she was thirty, she was remembered for years, with admiration, by other women who were trying to think or write. She shows too, less pleasingly, how reactionary cultural forces would join ranks against a woman stepping out of line, even when she did so in her mind rather than her behaviour.
Ahead of Her Time – Jane Johnson’s Nursery Library
Johnson wrote out her “fairy-tale” for her daughter and eldest son, and bound it like a proper book, about five or six years after the little Barbara had looked like herself rather than like her relations. This is startlingly early, before the late-eighteenth-century wave of professional writers for children, at about the same time as John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, 1744, which is generally presented as a first … Johnson’s manuscript is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and it finally, in 2001, reached print as a Bodleian publication …
Realigning political and personal selfhood: narratives of activist women in the late 1960s and 1970s
The small consciousness-raising groups that characterised the early Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) underlined the political and psychological importance socialist feminists attached to process and affect when it came to redefining the concept of politics. Instead of a left politics that…
Love, Power & Abandonment
Is all this suitable for soap opera rather than the seriousness of ‘true’ historical research and inquiry? The number of books, films and television hours made on the subject confirm its popularity so far as a general readership is concerned. Someone must be buying the books and the cinema tickets, and watching at home! Is it material for historians?
Prostitution and Police in a Port City during the French Revolution
Nantes prostitutes in the eighteenth century were on average twenty-five years old and single. Usually coming from a poor background, they received very little training in their youth and described themselves as seamstresses, thread and needle makers or laundresses. They…
Historical Lessons from the Worsley Case
The last two posts at the blog have told the story of the Worsley scandal. This post explores some of the press reactions to the case and thinks about what sort of emotions it produced it eighteenth century audiences and…
Seymour Dorothy Fleming (1757-1818), part 2
Richard’s vengeance had badly backfired. He and his sexual proclivities were now the talk of London society. For the press, Richard’s hobby of collecting ancient art and showing it off to the public, gave rise to the question of whether…