Background As Carol Boyce Davies has noted, black women have been consistently written out of accounts of black international radicalism. The life and work of Eslanda Goode Robeson is a case in point. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1896, Eslanda…
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Black History Month: Dorothy Dandridge (1922-1965) – at sea
October 28 1954. On this day the movie, Carmen Jones, was released. And Dorothy Dandridge was launched on her course as the world’s first African-American female film star, some say ‘the black Marilyn Monroe. This mixed-race singer and performer became…
Black History Month: Witness against Slavery – The Story of Mary Prince
Oh the horrors of slavery! … the truth ought to be told of it; and what my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate …. I have been a slave – I have felt what a…
Black History Month: Black cadet harassed to death at sea? Or murdered?
June 24 2010. On this date Akhona Geveza, a nineteen-year-old South African cadet on a cargo ship, disappeared. Her body was later found drifting in the sea off the Croatian coast. The question is still was she murdered to shut…
Black History Month: History in Fiction
Black history continues to discover new knowledge and generate new understanding. But today I want to celebrate a different kind of history, that which makes no bones about its invented characters, invented situations, invented scenes, yet which succeeds in telling…
Black History Month: Ayahs at Sea
September 4 1892: She’s Asian, she’s female, she’s just landed in England – and it’s a period when few working-class women of any colour speak up. But Asian nanny Minnie Green took her white employers to a white court. And…
History to Herstory is relaunched
From 7 October 2011 www.historytoherstory.org.uk, an online resource charting Yorkshire women’s lives 1100 to the present day, will be available free to researchers. West Yorkshire Archive Service and the University of Huddersfield are delighted to relaunch the updated History to…
Black History Month: What is Black?
What is Black? Searching for that word within the Cultural Formation tag in the Orlando digital history of women’s writing brings up, of course, a number of writers with unmixed African descent: from Phillis Wheatley and Mary Prince through Zora…
Winner of Book Prize 2011
The WHN Book Prize was awarded at the Annual Conference at The Women’s Library in London in September 2011. Many congratulations to Victoria Harris for Selling Sex in the Reich: Prostitutes in German Society, 1914-1945 (OUP, 2010)