Alice Hawkins was the leader of the women’s suffrage movement in Leicester. Born in 1863 to a working-class family, she left school and thirteen to work as a shoe machinist. In 1884, she married Alfred Hawkins and she went on…
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Catherine Rew’s Oral History, part 2.
A number of years ago, the missionary Catherine Rew did an oral history with her daughter Kathryn Rew Van’t-Wout. This is part two of the transcript. Part one is here. See here for a biography of Catherine. I have added…
Elizabeth Heyrick (1869-1831)
Elizabeth Heyrick (1769-1831), social reformer and abolitionist, is little known today. She receives only the briefest mention in Charlotte Sussman’s Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713-1833, Stanford University Press, 2000. She was hardly mentioned in the media…
Catherine Rew’s Oral History, part 1.
A number of years ago, the missionary Catherine Rew did an oral history with her daughter Kathryn Rew Van’t-Wout. This is part one of the transcript. See here for a biography of Catherine. I have added explanatory information in square…
Catherine Jane Rew (1926-2009)
Catherine Rew, nee McFadyen, was a missionary in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo in central Africa for over fifty years. She was born into a lower-middle class family in Renfrew, near Glasgow. Her father was the station…
Why don’t the girls propose?
The men are shy- the ladies cry Their minds they won’t disclose; If it be so, I’d like to know Why don’t the girls propose? At splendid balls, in dazzling halls amid a host o beaux, with speaking eye…
Uncovering the Life and Archive of Dame Elizabeth Taylor Cadbury, Quaker Philanthropist (1858-1951)
Elizabeth Taylor Cadbury is typically identified as the wife of Quaker chocolate manufacturer George Cadbury (1839-1922), described by the News Review in 1948 as ‘the Queen-Mother of British Chocolate’. However, beyond her popular identification with British confectionary, Taylor Cadbury deserves…
Dervorgilla of Galloway (abt 1214- abt 1288)
Dervorgilla of Galloway was a thirteenth century noblewoman of a prestigious lineage. Her Scottish relatives were major landowners in the South of Scotland. Her mother was the daughter of Matilda and David, Prince of Scotland; she was niece to Robert…
