‘Not all heroes wear capes’, a common refrain during and since the Covid pandemic, but the ideas behind that phrase go back much further and certainly played a part in the Home Front during the Second World War. Churchill instructed…
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Sign up for our next seminar, ‘Historical Responses of Women to Global Vulnerabilities of Terrorism and Peacebuilding in Northern Nigeria, 1980-2025’ with Dr Mubarak Tukur
Join us for the next session of our Summer Seminar Series will take place on Tuesday, 2 June at 4pm GMT. Our speaker will be Dr Mubarak Tukur, an early-career scholar and Lecturer at the Department of History and Security…
Anna Maria Garthwaite: One of the few 18th century British female silk designers – Elizabeth Strange
This blog post focuses on Anna Maria Garthwaite who was a silk designer in 18th century England. A silk designers’ purpose was to create designs that showed weavers what colours and decoration they should weave on their loom. Anna specialised…
Women’s History Today – Spring 2026 Edition
The Spring 2026 issue of Women’s History Today is now available. This issue brings together research examining women’s participation in the built environment, with a particular focus on educational institutions, professional formation and uneven career trajectories. The digital version of…
Sign up for our next seminar, ‘Female Theatrical Entrepreneurs: Women Versus the Nineteenth-Century French State’, with Dr Sophie Horrocks David
The first session of our Summer Seminar Series will take place on Tuesday, 5 May at 4pm GMT. Our speaker for the session is Dr Sophie Horrocks David, a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Leeds. Sophie will…
Undergraduate Dissertation Prize 2025-2026
We are awarding £250 for the best undergraduate dissertation on women’s or gender history written in the 2025–2026 academic year. Entries need to show original research and be submitted to a UK university, graded 2.1 or higher, with a strong…
A three-generation family story through Gwent Archives’ collection – Bec Howarth
Whilst preparing social media content for LGBTQ+ history month I came across the Welsh County LGBTQ+ timelines. Scanning the Newport timeline, one individual caught my eye – Amelia Vella. The timeline wrote how Amelia’s mother, Fanny Vella, was in the…
Summer Seminar Series 2026
We are thrilled to announce the programme for our Summer Seminar Series 2026 and hope you will join us for this wonderful line up of seminars and roundtables. The sign-up link for each session will be publicised here on our…
Boudoir Laments: Reading Gender and Spatiality in the Lyrics of Seventeenth-Century Chinese Gentlewomen – Yuemin He
Late Imperial China is often described as a society structured by strict gender hierarchies. Elite women were expected to remain within the domestic inner quarters, devoted to family duty, moral virtue, and household management, while public life and most forms…