Wednesday, 13th January 2021 4:00pm (London) Three weeks after the suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1920, the suffragist, labor lawyer, anti-war activist, and feminist journalist Crystal Eastman attended a meeting of the National Woman’s Party. Now…
All Posts
Remembering Nellie Cressall by Jane McChrystal
Nellie Cressall was one of the brave women who went to prison in support of the Poplar Rates Rebellion in 1921, just one episode in a long life of activism, which began after she joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP)…
Making women count in disability history By Dr Coreen McGuire
In my book, Measuring Difference, numbering normal: setting the standards for disability in the interwar period, I show how specific conceptions of normalcy and disability emerged in the interwar period. The First World War necessitated new ways of thinking about…
Women’s History Autumn 2020
The Autumn 2020 issue of Women’s History is available now for purchase. The digital version of this edition is available free to all members – see details below.
Christmas Book Club Special: Pandora’s Jar, Women in the Greek Myths with Natalie Haynes 4 pm on 16 December
The Greek myths are among the world’s most important cultural building blocks and they have been retold many times, but rarely do they focus on the remarkable women at the heart of these ancient stories. Stories of gods and monsters…
Widows: Poverty, Power and Politics by Professor Maggie Andrews and Dr Janis Lomas
Our interest in widows was sparked when writing about the British women’s suffrage movement; we noticed all three leaders of the major suffrage organisations were widows. Was this, we wondered, something of a coincidence, or a more complex and common…
Challenging the Gender Binary of War: Munitions and Disability During the Second World War By Amy Dale
The grand narrative of the Second World War as the ‘People’s War’ remains a dominant theme in British cultural memory. Within that narrative, warfare and traditional ideas about masculinity are inextricably linked. Courage, valour and aggression are all worlds associated…
Nursing The Troubles by Megan Kelly
In 2019 the BBC released a documentary[1] which showcased interviews with nurses that had worked during ‘The Troubles.’ Compelling and poignant, one of the exceptional features of the documentary was just how willing and keen nurses were to share their…
Case Studies in Blame: Victorian Physicians, Working-Class Women and Tuberculosis in Scottish Charity Hospitals by Amy W. Farnbach
“Uncleanliness of the mind and body act and react,” wrote the Edinburgh-trained physician J. Milner Fothergill in his 1874 Maintenance of Health, “and perfect health of one is incompatible with an unhealthy state of the other.” The Victorian middle classes…