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…
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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…
Undergraduate Dissertation Prize 2020
We received 19 submissions for the WHN Undergraduate Dissertation prize on a diverse range of topics, time periods and geographical contexts. The standard of the entries was incredibly high and a real celebration of undergraduate women’s history .The students drew…
MA Dissertation Prize
The Women’s History Network is offering one £250 prize for a £250 prize of a Masters dissertation on any aspect of women’s or gender history written during the 2019-2020 academic year. The WHN welcomes research on any period and place,…
Unlikely Angel: The Songs of Dolly Parton by Professor Lydia R. Hamessley
In mid-August 2020, Dolly Parton was in the news. This is not unusual, but the headlines were a bit bigger this time because, unlike her usual practice, Dolly had made a political statement. In a prominent interview for Billboard,[1] she…
‘Women’s Long Battle for the Vote: Surprises on the Road to the Nineteenth Amendment’, Prof. Ellen Carol DuBois
Wednesday 2 December 2020 16:00 (London) Women’s Long Battle for the Vote: Surprises on the Road to the Nineteenth Amendment Ellen Carol DuBois, Distinguished Research Professor UCLA Women’s Long Battle for the Vote: Surprises on the Road to the…