Some years ago, during a break from an academic workshop in Calcutta, I found an inner cityscape that was a mix of overbuilt and rather shabby looking shops, oddly punctuated by the occasional Western-looking skyscraper. As a historian my eye…
Author: Amy Swainston
When Women Champion Women: The Female Team Behind ‘When Two of Us Meet’ Musical – Emily Simonian, Alena Kutumian and Rebecka Webb
Honouring Women’s History Through Musical Theatre In the world of musical theatre, where women are still underrepresented in leadership roles, When Two of Us Meet stands out as a project created, led, and supported by women. We are incredibly proud…
Emotion and Space in the Mid-Victorian Women’s Suffrage Movement – Lucy McCormick
Separate Spheres The doctrine of the ‘separate spheres’ – women’s confinement in the home while men freely roamed the public world – is entrenched in popular imaginings of Victorian life. Historians have long debated the usefulness and accuracy of this…
Navigating “Female” Identity: The Role of 19th-Century Missionary Wives – Katherine Hsu
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, American Protestant churches prohibited women from preaching or becoming ordained ministers. However, the religious revivalism of the Awakenings – a series of Protestant religious movements in the United States – created new,…
Health, Death and Trauma in Middling Sort Women’s Letters during the Eighteenth Century – Isabella Smith
Sources taken from Karen Harvey’s Social Bodes project which contains transcribed letters between c.1680-1820 categorised by state, emotion and body part.[1] Why do we study old letters? What is it about them? Or as historian Susan Whyman asks, ‘filled with…