During my PhD research on the role of professional archaeologists on BBC radio, one of the first files I accessed from the BBC Written Archives at Caversham was that of archaeologist Dina Dobson. I quickly became a little obsessed with…
Author: Lisa Berry-Waite
The ‘Secret’ Children’s Books of Marie Stopes – Morgan M. Miller
Content warning: this blog post includes discussions of eugenics and racism which some readers may find upsetting. This blog post is a brief introduction to my research on Marie Stopes’ children’s books written under the pseudonym ‘Erica Fay’ between 1926…
Queenship, Disability, and Beauty: Queen Alexandra, 1844 – 1925 – Lucy Haigh
Queen Alexandra of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Empress of India (1844 -1925) is a royal figure often disregarded in historical literature. Although studies surrounding Alexandra’s husband, King Edward VII, are plentiful, there is comparatively little written…
Unnamed Revolutionary women in France, the UK, and Sri Lanka – Aruni Samarakoon
Content Warning: This article includes discussions of revolutionary politics and examples of violence against women in Sri Lanka. Reader discretion is advised. This blog post explores the fundamental questions of why and how women in the Global South and North…
Sophie Scholl: Female Resistance in Nazi Germany – Emily Harrington
The White Rose resistance movement began in Nazi Germany and ended in a shock trial where three of its members were executed. This blog post focuses on Sophie Scholl, one of the members of the movement who was executed by…
Radical Portraits of Working Class Women Writers – Laura Maw
Virginia Woolf’s maxim in her now-classic polemic was this: ‘a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction’.[1] But what if a writer did not have access to these resources – this…
Women Performers, their Writhing Reptiles and that Wrought Indian Connection – Debanjali Biswas
Please note that this article contains content that may be sensitive to readers with herpetophobia In the last decade of the nineteenth century, the British public was reportedly enthralled by a snake charmer’s performances. She was“richly attired in picturesque Hindoo…
‘Screwdrivers, Scissors and Pliers’: The Electrical Association for Women in Interwar Scotland – Eleanor Peters
2024 marks the centenary of the founding of the Electrical Association for Women (EAW), an organisation that urged women to equip themselves with pliers, scissors, and screwdrivers and learn how to maintain and fix their electrical appliances – no repairman…
‘The Farewell was as Painful as a Big Funeral’: Mária Nagy’s Recollections of the Hungarian Medical Assistance to North Korea in the 1950s – Réka Krizmanics
Not long after the Korean War broke out in early 1950, calls for expressing socialist solidarity with North Korea appeared throughout the Second World. Hungary, a small country where Communists got into power only two years prior, proved to be…