“We are an Injured Body”: Finding Inspiration in a Class on Jane Austen My new book, Women and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel: Injured Minds, Ruined Lives (Manchester University Press), originated in an undergraduate class I taught in spring…
Category: Blog
The Women’s History Network blog
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,…
Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician – Alice Rothchild
My memoir, Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician, is both a chronicle of my life in the 1950s in a first-generation Jewish family, coming of age in the 1960s, and my embrace of feminism as I encountered…
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…
Hidden history and vital identity with a First World War servicewoman’s suitcase of memory – Robert MacKinnon and Denby Humphries
Scanning Auntie Emmie’s attic with torchlight, a time-worn leather suitcase caught Susan’s eye. Emmie would regularly retrieve the suitcase from the attic, but its contents were never shared. Opening it up carefully, Susan was presented with material traces of a…
Taking the Page: Asserting Agency Through Letter Writing in 19th Century Britain
What’s in a letter? For a woman living in England in the nineteenth century with limited access to social freedoms and even paper—everything. Historians have given mixed reviews on the value of Jane Austen’s surviving personal letters. Some brush off…
Resurrecting Dina Dobson: Archaeologist, Educator and Radio Broadcaster – Jan Lewis
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…
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…