Why do some women receive publicity and public recognition of their achievements and others remain completely ignored? This is the case of Ellen Wilkinson MP, discussed in an earlier blog, and also her friends the birth control pioneers. There was an…
Category: Blog
The Women’s History Network blog
Saving Women’s History : The Employment Tribunal Archive – Pt 2
How a strategic approach to discrimination claims has shaped what is in the Employment Tribunal Archive Most early cases of sex discrimination involved recruitment or access to promotion. Recruitment cases were comparatively straightforward: was the claimant better qualified than the other candidates;…
Saving Women’s History : The Employment Tribunal Archive – Pt 1
Derby has much to do to set up the Archive in a way which enables its richness to be fully explored but it will be worth it. On some matters it may be possible to set information from the Archive alongside contemporaneous research and to discover, for example, whether early case decisions back up research findings that women who experienced sexual harassment tended to be those who were about to break into a male preserve – in other words, the harassment was not about sex, it was about power.
Cultures of Exclusion: Illicit worlds of Indian dance – Pt 2
In today’s India, classical performers are counted amongst the respectable middle classes, and usually belong to upper castes. However, before modern reforms, being married and performing in public or in front of men were entirely mutually exclusive social roles…
Cultures of Exclusion: Illicit worlds of Indian dance – Pt 1
From the 1990s, dance bars in Mumbai and other parts of the state of Maharashtra mushroomed into prominence. In these bars, girls dressed in glitzy though traditional clothes, danced to Bollywood songs and entertained almost exclusively male audience members.…
MARY QUAILE – Activist, Agitator, Trade Unionist
Mary Quaile Early in the 1900s, Mary Quaile arrived with her family in Manchester. They had come from Dublin, and Mary became a stalwart in the labour movement in Manchester. She led a café waitresses’ strike, going on to work…
Standing On Their Shoulders!
When appointed to the United States Supreme Court by President WJ (Bill) Clinton in the 1990s, Ruth Bader Ginsberg said: I would not be in this room today, if it were not for the women and men who…
Left on Pearl – 1970s Women’s Liberation Remembered
1970s Women’s Liberation Movement activism not only brought together women of diverse backgrounds. It ensured women’s voices were heard in political struggles of the time which women saw as intimately connected with women’s drive for a new world where egalitarian ideals would be met and women’s independence, bodily integrity and empowerment would be central. The 888 action was determined that women’s space should be free for women to consciousness raise and engage with the antiwar movement, civil rights, black power, lesbian and gay rights movements on women’s terms. Consistent with past wmen’s movement struggles, affordable housing was one of the issues taken up – reminiscent of Jane Addams and the Chicago movement of times past, where women trade unionists and suffragists like Alice Henry and Miles Franklin took up the banner.
Women of True Grit – Scottish Women’s Hospitals
It was during a visit to Belgrade, Serbia that I was first made aware of the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and the work they did during the First World War. What saddened me was that the women involved are known about…