Recognising –
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(8) Military expenditure harms women & girls disproportionately and denies resources essential to eliminating violence against women and ending exploitation, abuse & discrimination against women & girls.
Category: Blog
The Women’s History Network blog
Constance Smedley – Renaissance Woman
The Cotswolds caused Smedley, hitherto a Tory by inheritance, to move sharply to the left in her politics. She carried her idealism and activism back to London to run the Greenleaf Theatre and theatre school, to the USA for the years 1915-22, where she and Armfield left their impress on theatre movements in New York and California, and she was no less active in her late years back in England.
Lady Lucy Herbert – Prioress
… since Roman Catholic institutions were for generations illegal in Britain, parents who wanted their daughters brought up as Catholics, and who could afford it, often shipped them off to convents in France or the Low Countries. These flourishing female communities were hotbeds of talent and ability, and they recorded their own lives and those of their convents in a range of valuable historical texts. Distinctions of social rank were not quite obliterated among them, and women who rose to be leaders in the religious life were often aristocrats.
Women’s History Month: Bedding Rituals in Scotland
Bedding rituals have been a popular part of a wedding in many parts of the world and can be found in societies dating back several thousand years. Although the nuances of the ritual vary from place to place, a bedding…
Katherine Cecil Thurston – From a Will to a Death
If middle-class women lived humdrum lives, it was clearly a relief to read about the sensational. But the one among Thurston’s novels that became notorious in the light of its author’s end was The Fly on the Wheel, whose Irish heroine, torn between two men and hemmed in by the restrictions of being a woman, commits suicide by poison.
Elizabeth Smith – No Ivory Tower
Elizabeth Smith is a splendid example of the way that learning could provide a challenge and an outlet to women whose daily lives were by modern standards terribly cramped … She is also an example of the women’s tradition: though she died before she was thirty, she was remembered for years, with admiration, by other women who were trying to think or write. She shows too, less pleasingly, how reactionary cultural forces would join ranks against a woman stepping out of line, even when she did so in her mind rather than her behaviour.
Ahead of Her Time – Jane Johnson’s Nursery Library
Johnson wrote out her “fairy-tale” for her daughter and eldest son, and bound it like a proper book, about five or six years after the little Barbara had looked like herself rather than like her relations. This is startlingly early, before the late-eighteenth-century wave of professional writers for children, at about the same time as John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, 1744, which is generally presented as a first … Johnson’s manuscript is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and it finally, in 2001, reached print as a Bodleian publication …
Realigning political and personal selfhood: narratives of activist women in the late 1960s and 1970s
The small consciousness-raising groups that characterised the early Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) underlined the political and psychological importance socialist feminists attached to process and affect when it came to redefining the concept of politics. Instead of a left politics that…
Love, Power & Abandonment
Is all this suitable for soap opera rather than the seriousness of ‘true’ historical research and inquiry? The number of books, films and television hours made on the subject confirm its popularity so far as a general readership is concerned. Someone must be buying the books and the cinema tickets, and watching at home! Is it material for historians?