‘Not all heroes wear capes’, a common refrain during and since the Covid pandemic, but the ideas behind that phrase go back much further and certainly played a part in the Home Front during the Second World War. Churchill instructed…
Category: Blog and News
News items of interest to WHN Members
Sign up for our next seminar, ‘Historical Responses of Women to Global Vulnerabilities of Terrorism and Peacebuilding in Northern Nigeria, 1980-2025’ with Dr Mubarak Tukur
Join us for the next session of our Summer Seminar Series will take place on Tuesday, 2 June at 4pm GMT. Our speaker will be Dr Mubarak Tukur, an early-career scholar and Lecturer at the Department of History and Security…
Anna Maria Garthwaite: One of the few 18th century British female silk designers – Elizabeth Strange
This blog post focuses on Anna Maria Garthwaite who was a silk designer in 18th century England. A silk designers’ purpose was to create designs that showed weavers what colours and decoration they should weave on their loom. Anna specialised…
A three-generation family story through Gwent Archives’ collection – Bec Howarth
Whilst preparing social media content for LGBTQ+ history month I came across the Welsh County LGBTQ+ timelines. Scanning the Newport timeline, one individual caught my eye – Amelia Vella. The timeline wrote how Amelia’s mother, Fanny Vella, was in the…
Boudoir Laments: Reading Gender and Spatiality in the Lyrics of Seventeenth-Century Chinese Gentlewomen – Yuemin He
Late Imperial China is often described as a society structured by strict gender hierarchies. Elite women were expected to remain within the domestic inner quarters, devoted to family duty, moral virtue, and household management, while public life and most forms…
Winner of the 2025 MA Dissertation Prize
We are very pleased to announce Sophie Weinberg’s ‘The Matrilineal Printing House: Recovering the Printing Lineage of Widow Stationers in the Seventeenth-Century English Book Trade’ the winner of our 2025 MA dissertation prize. Sophie examined two examples of intergenerational female inheritance of print shops: the…
The Prejudice of Welfare for Women Under the Poor Laws – Shagnick Bhattacharya
In April 1818, Catherine Macknally, described in the parish records of St Andrew, Plymouth, as a ‘common prostitute’, was apprehended while wandering and begging with her two illegitimate children—both under two years of age.[1] Examined before two justices of the…
Women’s History Network/Women’s History Association of Ireland Joint Book Prize
We are delighted to announce that the WHN has teamed up with the Women’s History Association of Ireland to offer a joint annual book prize which awards £500 for an author’s first single-authored monograph in women’s or gender history. Entries…
‘The Finding Katherine Project’: a window into the life of Scottish suffragist, Katherine Walker Lindsay – Katherine Ingram
I first learned of Katherine Walker Lindsay in early 2025 when I was examining the letter books of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Society for Women’s Suffrage (GWSSWS), a branch of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS),…