On 26 March 1716 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s satirical mock-eclogues “Monday”, “Thursday”, and “Friday” were illicitly printed by the notorious Edmund Curll under the title of Court Poems. This therefore seems as good a day as any for remembering Montagu,…
Category: Biography
Women’s History Month: Eunice Guthrie Murray
On 26 March 1960 the Scottish activist for women’s rights Eunice Guthrie Murray died of a stroke. She was eighty-two, and her historical links reached back through her American mother to the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Her mother…
Women’s History Month: Lucille Mathurin-Mair (née Waldrond), 1924-2009: Pioneer of Caribbean Women’s History
Lucille Mathurin Mair. Source: The Gleaner, Jamaica, January 31, 2009 http://www.jamaica-gleaner.com/gleaner/20090131/letters/letters4.html Lucille Mathurin-Mair, who died on January 29th, 2009 aged 85, was a well respected Jamaican historian, author, teacher, activist and diplomat and sustained a deep commitment to women’s rights…
Women’s History Month: Health, Beauty and Physical Recreation – women of the keep-fit world
On 30th December 2010, Prunella Stack, a pioneer in the development and spread of female physical recreation in Britain and around the world, died at the grand age of ninety-six years old. Mary Bagot-Stack founded the Women’s League of Health…
Women’s History Month: Marie Stopes
On 17 March 1921 Marie Stopes and her husband of three years, Humphrey Verdon Roe, founded the Mothers’ Clinic for Constructive Birth Control at 61 Marlborough Road, Holloway, North London; it was the first birth control clinic in England. For…
Women’s History Month: The Woman who invented Welsh national dress
Pencil drawing of Augusta Hall, courtesy the Lady Llanover Society, www.ladyllanover.org.uk The Welsh woman in her flannel petticoat, dress, apron, shawl and tall black hat is a popular stereotype found on everything from maps, books and postcards to boxes of…
Women’s History Month: Pandita Ramabai
On 11 March 1889 the Indian activist known as Pandita Ramabai opened her Sharada Sadan (or Home for Learning) in Chowpatty, an area of Mumbai (which was then, under the British Raj, known as Bombay). She designed this institution to…
Women’s History Month: ‘Red Ellen’, Ellen Wilkinson, 1891 – 1947
Ellen Wilkinson was a key radical figure in British socialism and feminism of the early and mid-20th century, a woman of idealism, pragmatism, energy and passion who was involved in many of the major struggles of the period. Born in…
Women’s History Month: S. Margery Fry (1874-1958) ‘Women Champion of the Underdog’
Margery Fry was born on 11th March 1874 into a prominent and well-connected Quaker family. She was the eighth child of Edward and Mariabella Fry, whose family was later completed by the birth of Margery’s younger sister, Ruth. Margery’s father…