In 1967, in a meeting room of leftists and radicals at the University of Kent, Di Parkin met her future life-long friend and comrade Lorraine Hewitt. The political connection that drew the two young women together was immediate: Di had…
Category: Biography
Black History Month: Mary Prince
In September 1831 the Anti-Slavery Society in London published The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by herself. Prince, who was illiterate, had dictated her story, at her own suggestion, to a young abolitionist named Susanna Strickland…
Black History Month: Hart Sisters
In September 1809 Anne Hart Gilbert and her sister Elizabeth opened a Methodist Sunday school (the first in the West Indies) at the naval centre of English Harbour, Antigua, which was willing to teach both slave and free children. Anne…
Black History Month: Phillis Wheatley
On 18 October 1770 there appeared at Boston, Massachusetts, an advertisement for a broadside entitled An Elegiac Poem, On the Death of . . . George Whitefield. Whitefield was a charismatic evangelical preacher from England, who had died near Boston…
Black History Month: Lilian Masediba Ngoyi (1911-1980)
FEDSAW Women’s Protests, Pretoria 1956. In 1954, Lilian Masediba Ngoyi took to the stage of the inaugural conference of the Federation of South African Women (FEDSAW) and stated to the gathered group of multiracial delegates: “Let us be brave: we…
Catherine Rew’s Oral History, part four
A number of years ago, the missionary Catherine Rew did an oral history with her daughter Kathryn Rew Van’t-Wout. This is the final part of the transcript. Part one is here and part two and part three. See here for a biography of…
Hannah Kilham (1774-1832)
Hannah Kilham (1774-1832), a Quaker convert, was born in Sheffield and died at sea between Sierra Leone and Liberia. Her husband died after eight months of marriage and her daughter died before she was three. She joined the Society of…
Catherine Rew’s Oral History, part 3
A number of years ago, the missionary Catherine Rew did an oral history with her daughter Kathryn Rew Van’t-Wout. This is part three of the transcript. Part one is here and part two here. See here for a biography of Catherine.…
Alice Hawkins (1863-1946)
Alice Hawkins was the leader of the women’s suffrage movement in Leicester. Born in 1863 to a working-class family, she left school and thirteen to work as a shoe machinist. In 1884, she married Alfred Hawkins and she went on…