Bella Keyzer, born in 1922, was a jute weaver, a munitions worker, an assembly line worker, but most famously a welder. I came across an oral history interview with her recorded in 1985 as part of the Dundee Oral History…
Category: Biography
The Ladies of Llangollen
‘In early life they formed a romantic attachment, as deep as it proved to be lasting, and determined to enjoy their friendship in perfect seclusion.’ The ladies of Llangollen, or Lady Eleanor Charlotte Butler (1739-1829) and the Hon Sarah Ponsonby…
Maud Allen: The Salome Dancer
Maud Allen (1873-1956), born as Beulah Maude Durrant in Toronto, Canada, was an early twentieth century performer. She was a favourite of the music hall and popular theatres, where a population from diverse social backgrounds went to watch a variety…
Blogging Against Disablism
Yesterday was ‘Blogging against Disablism’ day, where bloggers everywhere are called to speak out against discrimination against those with disabilities. With that in mind, I began to think about what historians know about women with disabilities in the British past…
Madeleine Smith
9th Feb 1857 Emile, I have this night received your note. Oh, it is kind of you to write to me. Emile, no one can know the intense agony of mind I have suffered last night and to day. Emile,…
M. Marcin and Lucy Hutton.
She points out that Saint Paul had been taught by his mother and grandmother; she decries ‘Mans Scholastick Learning’, which, she says, has too frequently been set up to contradict the Scriptures; she notes that the words ‘she’ and ‘he’…
Women’s History Month: Christina of Markyate
Medieval women’s voices are notoriously difficult to hear through the surviving records, which principally reflect male dominated elites of the political, social and religious Western world in which they were created. A world in which women were frequently caricatured as…
Women’s History Month: Sheila Kitzinger
The pioneering natural childbirth activist Sheila Kitzinger was born March 29, 1929 in Taunton, Somerset. It’s an appropriate setting. In Somerset was ‘a nest of suffragettes’[i], at a time when there was silence about ways of birthing and much ignorance…
Women’s History Month: Jenny Lind
Jenny Lind or Johanna Maria Lind (1820-1887) was a nineteenth century Swedish opera singer. She was the illegitimate child of the school teacher Anne-Marie Felborg and Niclas Jonad Lind, a bookkeeper. They married when Jenny was 14. From childhood, she had…