On this day: We remember…Eunice Guthrie Murray who died on 26 Mar 1960. Along with her mother and her sister, Sylvia Murray, Eunice joined the Women’s Freedom League and by 1913 was President of the League in Scotland. In…
Category: Biography
Women’s History Month: Eleanor Rathbone.
At first sight, there would seem to be little to connect Eleanor Rathbone, Independent MP for the Combined English Universities, with the occupation of Prague by Hitler’s regime on 15 March 1939. But nothing could be further from the truth,…
Women’s History Month: Ada Lovelace Day.
Augusta Ada King, Countess Lovelace (1815-1852) wrote the world’s first computer programme for the Analytical Engine (an early computer), invented by Charles Babbage. She had been taught mathematics by her mother, Annabella Byron, and met Babbage in 1833. When translating…
Women’s History Month: Hertha Ayrton (1854-1923): scientist yet ‘in every way a woman’
On this day, March 23 1899, the scientist Hertha Ayrton read a paper about her electrical researches to the Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) who had opened their doors to a woman for the first time. Even today female scientists…
Women’s History Month: Caroline Sheridan or Norton
On the 22 March 1808, Caroline Sheridan (later Caroline Norton) was born into a famous theatrical family. (She revered her grandfather Richard Brinsley Sheridan, but probably never understood how famous in her day had been her great-grandmother Frances Sheridan.) She…
Women’s History Month: Jane Barker
On the 19 March 1718, poet and novelist Jane Barker, in her capacity as an active Jacobite, wrote advising the exiled Duke of Ormond (in code) regarding a suitable time for a Jacobite invasion of Britain. Barker was a Roman…
Women’s History Month: Constance Markievicz and the Feminist-Republican Dilemma
One of the great ironies of British suffrage history is that the first woman elected to Westminster, Constance Markievicz, was in fact Irish. Markievicz stood as a Sinn Fein candidate for Dublin’s St Patrick’s Division in 1918, winning her seat…
Women’s History Month: Marianne Farningham
On this day, 16 March, 1909, the writer Marianne Farningham (Mary Ann Hearne) died, at the age of 75, in the Welsh sea resort of Barmouth. The following day her obituary in the Times described Marianne as having been ‘for…
Women’s History Month: Death of Nellie McPherson, the first seawomen to die in WW1.
Few people know that women seafarers sailed in wartime. The stereotype is of rugged Cap’n Birdseye types in sou’westers standing stalwart at the storm-lashed wheel. But women were there – in surprisingly large numbers, as I found when writing my…