Last night the paperback of my biography of Eglantyne Jebb was launched at the wonderful Women’s Library in London, as part of their on-going Wise Words Book Fest. The book’s publication was deliberately timed to coincide with Mothering Sunday because Eglantyne changed…
Category: Biography
Women’s History Month: Mary Gawthorpe
On the 12 March 1973, Yorkshire working-class suffragist Mary Gawthorpe died at ninety-two, after a decade of widowhood, in a nursing home in New York (borough of Queen’s). In England she had been generally supposed to be already dead for…
Women’s History Month: The International Year of the Nurse.
This year marks the centenary of the death of Florence Nightingale, and in the world of nursing and nursing history this is a reason for celebration of a woman who is regarded by many as the founder of modern nursing.…
Women’s History Month: The Governess- Widow.
Women’s opportunities to realize themselves were limited in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For middle-class girls, marriage was the most suitable role in life. But as widows, women had to count on the money, usually a scarce sum…
Women’s History Month: From the Women’s Library.
On this day, 4 Mar 1912, ‘For Valour Hunger Strike’ A Women’s Social & Political Union hunger strike medal was awarded to Gertrude Wilkinson ‘Fed By Force 4/3/12 Gertrude Wilkinson’, with presentation box, produced by the WSPU and presented to Gertrude…
Women’s History Month: Anne Halkett
On the 2 March 1652, the seventeenth-century diarist we know as Anne Halkett acquired that name when she married Sir James Halkett. She was thirty-three, and a serious Anglican who consulted a clergyman before entering into wedlock with a Presbyterian.…
Women’s History Month: Miss Georgiana Fyfe
At the outbreak of the First World War Miss Georgiana Fyfe joined Dr Hector Munro’s ‘Flying Ambulance’ Corps in Flanders. Dr Munro was an eccentric Scottish specialist. He wanted to send out a detachment of women daringly dressed in khaki…