Event, General, Politics, Women's History

‘A Call to Arms’ … The Crimea to The Blitz – Ministering Angels

Mrs Rebecca Strong, one of Mrs Deeble’s ladies at Netley, wrote: ‘There was normally an orderly attached to each ward, but they were often taken away for relief work such as coal carrying, etc. Each sister had from six to eight of these wards under her charge, and speedily found that the nursing must be done by herself … A special orderly could be had in emergencies, but the nursing was nil.’

Biography, Event, Politics, Women's History

ELEANOR FLORENCE RATHBONE – A Woman for Our Times!

… [it] would be wonderful … to have a statue of Eleanor standing proudly in one of the two remaining niches in St George’s Hall, Liverpool. In theory this is perfectly possible, and would be welcome, but in practice it would require around £100,000 to commission and execute. That was the cost of the statue of Kitty Wilkinson, the first Liverpool woman to be so memorialised, in 2012. If there is anyone out there who has ideas of how the money might be raised, or would like to lead a fund raising campaign, we would LOVE to hear from you …

Event, Politics, Source, Women's History

Triangle Mill Sisters: hostel life for West Yorkshire textile workers 1920 to 1970

Morris’s mills managers targeted the north east of England to recruit their workers. Out-of-work coal mining families needed income and Morris’s needed ‘hands’. Anxious parents felt happier if their daughters, some as young as fourteen years old, were looked after in a safe ‘home-from-home’, and mill owners could control their labour force better if they were housed in an attractive well-supported community.

Event, General, Politics, Source, Women's History

A Century of Feminist Foreign Policy – Looking Back for Help Today

Since WILPF’s inception, the world has experienced 224 wars. During that same timeframe, women won two important struggles for human rights. The first, of course, was the right to vote in 1920; the second, the right to reproductive freedom in 1972. Jacobs, and the group that formed out of the Hague conference insisted then, and we insist now, on a third human right —the right to be at the peace table; to be part of the decisions to make war or keep the peace. Fewer than one in 40 of the signatories of major peace agreements since 1992 have been female, according to the UN development fund for women. This needs to change.

Today, there are 50 ongoing violent conflicts resulting in 50 million refugees around the world, and untold death and destruction. The international trade of lemons and toothbrushes is regulated, but not guns and other weapons. Would the adoption of more feminist foreign policy and an increase in women’s participation in peace negotiations put an end to arms and conflict? Probably not. But the point is not to end conflict, but to resolve it without recourse to military violence. The world is missing a powerful opportunity for creating sustainable peace when it turns to military solutions and restricts the participants at peace negotiations to the men with guns.

Event, Politics, Source, Women's History

Discrimination – A Coat of Many Colors

[In the General Motors (GM) case] … to [outlaw] sex and race discrimination [experienced by individuals or a group], the courts would have had to recognize a new minority classification, African American females. The court opposed the creation of any new classifications proposing that, “the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, [would] clearly raise[*] the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.” If the women had been able to show that they had been victims of discrimination because they were black or because they were women they would have had a case, but because GM was not discriminatory against white women nor black men, the women had no legal case.

Biography, Event, Politics, Women's History

The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act – A History of Equal Pay

Lilly Ledbetter’s eight year battle started with a little note she found in the women’s bathroom at work. The note ranked her salary alongside the much higher salaries of three male tire-room managers, and Ledbetter was shocked to see that her male peers were making $14,000 and more per year than she was. “I’d worried about being paid less than the men who were doing the same work I was,” Ledbetter records in her memoir, but she never had evidence to prove her suspicions (5). Armed with this alarming new information, Ledbetter took action and sued Goodyear for pay discrimination.

Event, General, Politics, Women's History

First Ever LGBT History Festival – Women & the United Kingdom: Part 2

Sonja Tiernan outlined the very cross-class and life-changing relationship of the daughter of big Anglo-Irish landlord and the working-class Esther Roper from 1897. Eva ‘rejected her aristocratic lifestyle, moving from an opulent mansion in the beautiful countryside of Sligo to a mid-terrace property in the smog-bound quarters of industrial Manchester’. They were together for 30 years. ‘Once labelled as a pair of oddities, it is now clear that the women were open about their relationship, mixing with an eclectic group of radical gay and lesbian activists. The couple became formidable political advocates in England often organising successful and radical campaigns for social justice …