The complexities surrounding women’s place in post-war British society have been well documented by historians. This debate centres on whether the Second World War had a liberating effect on women or if, instead, it served to cement women’s place in…
Category: General
Black History Month: Dorothy Dandridge (1922-1965) – at sea
October 28 1954. On this day the movie, Carmen Jones, was released. And Dorothy Dandridge was launched on her course as the world’s first African-American female film star, some say ‘the black Marilyn Monroe. This mixed-race singer and performer became…
Black History Month: Black cadet harassed to death at sea? Or murdered?
June 24 2010. On this date Akhona Geveza, a nineteen-year-old South African cadet on a cargo ship, disappeared. Her body was later found drifting in the sea off the Croatian coast. The question is still was she murdered to shut…
Black History Month: Ayahs at Sea
September 4 1892: She’s Asian, she’s female, she’s just landed in England – and it’s a period when few working-class women of any colour speak up. But Asian nanny Minnie Green took her white employers to a white court. And…
Black History Month: What is Black?
What is Black? Searching for that word within the Cultural Formation tag in the Orlando digital history of women’s writing brings up, of course, a number of writers with unmixed African descent: from Phillis Wheatley and Mary Prince through Zora…
BLACK HISTORY MONTH: Mary Morris-Knibb accuses the Child Welfare Association of discrimination, 17 November 1938.
Mr Morgan Jones: So I take it there now exists in this town, the city of Kingston, two bodies [providing child welfare services], one of which is composed of your own people – Jamaicans – and another composed of people…
Looking Forward to October
October at the Women’s History Blog is Black History Month, where we endeavour to provide a range of posts providing the most up to date research in the area of black women’s history. Yet, at the Women’s History Network Conference,…
Is history conservative?
In the last week, I attended an Irish Studies conference, where, amongst other things, I attended two papers, both by geographers: one on how research on DNA shapes how we view our national identity and the political consequences for power…
Couple Beggars in Ireland
Within a context of relatively low levels of interference from Church and State, the urban lower classes often determined their own regulatory mechanisms for marriage that were shaped by their local contexts. In both Dublin and, in most Presbyterian Irish…