2024 marks the centenary of the founding of the Electrical Association for Women (EAW), an organisation that urged women to equip themselves with pliers, scissors, and screwdrivers and learn how to maintain and fix their electrical appliances – no repairman…
Category: Blog
The Women’s History Network blog
‘The Farewell was as Painful as a Big Funeral’: Mária Nagy’s Recollections of the Hungarian Medical Assistance to North Korea in the 1950s – Réka Krizmanics
Not long after the Korean War broke out in early 1950, calls for expressing socialist solidarity with North Korea appeared throughout the Second World. Hungary, a small country where Communists got into power only two years prior, proved to be…
Marketing from Spanish commercial banks: attracting female customers – Susana Martínez-Rodríguez
In 1964, just a few months after British fashion designer Mary Quant became the center of controversy with her Bazaar boutique in Chelsea, the irreverent miniskirt arrived in Spanish society. Modernity was making strides. The consumer society was burgeoning in…
Beyond the Fragments: 45 Years on
Beyond the Fragments: 45 Years On A free one-day conference at People’s History Museum, Manchester Friday 28 June 2024 Keynote speakers: Sheila Rowbotham, Lynne Segal, and Hilary Wainwright 2024 marks the forty-fifth anniversary of the publication of the seminal socialist-feminist…
“Right, we have to do something about it!”: Policewomen’s agency against the Royal Ulster Constabulary – Dr Hannah West
“Right, we have to do something about it!”: Policewomen’s agency against the Royal Ulster Constabulary ‘The Chief Constable at that time […] decided that he didn’t want women working, really, because they weren’t armed. Everything was getting worse at that…
Reading Collaborative Life Writing in the Memoirs of Princess Daschkaw (1840) – Alexis Wolf
In 1840, Memoirs of Princess Daschkaw, Lady of Honour to Catherine II was published in England. The two-volume text included the personal memoirs of Russian noblewoman Ekaterina Dashkova (1743-1810), one of the most powerful, well-known and misunderstood women figures of…
‘Ane good receipt for the mother in trouball’: The anatomy of a seventeenth-century Scottish medical book – Roslyn Potter
The year is 1649 and Lady Jean Wemyss has a headache. Since paracetamol won’t be invented for another several hundred years, Jean reaches for the next best thing: a handwritten recipe book. The cure, written down in her mother’s neat…
Empire on Fire: The Institutionalisation of Widow Immolation by the British Colonial State in India – Ghazah Abbasi
Please note that this article includes discussion of state violence against women, racism, and violent death. Thousands of Hindu widows burned alive on pyres in colonised India, fanning the flames of British imperial rule. During much of the 19th century,…