Applications are invited for a fully-funded collaborative four-year PhD to commence in October 2023 at the University of Portsmouth. The PhD will be based in the School of Art, Design and Performance and will be supervised by Professor Deborah Sugg…
Category: Blog
The Women’s History Network blog
5th April 2023: Academic Fellows Celebration – Early Career Research Fellows Roundtable
Join us for a very special session featuring our Women’s History Network Early Career Research Fellows! Our ECR Fellows will be sharing their work on a diverse and fascinating range of topics from the history of women’s masturbation to the…
Everyday Gays, Ordinary Queers, and the National Lesbian and Gay Survey – Victoria Golding
Pride 1987, 10.10am: ‘Helped E. to throw pills down the cat with cystitis. Washed breakfast dishes. Brought Gay Vegetarian placard up from cellar. Fed goldfish.’ (Correspondent No.157)[1] This National Lesbian and Gay Survey contributor’s account of her involvement in the…
Girls in the workhouse: a question of morality, c.1880-1920 – Claire Phillips
In the late nineteenth century, anxiety was growing throughout society about the suitability of the workhouse for children. Children could enter the workhouse for many reasons: as part of destitute families, as orphans, or as a result of economic difficulties…
Medicine, morals, and masturbating women: John Marten and the changing face of female self-pleasure – Elizabeth Schlappa
From the early eighteenth century to the urban myths of today, masturbation has been credited with causing all manner of bodily miseries. Serious moral and medical alarm about self-pleasure was first popularised by an anonymous pamphlet entitled Onania, or, The…
Bodies of Evidence: Reflections on the Somatic Experience of Doing History – Sasha Rasmussen
Even as the discipline of history has come to terms with the subjectivities and positionality of its practitioners, the body of the historian remains fraught territory. Carolyn Steedman offers a rare glimpse of the embodied practice of history in her…
Lyrical Voices of Women in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century China – Yuemin He
The late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Chinese society and its changing socio-cultural attitudes towards women’s literacy and female public presence in print media created a hybrid dynamic site of bargaining for learned women, where new cultural opportunities met old challenges of…
Patssi Valdez & Chicana Feminism – Olivia Gill
For examples of Valdez’s art, see a recent online retrospective. A “Chicano” is ‘a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself’,[1] and Chicano culture is multilingual, multiracial, religious, and often involves urban street culture. Artist Patssi Valdez (1951-present) turned to…
‘‘They could but they weren’t encouraged to’: Class, gender and work in Portsmouth in the 1970s and 1980s’ – Mandy Wrenn
After a long career in financial services I wanted a change of direction and applied to study history in Portsmouth. One of my university modules covered the successes usually ascribed to Second Wave Feminism, namely gender equality legislation and a…