The Women’s History Network blog
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, American Protestant churches prohibited women from preaching or becoming ordained ministers. However, the religious revivalism of the Awakenings – a series of Protestant religious movements in the United States – created new,…
My memoir, Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician, is both a chronicle of my life in the 1950s in a first-generation Jewish family, coming of age in the 1960s, and my embrace of feminism as I encountered…
Sources taken from Karen Harvey’s Social Bodes project which contains transcribed letters between c.1680-1820 categorised by state, emotion and body part.[1] Why do we study old letters? What is it about them? Or as historian Susan Whyman asks, ‘filled with…
Scanning Auntie Emmie’s attic with torchlight, a time-worn leather suitcase caught Susan’s eye. Emmie would regularly retrieve the suitcase from the attic, but its contents were never shared. Opening it up carefully, Susan was presented with material traces of a…
What’s in a letter? For a woman living in England in the nineteenth century with limited access to social freedoms and even paper—everything. Historians have given mixed reviews on the value of Jane Austen’s surviving personal letters. Some brush off…
During my PhD research on the role of professional archaeologists on BBC radio, one of the first files I accessed from the BBC Written Archives at Caversham was that of archaeologist Dina Dobson. I quickly became a little obsessed with…
Content warning: this blog post includes discussions of eugenics and racism which some readers may find upsetting. This blog post is a brief introduction to my research on Marie Stopes’ children’s books written under the pseudonym ‘Erica Fay’ between 1926…
Queen Alexandra of the United Kingdom and the British Dominions and Empress of India (1844 -1925) is a royal figure often disregarded in historical literature. Although studies surrounding Alexandra’s husband, King Edward VII, are plentiful, there is comparatively little written…
Content Warning: This article includes discussions of revolutionary politics and examples of violence against women in Sri Lanka. Reader discretion is advised. This blog post explores the fundamental questions of why and how women in the Global South and North…