I am the Great Granddaughter of Ruby Side Thompson. I inherited her forty-three diaries that span from 1909–1969. They were passed down to my grandmother, Ruth Ferris Thompson who was married to Ruby’s son, John Thompson. Ruby’s Diaries had several…
Category: Blog
The Women’s History Network blog
Adolescent angst and wartime woes in World War Two France
The Second World War saw France defeated and subsequently occupied by the Germans. Young girls’ literary responses to the period – their diaries and memoirs – serve a dual purpose: they convey their own personal story whilst providing a historical…
British women at work in the British zone of occupied Germany, 1945-49
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…
Black History Month: Eslanda Goode Robeson
Background As Carol Boyce Davies has noted, black women have been consistently written out of accounts of black international radicalism. The life and work of Eslanda Goode Robeson is a case in point. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1896, Eslanda…
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: Witness against Slavery – The Story of Mary Prince
Oh the horrors of slavery! … the truth ought to be told of it; and what my eyes have seen I think it is my duty to relate …. I have been a slave – I have felt what a…
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: History in Fiction
Black history continues to discover new knowledge and generate new understanding. But today I want to celebrate a different kind of history, that which makes no bones about its invented characters, invented situations, invented scenes, yet which succeeds in telling…
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…