On 11 March 1903 Ethel Smyth became the first woman composer to have her work performed at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, when the Met put on her second opera, Der Wald. Music, like literature, has historically been divided…
Category: Blog
The Women’s History Network blog
Women’s History Month: Scottish Women’s Aid 35th Anniversary
In accordance with the contemporary re-evaluation of women’s status during the early-to-mid 1970s, there grew awareness that not only was domestic violence a deeply embedded social problem but one which demanded urgent confrontation. Further to the emergence of Women’s Aid…
Women’s History Month: The Hmong Nurses
The Hmong are agrarian people who emigrated from China to the mountainous regions of Northern Laos following centuries of persecution. They are an indubitably independent people, geographically and culturally separate from the rest of Laos, but they have a long…
Women’s History Month: Travelling Women
In 1774, the Scot Janet Schaw went on a trip to the Caribbean. She wrote this letter home to her family while in Antigua. Last Saturday was Christmass which we had engaged to pass with Mr Halliday, but our good…
Women’s History Month: Women , Credit and Debt in Early Modern Edinburgh
The role of women in the debt and credit relationships in early modern Scotland is one that is only beginning to be uncovered. My research uses information contained in the Register of Decreets and Deeds for the burgh of Edinburgh…
Women’s History Month: Mary Wortley Montagu
On 26 March 1716 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s satirical mock-eclogues “Monday”, “Thursday”, and “Friday” were illicitly printed by the notorious Edmund Curll under the title of Court Poems. This therefore seems as good a day as any for remembering Montagu,…
Women’s History Month: from the TUC Library Collections
A Soviet Union trade union delegation visited Britain 30 December 1941 -9 February 1942, touring factories and other workplaces around the country. This photograph shows their visit to a cotton mill in Lancashire. In London, the delegation met the Prime Minister…
Women’s History Month: Eunice Guthrie Murray
On 26 March 1960 the Scottish activist for women’s rights Eunice Guthrie Murray died of a stroke. She was eighty-two, and her historical links reached back through her American mother to the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Her mother…
Women’s History Month: Gossip and Scandal
Just like today, the nineteenth century public loved a good scandal. Here is one taken from the Connaught Journal, 3 September 1832. The peace of two families and the feelings of their relatives, who are highly respectable, have been painfully…