On the 22 March 1808, Caroline Sheridan (later Caroline Norton) was born into a famous theatrical family. (She revered her grandfather Richard Brinsley Sheridan, but probably never understood how famous in her day had been her great-grandmother Frances Sheridan.) She…
Category: Blog
The Women’s History Network blog
Women’s History Month: Shall We Go to the Pictures?
Three figures approach a doorway, lured in by the promise of a ‘stupendous’ time, their shapes thrown into relief by the bright lights of the picture house. The image comes from Shall We Go to the Pictures?, written by…
Women’s History Month: From the Trade Union Congress.
The Trade Boards Act 1909 introduced minimum wages in certain industries. In 1910, the Chainmaking Trade Board set a rate of 2½d per hour for adult women workers which was almost double the rate paid at the time. Mary Macarthur…
Women’s History Month: Jane Barker
On the 19 March 1718, poet and novelist Jane Barker, in her capacity as an active Jacobite, wrote advising the exiled Duke of Ormond (in code) regarding a suitable time for a Jacobite invasion of Britain. Barker was a Roman…
Women’s History Month: Working Woman’s Charter.
In the 1970s, ‘Militants’ from the Women’s Liberation Movement, the trade unions and the revolutionary left came together to ‘mobilise the organised strength of the working class behind a series of basic demands for women workers and housewives’. As part of…
Women’s History Month: Constance Markievicz and the Feminist-Republican Dilemma
One of the great ironies of British suffrage history is that the first woman elected to Westminster, Constance Markievicz, was in fact Irish. Markievicz stood as a Sinn Fein candidate for Dublin’s St Patrick’s Division in 1918, winning her seat…
Women’s History Month: Marianne Farningham
On this day, 16 March, 1909, the writer Marianne Farningham (Mary Ann Hearne) died, at the age of 75, in the Welsh sea resort of Barmouth. The following day her obituary in the Times described Marianne as having been ‘for…
Women’s History Month: Death of Nellie McPherson, the first seawomen to die in WW1.
Few people know that women seafarers sailed in wartime. The stereotype is of rugged Cap’n Birdseye types in sou’westers standing stalwart at the storm-lashed wheel. But women were there – in surprisingly large numbers, as I found when writing my…
Women’s History Month: What about the nanny? Thoughts on Mothering Sunday
Today, as the shops have been telling us for at least a month now, is Mother’s Day, the day when mothers are supposed to have a holiday, put their feet up and receive cards, flowers and presents from their children.…