My project delves into the political strategies and concepts that have powered the trans rights movement in the United Kingdom over the past half-century, particularly the concept of ‘recognition.’ The aim of my research is to understand what ‘recognition’ has…
In our latest fascinating blog, Dr. Namrata R. Ganneri examines the archive of one of the ‘Edinburgh Seven’, Edith Pechey. On 6 July 2019, the ‘Edinburgh Seven’- Sophia Jex-Blake, Isabel Thorne, Edith Pechey, Matilda Chaplin, Helen Evans, Mary Anderson Marshall…
For ‘throwback Thursday’, Dr. Sara Gray gives us a glimpse into her 2009 book, Dictionary of British Women Artists. The history of women artists remains largely uncharted even today, but particularly the history of British women artists. When I started…
In our latest post, Dr. Paula Bartley reflects on some of the archival challenges of studying women’s history in her latest excellent book, Labour Women In Power: Cabinet Ministers in the Twentieth Century. One of the many challenges facing historians…
In this post, Dr. Janis Lomas tells us about her role in ensuring that the papers of The War Widows’ Association were preserved. When I began a PhD over 30 years ago one of the organisations I contacted was The…
One of the Manchester signatories was a woman called Marguerite AC Douglas. I had not heard of her before. I couldn’t find any reference to her in the suffrage papers nor in the 1911 census for Lancashire. Was she a suffragist? Or was she involved in the trade union or other campaigns supported by Ashton? Was she evading the 1911 census? There is no mention of her in the wonderful book about some of the women who signed the letter, Doers of the Word by Sybil Oldfield, which is an inspirational and humbling publication … I could find nothing about the elusive Marguerite Douglas and put her to the back of my mind.
But then, just when I was thinking about something else completely …
Isabella Forsyth Christie didn’t stay in Rannoch long, just two years, but it was to have a great influence on her life and, after a career that took her back to North Uist and to Argyll, she retired to Kenmore, just over the hill from Rannoch and died there in 1933. By then she was a married woman, having wed John Bews in 1913, when she was forty eight. John Bews was the tailor in Kinloch Rannoch, and she must have met him there seventeen years before. She has no descendants and her life story died with her husband until the quilt reappeared some seventy years later …
‘A slave is a human being classed as property and who is forced to work for nothing. An enslaved person is a human being who is made to be a slave. This language is often used instead of the word slave, to refer to the person and their experiences and to avoid the use of dehumanising language’ … But in internet searches using the search term, ‘enslaved women’ not ‘slave’ doesn’t bring anything like as many hits.
Dramatic stories of … enslaved women on ships reveal something about the realities of the long cooped-up and traumatic voyages and gendered relations ….
There is no indication in the records as to why women left their post except in the rare instances when the word “married” has been noted … Did those women employed for less than a year leave because they were considered unsuitable for the post or did they find the job was not for them ? A newspaper report in 1917 concerning the assault of a former nurse, Mary Elizabeth Parry, stated that after nursing at the Asylum during 1916 she left to become a clerk at the munitions factory outside Chester …