A number of years ago, the missionary Catherine Rew did an oral history with her daughter Kathryn Rew Van’t-Wout. This is part three of the transcript. Part one is here and part two here. See here for a biography of Catherine.…
Category: Source
Alice Hawkins (1863-1946)
Alice Hawkins was the leader of the women’s suffrage movement in Leicester. Born in 1863 to a working-class family, she left school and thirteen to work as a shoe machinist. In 1884, she married Alfred Hawkins and she went on…
Catherine Rew’s Oral History, part 2.
A number of years ago, the missionary Catherine Rew did an oral history with her daughter Kathryn Rew Van’t-Wout. This is part two of the transcript. Part one is here. See here for a biography of Catherine. I have added…
Elizabeth Heyrick (1869-1831)
Elizabeth Heyrick (1769-1831), social reformer and abolitionist, is little known today. She receives only the briefest mention in Charlotte Sussman’s Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713-1833, Stanford University Press, 2000. She was hardly mentioned in the media…
Catherine Rew’s Oral History, part 1.
A number of years ago, the missionary Catherine Rew did an oral history with her daughter Kathryn Rew Van’t-Wout. This is part one of the transcript. See here for a biography of Catherine. I have added explanatory information in square…
Catherine Jane Rew (1926-2009)
Catherine Rew, nee McFadyen, was a missionary in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo in central Africa for over fifty years. She was born into a lower-middle class family in Renfrew, near Glasgow. Her father was the station…
Why don’t the girls propose?
The men are shy- the ladies cry Their minds they won’t disclose; If it be so, I’d like to know Why don’t the girls propose? At splendid balls, in dazzling halls amid a host o beaux, with speaking eye…
Still Makes My Blood Boil…
On June 4th 1913, it was derby day at Epsom racecourse. Suffragette, Emily Wilding Davison, ducked beneath the railings and onto the race track, just as King George’s horse Anmer approached Tattenham corner. She rushed towards the horse and was…
Nineteenth century humour
Like the modern tabloid, nineteenth century newspapers liked to carry jokes for their readers. And, like the modern tabloid, they often carried misogynist undertones. This selection is from the Anglo-Celt in 1871: A ferocious bachelor defines marriage as a crime…