WHN Admin. Barbara Pym’s novels provide a social history of the period over which she wrote from the 1920s to 1980. [1] Quotes from Pym’s diaries, notebooks and letters provide the background to her fiction and reminders that she…
Category: Women’s History
Western Australian Labor Woman, Jean Beadle promotes her options for dealing with venereal disease 1915
A Letter to the Editor of the Kalgoorlie Miner 1915[1] Jean Beadle [2] ‘Notwithstanding the fact that the First Labor Women’s Conference, held in 1912, carried a resolution favouring notification and segregation of persons suffering from venereal disease, I…
Gender neutral language…difficult even at the end of the best of pens?
WHN Admin. Admire her as one does, and as impressed by the ideas she expresses in fiction, and the beauty of her prose, this quote from Virginia Woolf is a reminder of the value of women’s fight to achieve…
This is where it all could have begun – but did it? Women and The Magna Carta A Treaty for Control or Freedom?
Jocelynne Scutt Part 2 Chapter 1 … Are Women Persons? … We have … granted to all freemen of our kingdom, for us and our heirs forever, all the underwritten liberties, to be had and held by them and their…
Commemoration of women in foreign missions during the Great War
Zvezdana Popovic An event to commemorate the lives of the brave women in foreign medical missions in Serbia during the Great War is being held. Details appear below. However, it is worth briefly explaining the back ground to…
The Case of the Chocolate Cream Killer: The Poisonous Passion of Christiana Edmunds
Kaye Jones The Victorians were terrified of women poisoners. It might seem like an obvious observation; after all, who wouldn’t be frightened of a poison-wielding woman? But there’s more to this relationship than self-preservation. In fact, the fear of…
Serendipity in the Archives – Finding something when least expected!
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 …
IFC – Isabella Forsyth Christie – Later Bews
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 …
DAD’S EULOGY: Adrian Leonard Aldrick – We all knew him as Len or Dad or Dar
All the family helped around the property on Terrigal Road, in the orchard which supplemented the family income and in the vegetable garden or milking cows. Some would often recall having to bring the cows in for milking and in the winter when the frost was crackling under their bare feet, they would stand in the fresh cowpats just to keep their feet warm.
Len worked in the bush with his Father for about three years then got a job at a local orchard. A few months after the war ended, and aged about 19, Len and his mate decided to look for work further afield and ended up at Wee Waa in the North West of the State working on a property during the wheat season. Len also sought work in the Riverina. Our family would return some years later to live at that property outside Wee Waa called “Brushy Park”. By now he had met Neryl and came to live at Carlingford and they were married in 1947. Len worked in a sawmill at Parramatta then at HMV Homebush and EMI, pressing records. The record collection began to grow. Then it was back to Terrigal Road where Len and Neryl built a small house and he began cutting and carting logs for a local sawmill. By then they had two very young daughters, Phyllis and Maureen, and Len would come home from work and they would both get stuck into finishing the house working well into the nights.