Ashenda is a festival of womanhood, sisterhood, and female joy, celebrated every August in Tigray, Ethiopia. It brings together physical adornment, music, and dance to honour the feminine form, where female participants are gifted food, drinks, and money by the…
Category: Women’s History
13th October: Black History Month 4pm (UK) Naomi Richman and Xia’nan Jin
13th October: Black History Month Wednesday, 13th October 2021, 4pm (UK) Naomi Richman and Xia’nan Jin Register for your place on the Zoom webinar: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_F2Ld0QrWSmCm6MwyLs68aw Join us for these two fascinating papers in this double bill seminar that features as…
Deviant Maternity: Illegitimacy in Wales, c. 1680-1800, by Dr Angela Joy Muir
Image: https://www.rct.uk/collection/search#/2/collection/913701/the-unwelcome-visitor-or-the-quaker-in-a-quake In 1721 in the parish of Llangollen, a ‘base’ infant named William was baptised. His parents were Simon Rogers and Elizabeth Roberts. Two years later, Elizabeth bore a second child fathered by Simon. The child was named Robert,…
Reading against the grain: sex workers lives in a government archive by Vicky Iglikowski-Broad
Reading against the grain: sex workers lives in a government archive Vicky Iglikowski-Broad Historically, sex workers lives have been medicalised, criminalised and moralised, and this is reflected in many of the collections held by archives and research libraries.[1] This post will…
15th September 2021: Women and Finance in Twentieth-Century China
Wednesday, 15th September 2021, 4pm (UK) Women and Finance in Twentieth-Century China Join us for this exciting double-bill event. Register for your place on the Zoom webinar: https://us06web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_PJIMvAD_QteAqvBZ0kulig ‘Women, Inheritance, and Property Expansion in the Republican Period…
Writing the Life of Millicent Price, Suffrage Campaigner, by Lucienne Boyce
In 2020 I wrote a piece for the WHN blog about the biography I’m not writing. In ‘Giants and Geniuses’ https://womenshistorynetwork.org/giants-and-geniuses-by-lucienne-boyce/ I explained my decision not to write about someone very famous, or someone who’s described as a ‘giant’ or…
Female Jewish Refugees and British Welfare from 1939, by Abi Exelby
Approximately 70,000 Jewish immigrants arrived in Britain fleeing Nazi persecution from 1933 until the outbreak of the Second World War. 20,000 of those refugees were women who were allowed entry under domestic permits: there were also an unknown amount who…
Wretched Whores or Virtuous Victims: Women, ‘Bastardy’ and Court Records 1630-1660, by Erin Newman
Women who produced ‘bastard’ children during the Civil War and Interregnum period were often depicted, within both court and popular literature, as ‘lewd women’ in opposition to patriarchally-defined models of the ‘chaste maid’ or legitimate wife. Yet in certain circumstances,…
Individual competitive sport as a site of women’s emancipation in Britain c.1948-1970 by Sophie Olver
At the Tokyo Olympic Games 2021, women will compete in all thirty-three available sports. In the British team, women will outnumber their male counterparts for the first time in history. By contrast, at the 1948 Olympics, women were restricted to…