On 17 March 1921 Marie Stopes and her husband of three years, Humphrey Verdon Roe, founded the Mothers’ Clinic for Constructive Birth Control at 61 Marlborough Road, Holloway, North London; it was the first birth control clinic in England. For…
Category: Women’s History
Women’s History Month: Before there was Internet 4: Marriage Advertisements
Looking for love in the nineteenth century was often as complicated as it is today. Instead of looking for a soulmate online, men and women placed advertisements in their local paper. Here are some examples from the Irish Times. To…
Women’s History Month: March 15 1912. Christabel Pankhurst and the Lusitania’s portholes
Frenzied by media spin, some people were so exercised by the arson and window-smashing tactics of the Women’s Social and Political Union that they suspected militant suffragettes were lurking everywhere. News-seekers were as avid as reactionaries later seeking Reds under…
Women’s History Month: The Glass Ceiling and the Calculator.
Lord Davies’ report into women in the boardroom highlighted once again the lack of women in the top jobs.Lord Davies said: Over the past 25 years the number of women in full-time employment has increased by more than a third…
Women’s History Month at the Women’s Library
Recently The Women’s Library hosted the annual Fawcett Lecture, presented by Sandi Toksvig. Following Sandi’s enlightening and suitably humorous take on the topic of Post-Feminism, the floor was opened to questions from the audience. One of the last of these…
Women’s History Month: The Woman who invented Welsh national dress
Pencil drawing of Augusta Hall, courtesy the Lady Llanover Society, www.ladyllanover.org.uk The Welsh woman in her flannel petticoat, dress, apron, shawl and tall black hat is a popular stereotype found on everything from maps, books and postcards to boxes of…
Women’s History Month: Pandita Ramabai
On 11 March 1889 the Indian activist known as Pandita Ramabai opened her Sharada Sadan (or Home for Learning) in Chowpatty, an area of Mumbai (which was then, under the British Raj, known as Bombay). She designed this institution to…
Women’s History Month: 100 Years of International Women’s Day
Glasgow Women’s Library holds archival material documenting the celebration of International Women’s Day. Here are just a couple of examples picked from our collections: In 1975 International Women’s Day was given official recognition by the United Nations. This edition of…
Women’s History Month: from the TUC Library Collections
Boatwomen Training Scheme, 1943. In 1941, Frances Marian ‘Molly’ Traill approached the Ministry of War Transport with a scheme to train women boat crews to help the country with its shortage of manpower on the canals. The Ministry was impressed…