News items of interest to WHN Members
On the 30 September 1918, sanitary inspector Dorothy Newhall wrote in her diary; ‘Terrible excitement today! Peace terms sign with Bulgaria to evacuate Serbia!’[i] Dorothy was on a brief visit to Salonika (now Thessaloniki) when she wrote this entry and…
‘Not all heroes wear capes’, a common refrain during and since the Covid pandemic, but the ideas behind that phrase go back much further and certainly played a part in the Home Front during the Second World War. Churchill instructed…
Join us for the next session of our Summer Seminar Series will take place on Tuesday, 2 June at 4pm GMT. Our speaker will be Dr Mubarak Tukur, an early-career scholar and Lecturer at the Department of History and Security…
This blog post focuses on Anna Maria Garthwaite who was a silk designer in 18th century England. A silk designers’ purpose was to create designs that showed weavers what colours and decoration they should weave on their loom. Anna specialised…
Whilst preparing social media content for LGBTQ+ history month I came across the Welsh County LGBTQ+ timelines. Scanning the Newport timeline, one individual caught my eye – Amelia Vella. The timeline wrote how Amelia’s mother, Fanny Vella, was in the…
Late Imperial China is often described as a society structured by strict gender hierarchies. Elite women were expected to remain within the domestic inner quarters, devoted to family duty, moral virtue, and household management, while public life and most forms…
We are very pleased to announce Sophie Weinberg’s ‘The Matrilineal Printing House: Recovering the Printing Lineage of Widow Stationers in the Seventeenth-Century English Book Trade’ the winner of our 2025 MA dissertation prize. Sophie examined two examples of intergenerational female inheritance of print shops: the…
In April 1818, Catherine Macknally, described in the parish records of St Andrew, Plymouth, as a ‘common prostitute’, was apprehended while wandering and begging with her two illegitimate children—both under two years of age.[1] Examined before two justices of the…
We are delighted to announce that the WHN has teamed up with the Women’s History Association of Ireland to offer a joint annual book prize which awards £500 for an author’s first single-authored monograph in women’s or gender history. Entries…