One of my most vivid memories from childhood, is of my mother reading the Nordic folktale ‘East of the Sun and West of the Moon’ to me. The tale, first collected in Norway in the mid-nineteenth century tells of a…
Category: Blog and News
News items of interest to WHN Members
The Pre-History of Nursing: An Alternative View – Alannah Tomkins
My first exposure to the history of nursing was the Ladybird book Florence Nightingale, in the ‘Adventure from History’ series. Like many primary-school children before and since, I was beguiled by Nightingale’s dedication to her cause. The only depiction of…
WHN Reading List for LGBTQ+ History Month 2025
For thirty years, the Women’s History Network (WHN) have been publishing journal articles and blogs on myriad subjects about women. We have constructed this reading list for LGBTQ+ History Month, and beyond, to make visibility of our publications easier. Clicking…
WHN Annual Conference 2025 CfP
Women’s History Network 33rd Annual Conference Online via Zoom Thursday 4 & Friday 5 September 2025 Hidden in Plain Sight: Women in Archives, Libraries, Museums and Personal Collections Check the 2025 Annual Conference page here One of the many exciting…
Women and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel: Injured Minds, Ruined Lives – Deborah Weiss
“We are an Injured Body”: Finding Inspiration in a Class on Jane Austen My new book, Women and Madness in the Early Romantic Novel: Injured Minds, Ruined Lives (Manchester University Press), originated in an undergraduate class I taught in spring…
Navigating “Female” Identity: The Role of 19th-Century Missionary Wives – Katherine Hsu
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, American Protestant churches prohibited women from preaching or becoming ordained ministers. However, the religious revivalism of the Awakenings – a series of Protestant religious movements in the United States – created new,…
CFP Women’s History Today Special Issue – Women and the Making of Art History
Women and the Making of Art History Since the publication of Linda Nochlin’s groundbreaking ‘Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?’ (1971), feminist art historians have led a revolutionary movement to review women’s and gender roles in art practices.…
Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician – Alice Rothchild
My memoir, Inspired and Outraged: The Making of a Feminist Physician, is both a chronicle of my life in the 1950s in a first-generation Jewish family, coming of age in the 1960s, and my embrace of feminism as I encountered…
Health, Death and Trauma in Middling Sort Women’s Letters during the Eighteenth Century – Isabella Smith
Sources taken from Karen Harvey’s Social Bodes project which contains transcribed letters between c.1680-1820 categorised by state, emotion and body part.[1] Why do we study old letters? What is it about them? Or as historian Susan Whyman asks, ‘filled with…