News items of interest to WHN Members
Gwen Farrar and Norah Blaney, both classically trained musicians, born in London, met each other around 1917, performing in Lena’s Ashwell’s pioneering concert parties for the troops which toured behind the allied lines in France and Belgium. They quickly adjusted…
“Do you really want to argue that Black-authored plays about lynching aren’t protest plays?” This question took many forms over the five or so years I worked on revisions of my first book Living with Lynching. Both peers and senior…
It is Spring 1984 in Britain: 24 million Britons have just watched Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean figure-skate their way to Winter Olympics gold on the BBC, Colin Baker is the sixth Dr Who and The Price is Right recently…
Bettie Thompson was a young African American woman who, in 1891, despite opposition, founded the James Street Holiness Church in Danville, Virginia during a time when African Americans, women, and the religious movement she embraced were all being excluded and…
In 1972, Alan Whicker, presenter of the widely watched ‘Whicker’s World’, together with his television crew, entered the silent and hidden world of the cloister. As part of a series ‘Whicker within a woman’s world’, he had astoundingly secured permission…
By Anna Muggeridge In response to the severe financial hardship resulting from the coronavirus outbreak, the Women’s History Network launched a hardship fund for historians of women based in the UK in March 2020. The fund provided one-off grants of…
On 3 August 1914, one day into World War 1, the writer Corra Harris received a telegram from George Lorimer, editor of the Saturday Evening Post, America’s largest circulation magazine: “How would you like to spend a few days in…
In our latest great blog we hear from Leila Kassir about Nell Bacon, a legendary ‘Nippy’! Following the launch in 1894 of their first teashop at 213 Piccadilly, the catering firm J. Lyons & Co. (Lyons) became a ubiquitous presence…
In this blog Dr Pamela Dale tells us about the history of health visitors and their relationship to Florence Nightingale. Today health visiting is an elite branch of nursing: only registered nurses and midwives can train as health visitors. Nurses…