So, perhaps Englishness wins out over local colour. English origins and activist past trumps home-grown rebel. For Adela Pankhurst, Jennie Baines and Alice Suter, notions of importance infused with dominant cultural perceptions, assertions and demands dictate what is ‘true’, what truly memorable, important and worthy of record. Alice Suter lost.
Category: Blog and News
News items of interest to WHN Members
Naomi Jacob – Novelist Conventional & Extraordinary
She wore men’s clothes; her future biographer mistook her, on first sight, for J. B. Priestley. She boasted (to friends but never in print) that she had served under fire on a destroyer during the second world war, without any of her shipmates suspecting that she was a woman. She once got married, but this proved a temporary aberration: the marriage was over within weeks and her husband’s name is not recorded.
“You are supposed to be educated”
Hertha Ayerton’s experiences – the struggle against poverty and family responsibility, the limitations on her education, and the blocks to her career development – were shared by other WSPU women. Florence Macauley was forced to leave Somerville College, Oxford when her father died because she could not live on her scholarship. Emily Wilding Davison gave up her studies at Holloway College when her father died and the money ran out. Teresa Billington-Greig had to leave school at thirteen to work. She later trained as a teacher, taking her BA through extension studies.
Women’s History Month: Seventeenth-Century Agony Aunts
This question and answer appeared in the Athenian Mercury’s regular advice column, where readers wrote in to the London newspaper for advice. It was published on the 7th February 1693. Quest. 4. A Married Lady meets another Womans Husband, stays…
Making History, Making Herstory – CSW 56
Recognising –
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(8) Military expenditure harms women & girls disproportionately and denies resources essential to eliminating violence against women and ending exploitation, abuse & discrimination against women & girls.
Constance Smedley – Renaissance Woman
The Cotswolds caused Smedley, hitherto a Tory by inheritance, to move sharply to the left in her politics. She carried her idealism and activism back to London to run the Greenleaf Theatre and theatre school, to the USA for the years 1915-22, where she and Armfield left their impress on theatre movements in New York and California, and she was no less active in her late years back in England.
Lady Lucy Herbert – Prioress
… since Roman Catholic institutions were for generations illegal in Britain, parents who wanted their daughters brought up as Catholics, and who could afford it, often shipped them off to convents in France or the Low Countries. These flourishing female communities were hotbeds of talent and ability, and they recorded their own lives and those of their convents in a range of valuable historical texts. Distinctions of social rank were not quite obliterated among them, and women who rose to be leaders in the religious life were often aristocrats.
Women’s History Month: Bedding Rituals in Scotland
Bedding rituals have been a popular part of a wedding in many parts of the world and can be found in societies dating back several thousand years. Although the nuances of the ritual vary from place to place, a bedding…
Katherine Cecil Thurston – From a Will to a Death
If middle-class women lived humdrum lives, it was clearly a relief to read about the sensational. But the one among Thurston’s novels that became notorious in the light of its author’s end was The Fly on the Wheel, whose Irish heroine, torn between two men and hemmed in by the restrictions of being a woman, commits suicide by poison.