Elizabeth Smith is a splendid example of the way that learning could provide a challenge and an outlet to women whose daily lives were by modern standards terribly cramped … She is also an example of the women’s tradition: though she died before she was thirty, she was remembered for years, with admiration, by other women who were trying to think or write. She shows too, less pleasingly, how reactionary cultural forces would join ranks against a woman stepping out of line, even when she did so in her mind rather than her behaviour.
Tag: feminism
Realigning political and personal selfhood: narratives of activist women in the late 1960s and 1970s
The small consciousness-raising groups that characterised the early Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) underlined the political and psychological importance socialist feminists attached to process and affect when it came to redefining the concept of politics. Instead of a left politics that…
Black History Month: Eslanda Goode Robeson
Background As Carol Boyce Davies has noted, black women have been consistently written out of accounts of black international radicalism. The life and work of Eslanda Goode Robeson is a case in point. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1896, Eslanda…
Looking Forward to October
October at the Women’s History Blog is Black History Month, where we endeavour to provide a range of posts providing the most up to date research in the area of black women’s history. Yet, at the Women’s History Network Conference,…
Bristol Suffragette Project
The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), founded by Mrs Pankhurst in Manchester in 1903 with the aim of winning votes for women, became a national movement which gave birth to a new type of woman: the suffragette. She made…
Some Early Irish Feminism?
Taken from the Freeman’s Journal, 26 February 1841 Dublin Police- Henry Street Office CHARGE OF BIGAMY An interesting-looking young woman, named Anne Kirwan, applied to Mr. Duffy, the presiding magistrate, to have informations taken against John Kirwan, her husband, on…
Una Marson 1905-65
In a small, sparsely furnished office in Kingston in the spring of 1928 Jamaica’s feisty first woman editor-publisher Una Marson proudly proclaimed, ‘This is the age of woman: what man has done women may do’. Born in 1905 in the…
Women’s History Month: Spare Rib
It’s hard to over-estimate the impact of Spare Rib. Launched in 1972 it caused an immediate sensation. Newsagents across the country, including WH Smith, refused to stock it. Spare Rib was seen as subversive, as indeed it was – a…
Women’s History Month: Irish Women Patrols
The advent of the First World War forced Irish feminist groups to adjust to new social and political circumstances. Most suffrage organisations participated in the war effort while keeping up suffrage work as much as possible, and many individual members…