Event, Politics, Women's History

Between the Pages – Women, Magazines & Historical Memory

Noliwe Rooks … gave a keynote address entitled ‘Black Women and “Real Beauty”: The Rise and Fall of the Dove Beauty Campaign’ analysing the way ‘black women’s bodies are used to market products to consumers who are not black, in a cultural moment, desperately seeking to evade race’. This sparked off extensive reflection, both in the session and outside it – in corridors, over coffee, lunch and dinner, and in other sessions – on magazine culture, advertising, beauty products and campaigns, and the place of women’s bodies and colour in promoting cultural sameness and difference.

Source, Women's History

Are Women People?

Women (With rather insincere apologies to Mr. Rudyard Kipling.) I went to ask my government if they would set me free, They gave a pardoned crook a vote, but hadn’t one for me; The men about me laughed and frowned…

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Source, Women's History

Nineteenth century humour

Like the modern tabloid, nineteenth century newspapers liked to carry jokes for their readers. And, like the modern tabloid, they often carried misogynist undertones. This selection is from the Anglo-Celt in 1871: A ferocious bachelor defines marriage as a crime…

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Politics, Source, Women's History

On Woman

This poem was published in the Ennis Chronicle and Clare Advertiser on the 25th October 1809 and reflects nineteenth century humour. Happy a man may pass his life, If freed from matrimonial chains, If he’s diverted by a wife, He’s…

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