Black history continues to discover new knowledge and generate new understanding. But today I want to celebrate a different kind of history, that which makes no bones about its invented characters, invented situations, invented scenes, yet which succeeds in telling…
Tag: Isobel Grundy
Black History Month: What is Black?
What is Black? Searching for that word within the Cultural Formation tag in the Orlando digital history of women’s writing brings up, of course, a number of writers with unmixed African descent: from Phillis Wheatley and Mary Prince through Zora…
Women’s History Month: Ethel Smyth
On 11 March 1903 Ethel Smyth became the first woman composer to have her work performed at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, when the Met put on her second opera, Der Wald. Music, like literature, has historically been divided…
Women’s History Month: Mary Wortley Montagu
On 26 March 1716 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s satirical mock-eclogues “Monday”, “Thursday”, and “Friday” were illicitly printed by the notorious Edmund Curll under the title of Court Poems. This therefore seems as good a day as any for remembering Montagu,…
Women’s History Month: Eunice Guthrie Murray
On 26 March 1960 the Scottish activist for women’s rights Eunice Guthrie Murray died of a stroke. She was eighty-two, and her historical links reached back through her American mother to the campaign for the abolition of slavery. Her mother…
Women’s History Month: Marie Stopes
On 17 March 1921 Marie Stopes and her husband of three years, Humphrey Verdon Roe, founded the Mothers’ Clinic for Constructive Birth Control at 61 Marlborough Road, Holloway, North London; it was the first birth control clinic in England. For…
Women’s History Month: Pandita Ramabai
On 11 March 1889 the Indian activist known as Pandita Ramabai opened her Sharada Sadan (or Home for Learning) in Chowpatty, an area of Mumbai (which was then, under the British Raj, known as Bombay). She designed this institution to…
Women’s History Month: Caroline Herschel
On 5 March 1777 Caroline Herschel made her first appearance as a professional singer (her brother William conducting), at the Upper Assembly Rooms at Bath in Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus.This information comes from Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles…
Black History Month: Mary Prince
In September 1831 the Anti-Slavery Society in London published The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave. Related by herself. Prince, who was illiterate, had dictated her story, at her own suggestion, to a young abolitionist named Susanna Strickland…