German crew … wondered at the women’s calmness. ‘Aren’t you afraid of being shot?’ they asked. After all, Edith Cavell had been executed by firing squad just seven months earlier. ‘“We are Englishwomen” was considered sufficient reply,’ claimed the women’s company magazine …
Tag: Jo Stanley
Basque Children and their Seafaring ‘Aunties’ – An Evacuation
In world wars, women, almost always volunteers, escorted children – together with disoriented adult refugees – on British ships. Often they were not even being paid expenses. Some were captured, interned and even killed during their WW2 voyages.
Called ‘aunty’, many of the women were experienced travellers and lively independent types, at a time when women’s mobility was still limited and their solo travel problematic. Unsung and overlooked, these pioneers deserve recognition. They were members of a minority who cleverly utilised gendered conventions (‘women are suitable carers for little ones’) to do all the travelling they could, despite low incomes.
Luddite Women
Of the activists, the best-known are the Molyneux sisters: ‘Set fire to it! Now lads!’ the two very young women urged Luddite men on 24 April 1812, at Westhoughton Mill near Bolton, Lancs. It was only an hour after the soldiers sent to protect it had gone away. The mill was a cotton mill, newly driven by steam.
Black History Month: Dorothy Dandridge (1922-1965) – at sea
October 28 1954. On this day the movie, Carmen Jones, was released. And Dorothy Dandridge was launched on her course as the world’s first African-American female film star, some say ‘the black Marilyn Monroe. This mixed-race singer and performer became…
Black History Month: Black cadet harassed to death at sea? Or murdered?
June 24 2010. On this date Akhona Geveza, a nineteen-year-old South African cadet on a cargo ship, disappeared. Her body was later found drifting in the sea off the Croatian coast. The question is still was she murdered to shut…
Black History Month: Ayahs at Sea
September 4 1892: She’s Asian, she’s female, she’s just landed in England – and it’s a period when few working-class women of any colour speak up. But Asian nanny Minnie Green took her white employers to a white court. And…
Women’s History Month: March 15 1912. Christabel Pankhurst and the Lusitania’s portholes
Frenzied by media spin, some people were so exercised by the arson and window-smashing tactics of the Women’s Social and Political Union that they suspected militant suffragettes were lurking everywhere. News-seekers were as avid as reactionaries later seeking Reds under…
Women’s History Month: Sheila Kitzinger
The pioneering natural childbirth activist Sheila Kitzinger was born March 29, 1929 in Taunton, Somerset. It’s an appropriate setting. In Somerset was ‘a nest of suffragettes’[i], at a time when there was silence about ways of birthing and much ignorance…
Women’s History Month: Death of Nellie McPherson, the first seawomen to die in WW1.
Few people know that women seafarers sailed in wartime. The stereotype is of rugged Cap’n Birdseye types in sou’westers standing stalwart at the storm-lashed wheel. But women were there – in surprisingly large numbers, as I found when writing my…