At the age of 12, Nancy decided to read Law at Newnham College, Cambridge. This ambition was realised in 1910, after she received her first LLB from the University of London. This first degree was completed in an acknowledgement of the fact that the University of Cambridge did not, then, award Law degrees (or indeed any degrees) to its female graduates … It is a tribute to her determination that in 1914 Nancy went down from Cambridge with a Double First in The Law Tripos: in Part I she was second between the male and female Lists, and fourth in Part II. The year 1948, when the University of Cambridge began awarding degrees to women graduates, finally saw Cambridge award her an MA (Cantab).
Tag: sex discrimination
Saving Women’s History : The Employment Tribunal Archive – Pt 2
How a strategic approach to discrimination claims has shaped what is in the Employment Tribunal Archive Most early cases of sex discrimination involved recruitment or access to promotion. Recruitment cases were comparatively straightforward: was the claimant better qualified than the other candidates;…
Saving Women’s History : The Employment Tribunal Archive – Pt 1
Derby has much to do to set up the Archive in a way which enables its richness to be fully explored but it will be worth it. On some matters it may be possible to set information from the Archive alongside contemporaneous research and to discover, for example, whether early case decisions back up research findings that women who experienced sexual harassment tended to be those who were about to break into a male preserve – in other words, the harassment was not about sex, it was about power.
Jessie Kenney and women seafarers
Jessie battled on but to no avail. ‘These gentlemen … had dark and impenetrable notions on the subject.’ Instead she ‘decided to go to sea as a stewardess in the hopes that later I may be allowed to practice as a wireless operator.’
(Victoria Drummond had similarly been advised to give up and become a stewardess, but refused.)
By autumn 1926, Jessie was working on the Otranto – as a stewardess. She sailed for ten years with Furness and Orient line, and kept her dream fed by reading science and philosophy books when she could, as the lists in her diaries show.
But ‘How often I looked up at the wireless cabin … afterwards. How I had longed for the peace and solitude of the wireless cabin where after my labours I could study in peace.’ She wasn’t even accepted in WW2.
Feminist Historical Novels: An important contribution to writing women into history
Each writer has used historical fiction in a way that undermines the control of women’s reading. They have produced work that, while ostensibly is safe because it is ‘women’s fiction’, questions women’s place in history. Historical novels have had a mixed reception, not all of it respectful. Again, such a reputation has added to the advantages a feminist writer can enjoy in her writing history. Each writer has written her history inspired by women’s role, actions, feelings and aspirations.