Biography, Blog, General, Politics, Source, Women's History

IFC – Isabella Forsyth Christie – Later Bews

Isabella Forsyth Christie didn’t stay in Rannoch long, just two years, but it was to have a great influence on her life and, after a career that took her back to North Uist and to Argyll, she retired to Kenmore, just over the hill from Rannoch and died there in 1933. By then she was a married woman, having wed John Bews in 1913, when she was forty eight. John Bews was the tailor in Kinloch Rannoch, and she must have met him there seventeen years before. She has no descendants and her life story died with her husband until the quilt reappeared some seventy years later …

Event, General, Politics, Women's History

Making Changes by Making History: Women in Construction

… construction projects have seen women taking on more senior roles like that of architect Nicole Dosso, Technical Director of the construction project known as One World Trade Centre. Dosso was the single senior technical coordinator representing Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) on the day-to-day execution of the job. For all intents and purposes it could be said that a woman built the tallest tower in North America. For her contribution to the rebuilding of the World Trade Centre site, Nicole Dosso was honoured by the US National Association of Professional Women in Construction in 2006.

General, Politics, Source, Women's History

WALKING WITH WOMEN – Aberdeen’s Women’s Trail …

As more than one woman is connected to some stops, twenty one women are included. These women’s lives span over four hundred years, although the majority died in the twentieth century. Within the Trail it became apparent that there were themes, such as health and civic life. At the site of the former Children’s Hospital (stop Four) four women are commemorated: Clementina Esslemont who founded the Aberdeen Mother and Child Welfare Association in 1909, Fenella Paton who founded the first birth control clinic in Aberdeen in 1926, Dr Agnes Thompson who pioneered services to children and Dr Mary Esslemont (Clementina’s daughter) who worked, inter alia, as a gynaecologist at the hospital. Pioneering speech therapist Catherine Hollingsworth’s story is told at stop Six. At the site of the former General Dispensary (stop Eleven), Maggie Myles, author of a Textbook for Midwives, which has been in print continuously since 1953, is commemorated.

Event, Politics, Source, Women's History

Discrimination – A Coat of Many Colors

[In the General Motors (GM) case] … to [outlaw] sex and race discrimination [experienced by individuals or a group], the courts would have had to recognize a new minority classification, African American females. The court opposed the creation of any new classifications proposing that, “the creation of new classes of protected minorities, governed only by the mathematical principles of permutation and combination, [would] clearly raise[*] the prospect of opening the hackneyed Pandora’s box.” If the women had been able to show that they had been victims of discrimination because they were black or because they were women they would have had a case, but because GM was not discriminatory against white women nor black men, the women had no legal case.