… since Roman Catholic institutions were for generations illegal in Britain, parents who wanted their daughters brought up as Catholics, and who could afford it, often shipped them off to convents in France or the Low Countries. These flourishing female communities were hotbeds of talent and ability, and they recorded their own lives and those of their convents in a range of valuable historical texts. Distinctions of social rank were not quite obliterated among them, and women who rose to be leaders in the religious life were often aristocrats.
Tag: Women’s History Month
Katherine Cecil Thurston – From a Will to a Death
If middle-class women lived humdrum lives, it was clearly a relief to read about the sensational. But the one among Thurston’s novels that became notorious in the light of its author’s end was The Fly on the Wheel, whose Irish heroine, torn between two men and hemmed in by the restrictions of being a woman, commits suicide by poison.
Ahead of Her Time – Jane Johnson’s Nursery Library
Johnson wrote out her “fairy-tale” for her daughter and eldest son, and bound it like a proper book, about five or six years after the little Barbara had looked like herself rather than like her relations. This is startlingly early, before the late-eighteenth-century wave of professional writers for children, at about the same time as John Newbery’s A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, 1744, which is generally presented as a first … Johnson’s manuscript is now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and it finally, in 2001, reached print as a Bodleian publication …
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: Scottish Women’s Aid 35th Anniversary
In accordance with the contemporary re-evaluation of women’s status during the early-to-mid 1970s, there grew awareness that not only was domestic violence a deeply embedded social problem but one which demanded urgent confrontation. Further to the emergence of Women’s Aid…
Women’s History Month: The Hmong Nurses
The Hmong are agrarian people who emigrated from China to the mountainous regions of Northern Laos following centuries of persecution. They are an indubitably independent people, geographically and culturally separate from the rest of Laos, but they have a long…
Women’s History Month: Travelling Women
In 1774, the Scot Janet Schaw went on a trip to the Caribbean. She wrote this letter home to her family while in Antigua. Last Saturday was Christmass which we had engaged to pass with Mr Halliday, but our good…
Women’s History Month: Women , Credit and Debt in Early Modern Edinburgh
The role of women in the debt and credit relationships in early modern Scotland is one that is only beginning to be uncovered. My research uses information contained in the Register of Decreets and Deeds for the burgh of Edinburgh…
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,…