WHN Admin. Barbara Pym’s novels provide a social history of the period over which she wrote from the 1920s to 1980. [1] Quotes from Pym’s diaries, notebooks and letters provide the background to her fiction and reminders that she…
Tag: women’s work
This is where it could have begun – but did it? Women and The Magna Carta A Treaty For Control or Freedom
Jocelynne A. Scutt Excerpts from the Introduction and Chapter 1 Women and The Magna Carta : A Treaty for Control or Freedom Part 1 Magna Carta Initiated Magna Carta is generally seen as a statement…
Ethical Fiction: Essential? Desirable? Irrelevant?
‘We often need literature to make our feelings intelligible to us.’ Joanna Trollope, The Rector’s Wife Robin Joyce Part 1 The strong response to a readers’ blog asking for examples of ethical fiction, (1) a list of topics under…
Are Women a Success in Parliament?
WHN Admin. Published in 1938 in the Westralian Worker May Holman’s commentary on women Members of Parliament makes interesting reading. May Holman was the first Labor woman to be elected to the Western Australian Parliament. She was a Member…
‘CEO of the Netherlands’: Performing Gender at the Dutch Court c. 1980 – 1999
Harry J. Mace presented the paper ‘CEO of the Netherlands’: Performing Gender at the Dutch Court c. 1980 – 1999 at the 2015 Women’s history Network Conference held at the University of Kent. Harry is an undergraduate international, political and gender historian…
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 …
Black & Asian women’s history: enslaved women on ships
‘A slave is a human being classed as property and who is forced to work for nothing. An enslaved person is a human being who is made to be a slave. This language is often used instead of the word slave, to refer to the person and their experiences and to avoid the use of dehumanising language’ … But in internet searches using the search term, ‘enslaved women’ not ‘slave’ doesn’t bring anything like as many hits.
Dramatic stories of … enslaved women on ships reveal something about the realities of the long cooped-up and traumatic voyages and gendered relations ….
ASYLUM STAFF RECORDS: A source for studying the Home Front in World War I
There is no indication in the records as to why women left their post except in the rare instances when the word “married” has been noted … Did those women employed for less than a year leave because they were considered unsuitable for the post or did they find the job was not for them ? A newspaper report in 1917 concerning the assault of a former nurse, Mary Elizabeth Parry, stated that after nursing at the Asylum during 1916 she left to become a clerk at the munitions factory outside Chester …
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.