Women (With rather insincere apologies to Mr. Rudyard Kipling.) I went to ask my government if they would set me free, They gave a pardoned crook a vote, but hadn’t one for me; The men about me laughed and frowned…
Tag: women’s writing
Black History Month: Eslanda Goode Robeson
Background As Carol Boyce Davies has noted, black women have been consistently written out of accounts of black international radicalism. The life and work of Eslanda Goode Robeson is a case in point. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1896, Eslanda…
Una Marson 1905-65
In a small, sparsely furnished office in Kingston in the spring of 1928 Jamaica’s feisty first woman editor-publisher Una Marson proudly proclaimed, ‘This is the age of woman: what man has done women may do’. Born in 1905 in the…
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,…
Women’s History Month: Caroline Herschel
On 5 March 1777 Caroline Herschel made her first appearance as a professional singer (her brother William conducting), at the Upper Assembly Rooms at Bath in Handel’s oratorio Judas Maccabeus.This information comes from Orlando: Women’s Writing in the British Isles…
LGBT History Month: Bessie Craigmyle (1863-1933)
On 27 February 1933, Bessie Craigmyle was sitting by her fireside reading a newspaper. Two days earlier she had observed the forty sixth anniversary of the death of “the friend of her life” Maggie Dale. Possibly she dozed off; at…
WELCOME TO THE NEW YEAR
Welcome, New Year! though we are growing old, And life looks sadder than it seemed of yore, And Winter’s fleecy robe with ermined fold Doth bear a blemish unperceived before, And falling storms, grateful to boyhood’s ears, Bring up stern…
Independence Day
The Americans are celebrating their independence from Britain today. Congratulations and good luck to them. But what about celebrating a couple of other, smaller victories from this date? On 4 July 1784 Hester Thrale composed a letter of measured, dignified…
Women’s History Month: Marianne Farningham
On this day, 16 March, 1909, the writer Marianne Farningham (Mary Ann Hearne) died, at the age of 75, in the Welsh sea resort of Barmouth. The following day her obituary in the Times described Marianne as having been ‘for…