Charlotte Stopes was the first woman in Scotland to get a university qualification. She devoted her life to studying Shakespeare and the promotion of women in public life. Though Charlotte is largely forgotten, her daughter Marie is well known. Green asserts that Marie’s success can only be understood in relation to the achievements of her mother.
This book examines the life, work and contraversial achievements of Marie Stopes, author and pioneer of the birth control movement in the interwar period. As the centenary of the ground-breaking publication of Married Love approaches, this study traces and reassesses Marie’s remarkable achievements, considering the literary, scientific and political themes of her life’s work. Clare Debenham analyses how Stope’s personal life led her to turn away from palaeobotany to concentrate on transforming the country’s sexual relationships by writing Married Love. Utilising extensive unpublished archive research, biographies, letters, and interviews with her friends and relatives, Debenham demonstrates that Stopes's work on sexual relationships has overshadowed her considerable achievements including her scientific career as a paleaobotantist, her literary success in the interwar period, and her work, with help from suffragists, in establishing the first British birth control clinic.
The story of the struggle for women's suffrage is not just that of the Pankhursts and Emily Davison. Thousands of others were involved in peaceful protest and sometimes more militant activity and they included women from all walks of life. This book presents the lives of forty-eight less well-known women who tirelessly campaigned for the vote, from all parts of Great Britain and Ireland and from all walks of life. They were the hidden heroines who paved the way for women to gain greater equality in Britain. Fully illustrated with 52 black and white photographs.
This collection focuses on generations of early women historians, seeking to identify the intellectual milieu and professional realities that framed their lives. It moves beyond treating them as simply individuals and looks to the social and intellectual forces that encouraged them to study history and, at the same time, would often limit the reach and define the nature of their study. This collection of essays speaks to female practitioners of history over the past four centuries that published original histories, some within a university setting and some outside. By analysing the values these early women scholars faced, readers can understand the broader social values that led women historians to exist as a unit apart from the career path of their male colleagues.
Addressing current trends in feminist historical and literary scholarship in relation to digital media, this book looks at how the field has developed since the first feminist archival research projects were initiated over twenty years ago. The contributions to the book explore three key concerns: projects which document the history of women’s political activism; the digitising of primary document archives by women; and the impact of digitisation on historical research about women. In addition, the book sheds light on the way in which historians and literary scholars fuse digital sources with traditional forms such as books and journal articles to imagine different and ground-breaking histories of women’s experience. With the field of feminist history and its relationship to the digital world in a dynamic position, the contributions to this volume can be read as signposts for future research in the field, posing questions for scholars and readers to explore in more detail. This book was originally published as a special issue of Women’s History Review.
From novelists and professors to suffragists and Irish revolutionaries, Shakespeare's women editors lived extraordinary lives and produced editions that, throughout England and America, were read and used by people of all ages. This compelling book draws on book history, literary studies and women's history alike to tell their remarkable stories.
2018 marked a double centenary: peace was declared in war-wracked Europe, and women won the vote after decades of struggle. A Lab of One's Own commemorates both anniversaries by revealing the untold lives of female scientists, doctors, and engineers who undertook endeavours normally reserved for men. It tells fascinating and extraordinary stories featuring initiative, determination, and isolation, set against a backdrop of war, prejudice, and disease. Patricia Fara investigates the enterprising careers of these pioneering women and their impact on science, medicine, and the First World War. Suffrage campaigners aligned themselves with scientific and technological progress. Defying protests about their intellectual inferiority and child-bearing responsibilities, during the War they won support by mobilizing women to enter conventionally male domains. A Lab of One's Own focuses on the female experts who carried out vital research. They had already shown exceptional resilience by challenging accepted norms to pursue their careers, now they played their part in winning the War at home and overseas. In 1919, the suffragist Millicent Fawcett declared triumphantly that 'The war revolutionised the industrial position of women. It found them serfs, and left them free.' She was wrong: Women had helped the country to victory, had won the vote for those over thirty - but had lost the battle for equality. A Lab of One''s Own is essential reading to understand and eliminate the inequalities still affecting professional women today.
WOMEN WERE NEVER GIVEN THE RIGHT TO VOTE . . . THEY TOOK IT BY FORCE, BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. BUT WHY HAS THE RADICAL LEGACY OF THE SUFFRAGETTES BEEN ERASED FROM HISTORY? In Death in Ten Minutes, historian Fern Riddell uncovers the story of radical suffragette Kitty Marion, told through never-before-seen personal diaries in Kitty's own voice. In the early twentieth century, women in the UK and the US were fighting for the vote using any means necessary. Kitty Marion was sent on a mission by the family of Emmeline Pankhurst, founders of the leading militant organization for women's suffrage in the UK: to carry out a nationwide campaign of bombings and arson attacks in support of their goals. Kitty's subsequent arrests and force-feedings while in prison put her on a path of dedicated radical activism, leading her across the ocean to New York City, where she joined Margaret Sanger in advocating for birth control. But in the aftermath of World War I, the dangerous and revolutionary actions of Kitty and other militant suffragettes were quickly hushed up and disowned by the feminist movement, and the women who carried out these attacks were erased from our history. Now, for the first time, their untold story will be brought back to life.
