Feminist history often focusses on salvaging the experiences of women from the margins of history. But how is feminist history challenged by women complicit it enslavement? Misha Ewen explores in this piece.
How did enslaved women calculate risks when petitioning for their freedom in colonial Mexico? Amos Megged explores the complex life story of María de la Candelaria, arguing that enslaved women sought restitution of their rights, and…
How did women escape domestic abuse in late medieval London? Charlotte Berry explores how women navigated the social and economic barriers to leaving a violent marriage to find a safe place to live in a medieval city.
Rebecca Turkington explores how the #MeToo movement in China today is made possible through rich histories of Chinese feminists organising inside, alongside and beyond the state.
In Britain today, 9 out of 10 women marrying men will change their name on marriage. Rebecca Mason discusses the history of female name changing after marriage in Britain, arguing that reference to tradition is not necessarily rooted in…
Cherish Watton considers what a scrapbooking scene in a recent BBC drama can tell us about the value of scrapbooks as radical sources for uncovering women’s lives.
What can the arrival of an anonymous letter to a local police station tell us about the administration of justice in nineteenth-century Scotland? Hannah Telling discusses the case surrounding the discovery of a woman's body in 1853, and…
Madeleine Goodall discusses the radical life of Eliza Sharples, whose letters to freethinking poet Thomas Cooper in the mid-19th century depict an idealistic figure struggling to survive.
In 1995, 8000 US feminists went to Beijing for the United Nations Fourth World Conference on Women. Lisa Levenstein finds that this conference had huge impact on grassroots feminism in the US for years to come.
In the US, abortion rights are under threat. But, as Kelly O'Donnell and Lauren MacIvor Thompson explore, if Roe is lost, we must go back to the beginning, turning to history and what it can reveal about potential paths forward.
The campaign for women’s ordination dominated discussions about the Church of England’s gender politics during the twentieth century. Grace Heaton examines the badges produced by campaigners and untangles some of the powerful emotions…
What does the vaginal speculum have to do with power? How does the history of this instrument help us to understand how bodies have been understood, policed, and governed? Can this object be reclaimed?
Lisa Godson explores.
How can we understand women's role in political violence and terrorism? James Crossland discusses the role of Russian women in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II.
How do we see walking women? Using archival photography from 1950s and 1960s Turku (Finland), Tiina Männistö-Funk argues that women's care and bodily presence shapes cities as much as concrete and asphalt do.
As the festive season approaches and thoughts turn to gifts and treats, Edmund Wareham explains how gingerbread could be a Radical Object in medieval & early modern Germany.
Jane McChrystal surveys Norah Smyth's engrossing photographs: a powerful record of women's Suffrage activism, campaigning and social justice in East London.
A new book on Kate Millett's 1979 trip to Iran raises questions about voices unheard or marginalized in the writing of history. Rosa Campbell and Taushif Kara explore.
The opening stages of the French Revolution helped generate widespread enthusiasm for reform in Britain. It did so especially amongst a group of intellectual and literary women and men who contributed to the emerging ‘revolution…
How were current debates about working motherhood pioneered by now-obscure studies by mid-twentieth-century female sociologists? Helen McCarthy explores.
Caroline Nielsen introduces you to one of the best-selling ghost story collections of all time and to the foremost writers on psychic phenomenon of the nineteenth century: Mrs Catherine Crowe.
Why are so few women found participating in premodern revolts? Shannon McSheffrey uses the Evil May Day riots of 1517 to unpack the patriarchal underpinnings of all our political practices
On the 750th anniversary of its rebuilding, Fay Bound Alberti calls for engagement with the politics of commemoration at Westminster Abbey and makes the case that more women authors, playwrights and poets must be included at Poets' Corner.
Complicated and often conflicted responses to sex workers who become victims of violence is by no means new, and is not limited to police and the courts. If we look at evidence from earlier centuries it is clear that both social and legal…
Hull's mural depicting Lillian Bilocca, the 'headscarf revolutionary' who led a campaign to improve safety conditions on board North Sea trawlers in the 1960s.
The Irish Civil War of 1922-3 was fought by Irish nationalists over whether or not to accept the Anglo-Irish Treaty. The treaty had been signed in December 1921, following the War of Independence (1919-1921). During this period in Irish…
