Tag: Women

How Florence Nightingale David saved lives during the Blitz – with statistics

How Florence Nightingale David saved lives during the Blitz – with statistics

by | Dec 9, 2024 | , | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
In 1939, Florence Nightingale David was living in the village of Bledlow in Buckinghamshire, alongside a number of her female academic colleagues at University College London (UCL). This included Eileen Evans, a phonetics lecturer, Elizabeth Bigg-Wither, a lecturer in Italian, and Joyce Townsend, research assistant, secretary, and illustrator to the zoologist DMS Watson. Born in Herefordshire in 1909, David’s parents had been friends with the Crimean War nurse Florence Nightingale, who she was named after. She would complete her degree in Mathematics at Bedford College for Women in 1931, and joined UCL as a research assistant in statistics, before completing her doctorate in 1938 and continued her work at the college until 1939.

Read More
“Its Name Synonymous with Barbarism”: The Colonial Narratives that Destroyed Dahomey’s ‘Amazons’

“Its Name Synonymous with Barbarism”: The Colonial Narratives that Destroyed Dahomey’s ‘Amazons’

by | Nov 20, 2024 | , | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
Tales of Dahomey’s fearsome female fighting force are writ large across the world, rippling from the far-fetched, bewildered accounts of colonizing Frenchmen to modern-day popular culture, in films like Black Panther and The Woman King. Though they were known in their homeland as the Agojie, their combat prowess and defiance of strict 19th-century European gender norms earned them worldwide fame–and infamy–as the Amazons of Dahomey.

Read More
Revealed: how women cricketers mended Australia’s relationship with Britain after Bodyline

Revealed: how women cricketers mended Australia’s relationship with Britain after Bodyline

by | Aug 5, 2024 | , | 0

Reading time: 7 minutes
Some of the earliest records of women playing cricket date back to 1745 in England and 1855 in Australia. Emily Whatman was part of a strong cohort of enthusiastic players from the 1890s. The snowballing interest in playing cricket had led women to form their own national cricket associations in England by 1926 and in Australia by 1931.

Read More
What Australia’s convict past reveals about women, men, marriage and work

What Australia’s convict past reveals about women, men, marriage and work

by | May 6, 2024 | , , | 0

Reading time: 5 minutes
It is not the presence of convicts that matters, but the drastic distortion in the ratio of men to women that came with it. Convict men outnumbered convict women by roughly six to one. These numbers were even more skewed at the start of settlement. Convicts were joined by free migrants, especially in the second half of the 19th century, whose numbers also skewed heavily male. The ratio of men to women was consistently skewed in favour of males in Australia until the start of the first world war.

Read More
Forget ‘Man the Hunter’ – physiological and archaeological evidence rewrites assumptions about a gendered division of labor in prehistoric times

Forget ‘Man the Hunter’ – physiological and archaeological evidence rewrites assumptions about a gendered division of labor in prehistoric times

by | Mar 27, 2024 | , | 0

Reading time: 8 minutes
Prehistoric men hunted; prehistoric women gathered. At least this is the standard narrative written by and about men to the exclusion of women. The idea of “Man the Hunter” runs deep within anthropology, convincing people that hunting made us human, only men did the hunting, and therefore evolutionary forces must only have acted upon men. Such depictions are found not only in media, but in museums and introductory anthropology textbooks, too.

Read More
Fear Was Not in My Dictionary: The Revolutionary Work of Sara Fortis

Fear Was Not in My Dictionary: The Revolutionary Work of Sara Fortis

by | Jan 9, 2024 | | 0

Reading time: 6 minutes
When the small Greek town of Kuturla burned in 1943, teenage Sara Fortis had been on the run from German occupying forces for two years already. From the raw age of fourteen, she had hidden her Jewish status and worked for underground resistance movements as a nurse and teacher. But when her sanctuary burned, when she was separated from her mother, Fortis was no longer willing to hide. She was no longer willing to limit her resistance to ‘women’s work.’

Read More
Women, Parliament and Political Space

Women, Parliament and Political Space

by | Nov 20, 2023 | , , | 0

Reading time: 10 minutes
This blog post marks the anniversary of the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act, which passed on 21 November 1918, and enabled women over the age 21 to stand for Parliament. While an often overlooked act, this change in the law represents an important milestone for women’s rights. For the first time in history, women were able to directly influence Parliamentary debates and the passing of laws.

Read More
Unsung Heroes: Women’s Role in the Agricultural Revolution

Unsung Heroes: Women’s Role in the Agricultural Revolution

by | Nov 15, 2023 | | 0

Unearthed secrets from 7,000 years back highlight prehistoric women as the heroines who dug deep–quite literally, to plant the seeds of the first Agricultural Revolution–a recent study in Science Advances has unearthed. Analysis of the bones of these women shows they took on their fair share of digging, hauling, hoeing, and grinding grain in early agricultural societies – in fact, so much so, that their upper body strength would have been greater than that of modern female athletes today. Notably, these findings disprove the widely-held notion that prehistoric women favored domestic tasks over intensive manual labor. 

Read More
Loading