By Tilly Nevin. Today we look out upon an America divided internally, an America in which racism does not appear the distant memory that it should. Mamie Phipps Clark saw a much more visceral manifestation of such racial divisions: segregation in schools, in the workplace, in public. Phipps Clark studied the impact that segregation had… Continue reading Mamie Phipps Clark: Psychologist and Activist
By Ellen Pasternack and Emily Oldham. Many people think of Georgia O’Keeffe as ‘that artist who paints flowers to look like vulvas’. Judy Chicago and others pick out her 1923 ‘Grey Lines With Black, Blue and Yellow’ as particularly yonic, for example. So we were surprised to learn that not only was this resemblance… Continue reading Georgia O’Keeffe at the Tate Modern
By Sophie Dowle. I remember being fascinated by the suffragettes from a young age, devouring the ‘My Story’ book about a girl who joins the movement, and reading as many books as I could get my hands on (that weren’t beyond an eight-year-old’s reading ability). Something struck me about the narratives I was reading; the… Continue reading An Interview with June Purvis: The Demonisation of the Suffragettes
By Ellen Pasternack. Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, has always carried a lot of stigma. Viewed as lost causes at best, and dangerous disease spreaders at worst, sufferers have long been treated as social pariahs. With a name coming from the Greek λέπρα, meaning ‘a disease that makes the skin scaly’ due to the… Continue reading Alice Ball and the Fight against Leprosy
By Alice Theobald Beatrice Webb – co-founder of the London School of Economics – had a notoriously pragmatic approach to social affairs, coining the term ‘collective bargaining’ to describe the relationship between employers and employees negotiating working conditions. Cousin to social philanthropist Charles Booth, Webb immersed herself in aiding his research on Victorian urban slums… Continue reading Beatrice Webb: Progressive Politics and a Pragmatic Outlook on War
By Ellen Wright Emmeline Pankhurst’s life is largely studied in the context of the fight for women’s suffrage in the early 20th century; however, she in fact had a much wider spread of interests and campaigns. By defining Emmeline solely as the leader of the suffragette movement, we are limiting the ways in which she… Continue reading A Life Less Ordinary: Emmeline Pankhurst’s Fight for Equality
By Henrietta Heald What was a girl to do in the year 1900 if she wanted to become an engineer? It helped to have a father called Charles Parsons, whose creation of the steam turbine had marked him out as an inventive genius – to say nothing of a star-gazing grandfather who had built a… Continue reading What was a girl to do? Rachel Parsons (1885–1956): engineer and feminist campaigner
By Siobhan Fenton Behind every great man is a great woman. The shallow reality of this phrase is perhaps never so brilliantly exposed than through the life of Gertrude Stein, who was not merely behind one great man, but several geniuses: Picasso, Hemmingway, Matisse and Cezanne. Stein, the American art collector and modern writer, is… Continue reading Gertrude Stein
By Verity Heir The need for interlanguage As the world became increasingly more international in the twentieth century, with the rise of technology and more transportation options, there became a demand for a common language so that nations could communicate effectively without the use of translators. To solve this linguistic conundrum, individuals such as Alice… Continue reading Alice Vanderbilt Morris: Interlingua and the case for a Global Language
By Riana Patel Over the course of nearly fifteen years Persephone Books has been publishing a range of books written by women around the middle of the 20th century, from biographies to science fiction to poetry and even to cookery. Every book is selected to be “intelligent, thought-provoking, and beautifully written” and also features a… Continue reading Book Review: The Persephone Book of Short Stories
