Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: Aug 2018 update: Women and Parliament

The ODNB’s August 2018 update adds twenty-seven articles (including one reference group article), containing twenty-six biographies, accompanied by ten portrait likenesses. The particular focus is on women and Parliament in the period after 1918 when women’s suffrage was (partially) gained, and when women could stand for parliament for the first time. Their biographies have been curated by Dr Mari Takayanagi, senior archivist at the Parliamentary Archives. Read the full editorial introduction to this month’s update.

New and updated subjects include:

Attlee (née Millar), Violet Helen, countess Attlee (1895–1965), charity fund-raiser and prime minister’s wife
Carnegy, Elizabeth Patricia, Baroness Carnegy of Lour (1925–2010), Girl Guides official and educationist
Carney [married name McBride], (Maria) Winifred, [Winnie] (1887–1943), trade unionist, suffrage activist, and Irish republican*
Chamberlain, Annie Vere [Anne] (1882–1967), political wife

and many more.

To accompany the August update, a new reference group Women candidates at the 1918 General Election is now available.

ODNB’s Reference groups are selected biographies on a particular topic/ themes, professions, clubs, movements, etc. They are particularly useful if you don’t know the names of individuals.

The biography of the one female candidate (out of 17) to be elected, is available in the ODNB: Constance Markievicz was elected as the Sinn Fein candidate for Dublin St Patrick’s constituency. Although she was the first woman MP, she did not take her seat in Parliament in line with other Sinn Fein MPs. She was also a Polish countess by marriage.

Other ODNB reference groups also relevant to women’s history in this period are, for instance:

You might also like:

Source databases (subscription resources available to Oxford students and researchers):

Exhibition:

Sappho to Suffrage: women who dared – Weston Library, 6 March 2018 – 3 February 2019 > more

> Digitised exhibits (incl.

New books:

Grayzel, Susan R. ; Proctor, Tammy M.,

Gender and the Great War (Oxford, 2017)

 

Fara, Patricia,

A lab of one’s own : science and suffrage in the First World War

(Oxford, 2018)

Berthezène, C., & Gottlieb, J. (eds.),

Rethinking right-wing women : gender and the Conservative party, 1880s to the present

(Manchester, 2018)

To find more books, using the following subject searches in SOLO:

  • Women — Political activity — Great Britain — Biography
  • Women — Suffrage — Great Britain

New: Churchill Archive

I am pleased to announce that Oxford researchers now have access to the Churchill Archive. This resource, published by Bloomsbury Publishing in collaboration with the Churchill Archives Centre (Cambridge), is a signification collection providing access to more than 800,000 pages of original documents of Winston S. Churchill’s private papers, produced between 1874 and 1965. They include speeches, private letters, telegrams, manuscripts and government transcripts.

This resource is relevant for students and researchers of modern history, politics and international affairs. It is accessible via SOLO and Databases A-Z.

CHUR 5/8/145-162     –    19 Sep 1946
Winston Churchill: “The Tragedy of Europe”
Speech notes for WSC’s speech (19 September, University of Zurich)

Accompanying the resource are specially-commissioned articles, as well as reading lists and bibliographies.

Readers can search the collection by topic, by person, by place or by period.

Also useful:

New: e-access to The Nation, National Review, The New Republic Digital Archives

[re-blogged from the VHL Blog.]

We’re pleased to announce that, following a trial in the autumn, we have now subscribed to the digital archives of three significant political magazines: The Nation, National Review and The New Republic.

  • The Nation is the oldest continually published weekly magazine in the United States, beginning publication in 1865, and describes itself as “the flagship of the left”.
  • National Review was founded in 1955 by William F. Buckley, Jr. and is a hugely important source for any study of American conservatism over the past sixty years.
  • The New Republic, founded in 1914, is widely considered important in changing the character of liberalism in the direction of governmental interventionism, both foreign and domestic.

Each archive starts from the first issue and runs up to present, and the three may be cross-searched with each other and also the Readers’ Guide Retrospective database. Access is via Databases A-Z.

Related resource

Readers’ Guide Retrospective: 1890-1982