Tag Archives: suffragettes

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

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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 online collection tells story of British women’s struggle for the vote

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Poster by Hilda Dallas, c 1912

A unique collection relating to British women’s fight for the vote 100 years ago has been revealed online yesterday through the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS).

The digitised material represents a selection of the vast collections housed at the Women’s Library at London Metropolitan University, and includes posters, photographs, postcards, badges, and other memorabilia relating to the British suffrage movement.

Particularly remarkable and moving items from the online collection include a photograph of a crowd attacking suffragettes, and the purse that was held by Emily Wilding Davison at the Epsom Derby in 1913, when she stepped in front of the horse of King George V, which resulted in her death four days later.

The Women’s Library is the oldest and largest collection of women’s history in the UK and was founded in 1926 as the Library of the London Society for Women’s Service, a non-militant organisation led by leading suffragist, Millicent Fawcett. It is now held by the London Metropolitan University and is an internationally acclaimed specialist library, archive, and museum with collections that have broadened since its inception to include a wide range of subjects which focus on the lives of women in Britain. The collection now consists of 60,000 books and pamphlets, 3500 periodical titles, over 450 archives, and 5000 museum objects.

The collection of valuable documents, from the Women’s Library and the Parliamentary Archives, which tell the story of the women’s suffrage movement has also recently been selected as one of twenty collections to represent the outstanding heritage of the United Kingdom on the UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register.

The online selection provides a taster of these extensive collections, and adds to the national repository of over 120,000 digitised images available through VADS from a range of collections across the UK. In particular, this latest addition complements the existing online collection of Women’s Library Suffrage Banners, which includes almost 250 banners and associated artworks which have been made available online for free use in education and research.

To view the new Women’s Library Suffrage Collection, see http://www.vads.ac.uk/collections/WLS.