Jane Robinson | |
---|---|
Born | 1959 (age 63–64) |
Alma mater | Somerville College, Oxford |
Occupation | Historian |
Jane Robinson (born 1959) is a British social historian specialising in women's history. She has published on female pioneers in a range of fields including education, travel, and the professions, and on other women's social history topics including suffrage, illegitimacy, and the Women's Institute.
She was born in Edinburgh, educated at Easingwold School and Somerville College, Oxford, worked in the antiquarian book trade for 10 years and now lives near Oxford writing and lecturing. [1] [2]
In 1994, she published an anthology of women travellers' writings, Unsuitable for Ladies. [3] Her 2002 work Pandora's Daughters (Women Out of Bounds in the United States) [4] discussed "Enterprising women" including early French writer Christine de Pizan, criminal Moll Cutpurse, and Christian Cavanagh who joined the army in male disguise. In 2005 she wrote Mary Seacole, a biography of the nurse who was in 2004 voted "the top black Briton of all time", [5] and her 2009 book Bluestockings describes women's entry into English universities from the 1860s to 1939, and was the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week . [1] [6] [7]
In 2011 Robinson published A Force to be Reckoned With, a history of the Women's Institute; she says in the introduction that "the WI members I've come across - past as well as present - have had more humour, courage, spirit, eccentricity and common sense than any other individuals I've ever written about. And that's saying something." [8]
In 2015 she published In the Family Way: Illegitimacy Between the Great War and the Swinging Sixties, a book on attitudes to illegitimacy, described in The Telegraph as "bone-chilling". [9]
Her 2018 book Hearts And Minds: The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote tells the story of the Suffragists, who campaigned for women's suffrage in Britain separately from the Suffragettes and marched on London in 1913. [10]
Her 2020 book Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders - The Pioneering Adventures of the First Professional Women explores the lives of pioneering women forging careers in the fields of medicine, law, academia, architecture, engineering and the church in the period following the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act of 1919. [11]
Bluestocking is a term for an educated, intellectual woman, originally a member of the 18th-century Blue Stockings Society from England led by the hostess and critic Elizabeth Montagu (1718–1800), the "Queen of the Blues", including Elizabeth Vesey (1715–1791), Hester Chapone (1727–1801) and the classicist Elizabeth Carter (1717–1806). In the following generation came Hester Lynch Piozzi (1741–1821), Hannah More (1745–1833) and Frances Burney (1752–1840). The term now more broadly applies to women who show interest in literary or intellectual matters.
Hester ChaponenéeMulso, was an English writer of conduct books for women. She became associated with the London Bluestockings.
Mary Jane Seacole was born in Jamaica to a Creole mother who ran a boarding house and had herbalist skills as a “doctress.” In 1990, Seacole was (posthumously) awarded the Jamaican Order of Merit. In 2004, she was voted the greatest black Briton in a survey conducted in 2003 by the black heritage website Every Generation.
Clara Reeve was an English novelist best known for the Gothic novel The Old English Baron (1777). She also wrote an innovative history of prose fiction, The Progress of Romance (1785). Her first work was a translation from Latin, then an unusual language for a woman to learn. She was a near-contemporary of the bluestockings ladies of Elizabeth Montague's circle.
Dame Carmen Thérèse Callil, was an Australian publisher, writer and critic who spent most of her career in the United Kingdom. She founded Virago Press in 1973 and received the Benson Medal from the Royal Society of Literature in 2017. She has been described by Gail Rebuck as "the most extraordinary publisher of her generation".
A virago is a woman who demonstrates abundant masculine virtues. The word comes from the Latin word virāgō meaning "vigorous maiden" from vir meaning "man" or "man-like" to which the suffix -āgō is added, a suffix that creates a new noun of the third declension with feminine grammatical gender. Historically, this was often positive and reflected heroism and exemplary qualities of masculinity. However, it could also be pejorative, indicating a woman who is masculine to the exclusion of traditional feminine virtues.
The academic discipline of women's writing is a discrete area of literary studies which is based on the notion that the experience of women, historically, has been shaped by their sex, and so women writers by definition are a group worthy of separate study: "Their texts emerge from and intervene in conditions usually very different from those which produced most writing by men." It is not a question of the subject matter or political stance of a particular author, but of her sex, i.e. her position as a woman within the literary world.
Scars Upon My Heart is an anthology of poetry written by American and British women during the First World War, compiled and edited by Catherine W. Reilly and published by Virago Press in 1981. Scars Upon My Heart is recognized as a pioneering presentation of women's literary expression during the First World War, giving voice to women's experiences, thoughts, and emotions. In the words of Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, the book 'largely contributed to the current reevaluation of poetry written by women during World War I'.
Penelope Jane Farmer is an English fiction writer well known for children's fantasy novels. Her best-known novel is Charlotte Sometimes (1969), a boarding-school story that features a multiple time slip.
Christine Roche is French-Canadian illustrator, cartoonist, teacher and film-maker who lives and works in London. Her work has appeared in several books, magazines, and national newspapers. She is currently a painter.
Hannah Woolley, sometimes spelled Wolley, was an English writer who published early books on household management; she was probably the first person to earn a living doing this.
Margaret Robertson Watt was a Canadian writer, editor and activist. She was a woman of great energy and drive who believed strongly in the power exerted by women working together. She is known to members of Women's Institutes in the United Kingdom for introducing the concepts and practices of the Canadian Women's Institute movement to Britain in 1914. She is remembered internationally as one of the founding members of the Associated Country Women of the World (ACWW) in 1933.
Elizabeth Ellis was a British novelist and travel writer.
Constance Louisa Maynard was the first principal of Westfield College (1882–1913) and a pioneer of women's education. She was the first woman to read Moral Sciences (philosophy) at the University of Cambridge.
Lettice Fisher was the founder of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child, now known as Gingerbread. She was also an economist and a historian.
Helen Emily Lowe was a British travel writer. Lowe made travels to Scandinavia and southern Europe together with her mother. Her experiences were published in two books: Unprotected Females in Norway, or the Pleasantest Way of Travelling there, Passing through Denmark and Sweden. 1857, G. Routledge & Co. and Unprotected Females in Sicily, Calabria and on the Top of Mount Aetna. 1859, G. Routledge & Co.
Stephanie Dowrick is an Australian writer, Interfaith Minister and social activist. She is the author of more than 20 books of fiction and non-fiction, five of them best-sellers. She was a publisher in Australia and the UK, where she co-founded The Women's Press, London.
Judith Melita Okely is a British anthropologist who is best known for her ethnographic work with the traveller gypsies of England. She is an Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Hull and Research Affiliate of the School of Anthropology, University of Oxford. Her research interests encompass fieldwork practice, gypsies, feminism, autobiography, visualism, landscape representations, and the aged, mainly within Europe. The UK Data Service lists her as a "Pioneer of Social Research".
Gwendoline "Gwen" Whyte Richardson was an Australian actress and travel writer, author of On the Diamond Trail in British Guiana (1925).
Cathie Koa Dunsford is a New Zealand novelist, poet, anthologist, lecturer and publishing consultant. She has edited several anthologies of feminist, lesbian and Māori/Pasifika writing, including in 1986 the first anthology of new women's writing in New Zealand. She is also known for her novel Cowrie (1994) and later novels in the same series. Her work is influenced by her identity as a lesbian woman with Māori and Hawaiian heritage.