Historian, Author, Researcher
For the past three days I’ve been at The National Archives at Kew with my colleagues from the Everyday Lives in War centre. In conjunction with the Archives, we organised Voices of the Home Fronts, a three day conference exploring aspects of the home fronts during and after the First World War.
Continue reading “Voices of the Home Front at The National Archives”
This post is really just me thinking out loud, as I try to work through one of the research questions with which I’m grappling at the moment: were Irish housewives in the 1960s content, or were the unconsciously oppressed? Thinking about it is leading me into the realms of philosophical debate.
Continue reading “1960s Housewives: Content or Unconsciously Oppressed?”
Cinemas are currently showing the trailer for Bridget Jones’s Baby, the third instalment in the franchise which will be released later this year. Renée Zellweger has reprised the role of Bridget Jones, the woman who popularised the term ‘singleton’. Before I read Helen Fielding’s novels, I can’t honestly say that I’d previously heard the term ‘singleton’. Without thinking about it too much, I’d accepted that the word was the linguistic creation of Fielding. So I was more than surprised when I recently read William B. Faherty’s 1965 book, Living Alone: a Guide for the Single Woman and found ‘singleton’ listed as one of the terms used to describe unattached women.
She [Kathleen] could be fiercely passionate in their love-making, clutching his face between her hands or forcing his head back with a masculine kiss. When he embraced her he would often feel her hands wild and cruel about his neck and hair. Then she would hate Hugh as the cause of her passion and loathe herself. For days afterwards she would talk and talk religion without allowing him to touch her … He became insanely jealous of the power of the church over her. It all led to a bitter quarrel.
I’m in Galway at the moment to view the John McGahern papers at NUIG Archives. Reading the above extract from McGahern’s unpublished novel The End or The Beginning of Love, I was reminded of the many discussions of sex anxiety in the women’s magazines from the 1960s I’ve been researching.
Back in July 2014, Jennifer Evans and I organised Perceptions of Pregnancy: From the Medieval to the Modern, a three-day international conference. Arising out of that conference, we guest edited a special issue of Woman’s History, the journal of the Women’s History Network (WHN), which was published today. Continue reading “Special issue of Women’s History”
