Great Women of London: Women’s History Month
Women’s History Month is celebrated each year in March. It’s a month for honouring women from throughout history, and for writing women back into the centre of the stories we tell about the past.
This year, we’re celebrating all the women who have contributed to the history of London – from the big names you might already know, to the ordinary women who move the world forward every day.
Strangeland
Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin’s Strangeland is her own space, lying between the Margate of her childhood, the Turkey of her forefathers and her own, private-public life in present-day London. Her writings, a combination of memoirs and confessions, are intimate and engaging.
Emin retains a profoundly romantic world view, paired with an uncompromising honesty. Her capacity both to create controversies and to strike chords is unequalled in British life.
The Emperor’s Babe
Bernardine Evaristo
Londinium, AD 211. Zuleika is a modern girl living in an ancient world. She’s a back-alley firecracker, a scruffy Nubian babe with tangled hair and bare feet.
She knows this city like the back of her hand: its slave girls and drag queens, its shining villas and rotting slums. She knows how to get by. Until one day she catches the eye of the most powerful man on earth, the Roman Emperor, and her trouble really starts…
Bluestockings
Susannah Gibson
In England in the 1700s, women who were intellectual was considered unnatural. But a circle of women called the Bluestockings came together in glittering salons to debate and discuss as intellectual equals with men. They fought for women to be educated and to have a public role in society.
In this intimate and revelatory history, Susannah Gibson delves into the lives of these pioneering women.
Normal Women
Philippa Gregory
The ‘normal women’ you will meet in these pages went to war, ploughed the fields, campaigned, wrote, and loved. They rode in jousts, flew Spitfires, issued their own currency and built ships, corn mills and houses as part of their everyday lives.
They committed crimes, or treason, worshipped many gods, cooked and nursed, invented things and rioted. A lot. They built our society to be as diverse and varied as the women themselves. They are there in the archives – if you look – and they made our history.
This Much is True
Miriam Margolyes
BAFTA-winning actor, Miriam Margolyes is one of the nation’s favourite (and most naughty) treasures.
From declaring her love to Vanessa Redgrave to being told to be quiet by the Queen, this book is packed with brilliant, hilarious stories. With a cast list stretching from Scorsese to Streisand, a cross-dressing Leonardo di Caprio to Isaiah Berlin, This Much Is True is as warm and honest, as full of life and surprises, as its inimitable author.
Things a Bright Girl Can Do
Sally Nicholls
Through rallies and marches, in polite drawing rooms and freezing prison cells, and in the poverty-stricken slums of the East End, three courageous young women join the fight for the vote.
The fight for freedom will challenge Evelyn, May and Nell more than they could ever believe. As war looms, just how much are they willing to sacrifice?
In Search of Mary Seacole
Helen Rappaport
Raised in Jamaica, Mary Seacole came to England in the 1850s and volunteered to help during the Crimean War. When her services were turned down she paid for her own expedition and she became well known as a nurse.
Popularly known as ‘Mother Seacole’, she was the most famous Black celebrity of her generation – an extraordinary achievement in Victorian Britain. In Search of Mary Seacole is the fruit of almost twenty years of research by Helen Rappaport into her story.
The Five
Hallie Rubenhold
Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine and Mary-Jane are famous for the same thing, though they never met.
What they had in common was the year of their murders: 1888. Their murderer was never identified, but the name created for him by the press has become far more famous than any of these five women.
Now historian Hallie Rubenhold finally sets the record straight, and gives these women back their stories.
Square Haunting
Francesca Wade
Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of interwar Bloomsbury, was home to women who were activists, experimenters and revolutionaries. They each arrived there seeking a space where they could live, love and, above all, work independently.
Francesca Wade’s spellbinding group biography explores how these trailblazing women pushed the boundaries of literature, scholarship, and social norms, forging careers that would have been impossible without these rooms of their own.
Women from Hackney’s History
The Hackney Society
This book contains 113 brief illustrated biographies of women from Hackney’s history who lived or worked, were born or buried in today’s borough.
Drawn from diverse backgrounds, their stories cover five centuries and show us how times have changed for women and for Hackney. Written and designed by Hackney women, the book is a collaboration between the Hackney Society and Hackney History (Friends of The Hackney Archives).