Advancing the Human Rights of Women & Girls
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Despite a senior colleague’s protests, Jean Purdy’s name was not included on memorial.
Source: Female nurse who played crucial role in IVF ignored on plaque | Society | The Guardian
They called it the épuration sauvage, the wild purge, because it was spontaneous and unofficial. But, yes, it was savage, too. In the weeks and months following the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944, Allied troops and the resistance swept across France liberating towns and villages, and unleashing a flood of collective euphoria, relief and hope. And then the punishments began.
The victims were among the most vulnerable members of the community: Women. Accused of “horizontal collaboration” — sleeping with the enemy — they were targeted by vigilantes and publicly humiliated. Their heads were shaved, they were stripped half-naked, smeared with tar, paraded through towns and taunted, stoned, kicked, beaten, spat upon and sometimes even killed.
Source: What Happened to Women in France After D-Day in 1944 | Time
The story of Isabel Flick, the tenacious woman and campaigner who fought segregation in Australia and is a recipient of an Order of Australia medal.
Source: Isabel Flick, the tenacious campaigner who fought segregation in Australia
To mark the anniversary of women’s suffrage, we republish this essay from International Women’s Day 2018 by Ātea editor Leonie Hayden – how Māori women can find their way back to equity through the stories of the past.
1893 was the first time New Zealand women were given access to the Westminster vote, but traditionally Māori women and children already had a say on important issues in their own communities. As that right was slowly eroded by encroaching colonisation, Māori women joined the fight for suffrage.
Source: Let’s not forget that Māori women had the vote long before Europeans arrived | The Spinoff
A bright and spirited girl, 18-year-old Margaret chastised her spendthrift brother with the words: “Were I not a girl, I would be a soldier!” The following year she set out on the path towards that unlikely ambition when she exchanged her skirts for breeches and enrolled as a medical student at Edinburgh, shrewdly reducing her age to explain her hairless chin and petite frame.
Barry was the second child born to Jeremiah and Mary-Ann Bulkley, and was given the name Margaret Anne. . . . A third child appeared in the Bulkley family and was named Juliana. Although presented as being Barry’s sister, it is likely that she was Barry’s daughter as a result of childhood sexual assault, as the charwoman who discovered Barry’s sex when laying out the body stated that pregnancy stretch marks were present.
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Barry_(surgeon)
Throughout history, women have been written out of cultural moments they helped shape. And now we have a new word for it
Mary Putnam Jacobi argued that menstruation shouldn’t stop women from getting an education—and that science should be supported by facts, not hunches.
As the historian Deakin writes, “The most detailed accounts we have of Hypatia‘s life are the records of her death. We learn more about her death from the primary sources than we do about any other aspect of her life” (49). She was murdered in 415 CE by a Christian mob who attacked her on the streets of Alexandria. The primary sources, even those Christian writers who were hostile to her and claimed she was a witch, portray her as a woman who was widely known for her generosity, love of learning, and expertise in teaching in the subjects of Neo-Platonism, mathematics, science, and philosophy in general.
Hypatia was a close friend of the pagan prefect Orestes and was blamed by Cyril, the Christian Archbishop of Alexandria, for keeping Orestes from accepting the ‘true faith’. She was also seen as a ‘stumbling block’ to those who would have accepted the ‘truth’ of Christianity were it not for her charisma, charm, and excellence in making difficult mathematical and philosophical concepts understandable to her students; concepts which contradicted the teachings of the relatively new church. Alexandria was a great seat of learning in the early days of Christianity but, as the faith grew in adherents and power, steadily became divided by fighting among religious factions. It is by no means an exaggeration to state that Alexandria was destroyed as a centre of culture and learning by religious intolerance and Hypatia has come to symbolize this tragedy to the extent that her death has been cited as the end of the classical world.
Source: Hypatia of Alexandria – Ancient History Encyclopedia
Blue plaques are found right across Greater London, showing us where important people in history have lived and worked. Over 900 official plaques have been erected across London since the scheme began in 1866.
But, currently just 14 per cent of blue plaques across the city celebrate women.
Source: Where are all the blue plaques celebrating women? – Virago
