Michael Herbert (Red Flag Walks) has announced an eight week course covering the history of radical women in Britain between 1819 and 1918. The course will run online via Zoom each Sunday for eight weeks at 2:00pm, beginning on Sunday 11 October and ending on Sunday 29 November. The course will cover the following themes: Female Reform Societies and the 1819 Peterloo Massacre: In the … Continue reading Online series: Radical Women, 1819 to 1928
A new biography of Manchester Irishwoman and trade union organiser, Mary Quaile, will be launched on Saturday 8th August in Manchester. Bernadette Hyland and Michael Herbert’s new book: ‘To her the trade union movement was her life’ – Mary Quaile: Manchester Irishwoman and trade union organiser of women workers traces the story of Mary’s life and work. The book begins with her arrival in England … Continue reading Book launch: Mary Quaile, Manchester trade union organiser
To mark the centenary of the 1926 General Strike, Professor Michael Sanders (University of Manchester) will deliver an online talk on Wednesday 20 May at 7pm covering two Mancunian female trailblazers. Elizabeth Gaskell may have been one of the first to write a ‘picket-line’ romance, in her much-loved classic North and South, but she was certainly not the last. In the centenary year of the ‘General … Continue reading Online Talk: South and North rather than North and South: The ‘Big Strike’ Novel
My research investigates female migrant mill and factory workers housed at asylums and poorhouses in Dundee and its environs between 1841 and 1900. I have spent the last four years digging through primary sources, assessing and analysing recorded manifestations of anomic symptoms, and evidence of anomic experience, drawing on data principally from the Dundee Royal Lunatic Asylum, Montrose Asylum, the Dundee East poorhouse, and the … Continue reading Theo Christodoulidis (University of Dundee) on industrial Dundee’s female migrant millworkers c.1841-1891.
“All help possible will be given”: The complete Minutes of the Manchester and Salford Women’s Trades Union Council, 1895 – 1919. Transcribed by Bernadette Hyland, edited by Michael Herbert. Manchester and Salford Women’s Trades Union Council was set up in 1895 and continuing in existence until 1919 when it merged with the men’s trades council to form a single body. During its quarter of a … Continue reading Book: Minutes of Manchester and Salford Women’s Trades Union Council
From 1885 when she first arrived in London aged twenty-four to become secretary to her aunt, the writer, suffragette and trade unionist Emily Dilke, until her retirement in January 1921, Gertrude Tuckwell was among the most prominent and influential figures in the women’s trade union movement. In nearly four decades of activism, she first became active in the Women’s Trade Union League, serving as its … Continue reading Gertrude Tuckwell and the Women’s Trade Union League papers online
In the seventh of our series on meetings with figures from labour history, Constance Bantman encounters the French anarchist Antoinette Cazal. Was Antoinette ‘Trognette’ Cazal (1862-1902) even a figure of the labour movement? Her entry in the biographic dictionary of the French labour movement, Le Maitron, describes her as ‘a seamstress; a brewery girl; an anarchist; a defendant in the [1894 anti-anarchist] Trial of the … Continue reading Class Encounters: Antoinette Cazal, anarchist
Dr Natalie Thomlinson delivered the Society’s third annual John Halstead Memorial Lecture, Remembering the Strike: the miners’ strike of 1984-5 in popular memory at the University of Huddersfield on Saturday 9 November 2024. The lecture can be viewed on YouTube here. Dr Thomlinson is Associate Professor of Modern British Cultural History at the University of Reading, and co-author of Women and the Miners’ Strike (2023). She has … Continue reading Video: Remembering the Strike: the miners’ strike of 1984-5 in popular memory
Funding from the Society for the Study of Labour History allowed me to conduct a wide range of research into eighteenth-century female domestic servants. My aim was to discover how they have been represented both in their time and now, whether this representation has changed, and what might we be able to do to change it. Domestic servants have traditionally been excluded from labouring, working-class … Continue reading Lauren Halls (York) on the representation of eighteenth-century female domestic servants
Women who worked in munition factories during the First World War were known as the Canary Girls. The nickname was reminiscent of the effects of the chemical TNT, as it gave their skin a yellow tint. Whilst the fight of their male counterparts on the front line was at the forefront of the public’s mind, the Canary Girls’ work was hidden within the walls of … Continue reading Lola Mills (Warwick) on the forgotten history of the Canary Girls
