Gender

The work of military nurses at Passchendaele transformed the perception of women’s war service, showing they could perform life-saving work and risk their lives at the front.

As the Industrial Revolution wrought widespread social changes, female cotton industry workers’ lives changed dramatically.

Writing a history of transgender people poses unique problems.

The British newspaper revolutionised the market by appealing to female readers, even though its attitude towards sexual politics has often been ambivalent, argues Adrian Bingham.

In the 18th century, when women in scholarship were not encouraged and medieval languages were little-studied even by men, Elizabeth Elstob become a pioneer in Anglo-Saxon studies, her work even finding its way into the hands of Thomas Jefferson.

Amy Fuller looks at the life of the Mexican nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and asks why we feel the need to kill our heroines rather than celebrate their achievements.

Were the fifties a dull decade? Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s by Virginia Nicholson has the answer.

This is an extract from Anna Field’s ‘Masculinity and Myth’, which won the 2014 History Today undergraduate dissertation prize, awarded in conjunction with the Royal Historical Society.

Walter L. Arnstein offers a study of the movement for female emancipation, from the 1860s until 1918.

Edna Nixon describes how Mary Wollstonecraft became a passionate believer in the education of her own sex, having herself suffered intensely as a woman.