Tag: Gender History
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Beyond the Beads and Feathers: Unpacking the Subversive Potential of Carnival in the Atlantic World
Beyond the colour and conviviality, Carnivals have served as a means for participants to challenge oppression through performance. Angela Davis explores the history of this tradition and the sociocultural changes it has driven.
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Dead and Buried? Finding Edinburgh’s last hanged woman in oral history
Charged with a most heinous crime, Jessie King would come to sit in the annals of Scottish history as the last woman hanged in Edinburgh. Chloe Bramwell explores the story of a woman who may have been as much a victim of circumstance as a villain for commercial tours to exploit.
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The Portrayal of Female Desire and Lesbianism in Deepa Mehta’s Fire
Written by Kat Jivkova. Deepa Mehta’s deeply impactive 1996 film, ‘Fire’, is a portrayal of female desire as resistance to Hindu patriarchy. Kat Jivkova asks why, as something deeply embedded in Indian life and a not a mere Western import, this stirred much imagination, and ire, on its release.
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Was Anwar Sadat a Feminist?
Written by Amy Hendrie. The conflicting legacy and motivations of the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat is explored by Amy Hendrie. A complex figure, Sadat in several ways raised the position of women in his country, even if it was for his own ends.
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All’s Unfair in Marriage and Divorce
Written by Sophie Whitehead. How has gender inequality historically been expressed in marriage and divorce law? Sophie Whitehead examines how deep-seated, yet often subtle, discrepancies have evolved, and in some cases remain, in England and Wales.
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The Pill that Changed the World: A Complicated History
Written by Sophie Whitehead. The history of birth control pills is not commonly understood, despite their presence in the everyday lives of hundreds of millions of people. Sophie Whitehead discusses its murky history both in relation to narratives of historical exceptionalism and uncomfortable associations.
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Crystallography – The Secret Women in Science
Written by Sophie Whitehead. The experience of women in science has been a challenging one over the last century. But how does the science of Crystallography compare, and who are the women behind the work?
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Investigating Female Liberation Inside the Eighteenth-Century British Masquerade
Written by Boryana Ivanova. The masquerade ball carries a long and varied history, but how did the eighteenth century masquerade become imagined places of pleasure, excess and female liberation?
Retrospect Journal 