This special issue has been curated by Sarah Admans, Graduate Trainee Library Assistant at the Institute of Historical Research, in celebration of Women’s History Month 2025. The works within this collection question how history, and the women within it, is told, exploring how biography, periodisation, and shifting social norms shape our understanding of the past. Through utilising a diverse range of methodologies and perspectives, they highlight the often overlooked contributions women have made to society throughout history. This issue encompasses works which span different periods, geographical locations and topics. It emphasises the complexity of women’s lived experiences, from moments of resistance and innovation to everyday acts of survival and change. Far from passive bystanders, these works present women as active participators in history and are a recognition of both their achievements and struggles. Image: 'Ireland's first girl graduates', The Pictorial World, 1894. From the British Library archive
Immaculate Forms: Uncovering the History of Women’s Bodies / Helen King
Review Date: 23 January 2025
In 1950, visitors to the State Theatre in Sydney could pay to see the ‘Transparent Woman’, a life-sized plastic model with glowing blood vessels, nervous system, and internal organs.
Black Female Intellectuals in Nineteenth Century America: Born to Bloom Unseen? / Rebecca J. Fraser
Review Date: 08 January 2025
Twenty years ago, at the start of his monumental Conjectures of Order, Michael O’Brien suggested that ‘intellectual history is not a democratic venture,’ and was, therefore, ‘somewhat illegitimate in the modern discipline of history, which has made much of the moral importance of inclusiveness and equality.
Women Philosophers in Nineteenth-Century Britain / Alison Stone
Review Date: 30 October 2024
Death was imminent for Harriet Martineau in 1855 or, at least, this is what she thought. Convinced that a disease of the heart would soon lead her to the grave, she began setting her house in order by writing her Autobiography, not published until 1877, one year after she actually passed away. In common with J. S.
The Politics of Biography in Africa: Borders, Margins, and Alternative Histories of Power / ed. Anaïs Angelo
Review Date: 09 November 2023
Anaïs Angelo’s new edited collection, The Politics of Biography in Africa: Borders, Margins, and Alternative Histories of Power, explores themes within, and approaches to, writing and using biography in the pan-African context. It sits within an increasing amount of scholarship using biography as both method and mode of African history.
Silent Partners: Women as Public Investors during Britain’s Financial Revolution, 1690-1750 / Amy Froide
Review Date: 29 June 2017
Amy Froide’s book is an excellent addition to the work on early modern women done by researchers such as Amy Louise Erickson. In fact, it was Amy Erickson who first drew my attention to this book even before I was asked to review it. It does not disappoint.
Religious Women in Early Carolingian Francia: A Study of Manuscript Transmission and Monastic Culture / Felice Lifshitz
Review Date: 22 October 2015
This book offers an investigation into the Anglo-Saxon cultural province of Francia during the eighth century (more specifically the area between the Middle Main and Tauber valleys), which, to borrow the author’s own words, ‘argues that the Christian culture of that region was thoroughly gender-egalitarian and in many ways feminist’ (p. 3).
Women in Eighteenth-Century Scotland: Intimate Intellectual and Public Lives / eds. Katie Barclay, Deborah Simonton
Review Date: 31 July 2014
Lady Grisell Baillie (1665–1746) graces the front cover of this volume, her poise and thoughtful, questioning expression a fitting overture for a book that is peppered with images of 18th-century Scottish women, literally making them more visible. The traditional accounts of this period of Scottish history gave little consideration to women – an oversight that has been challenged over the last several decades.
Passion, Betrayal and Revolution in Colonial Saigon. The Memoirs of Bao Luong / Hue-Tam Ho Tai
Review Date: 31 January 2011
Historians with an interest in personal and public memory know a great deal about the challenges entailed in attempting to document the affective contours of past and present lives.
Gender and Change: Agency, Chronology and Periodisation / eds. Alexandra Shepard, Garthine Walker
Review Date: 01 October 2010
This edited collection of essays, published to mark the 20th anniversary of the journal Gender and History, is a welcome and timely reminder of the way in which gender and women’s history has successfully challenged historical orthodoxies, has been used to scrutinize and enrich established timeframes for the past and has vividly exposed the way in which female agency has too often been rendered invisible in…
Women and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Britain /
Review Date: 30 November 2009
The history of the Enlightenment can sometimes appear as a male narrative, dominated by canonical male writers, with women appearing only as subjects denied an equality of rationality and relegated to a feminine domesticity.
