Autumn 2023: An online course on Radical Women, 1914 to 1978

Emmie 2

Women's Liberation march 1971

In the autumn I  will be teaching an online course using Zoom on Radical Women, 1914 to 1978.

I am a  freelance historian and have been researching and writing about  radical   women  for many years,  and have  been running online courses using Zoom since  March 2020.

My published work includes “Up Then  Brave  Women” : Manchester’s Radical Women  1819-1918 and “For the sake of the women who are to come after:” Manchester’s Radical women, 1914-1945

The course   will last 10 weeks and will be held in the evenings, starting on Monday 2nd  October 2022, and ending on Monday 11th December.  (There will not be a class on Monday 6th November.)   The course fee will be £60.

The format is that I speak about the evening’s topic,  and we then have a discussion among ourselves . Afterwards I will send out a handout and suggest some further  reading. Sometimes I suggest a video for course members to watch beforehand.

For more information or to reserve  a place, please email me, Michael Herbert : redflagwalks@gmail.com

Course outline

The course will include the following

The First World War

  • Response of suffragist and suffragette organisations to  the declaration of war
  • Effect of war on women’s employment
  • Campaigns for the rights of women war workers
  • The Christmas letters between British and German women
  • The International Women’s Congress in the Hague in 1915
  • The No Conscription Fellowship
  • The Women’s Peace Crusade in 1916 and 1917
  • The end of war and the Treaty of the Versailles.

The 1920s

  • What happened to women workers after the end  of the war ?
  • Women in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement
  • Campaigns for equality  and the Equal Rights Procession, July 1926
  • Women’s International League
  • Peacemakers’ Pilgrimage, 1926
  • the campaign to make birth control available
  • The General Strike

The 1930s

  • Women and mass unemployment
  • Women in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement
  • Women  and the fight against the fascist Blackshirts
  • Women and the Spanish Civil War

Ruby Loftus

The Second World War

  • Evacuation, September 1939
  • Women war workers
  • Woman and  the ATS
  • Ellen Wilkinson’s war
  • The Women’s Parliaments 1941 and 1942

Ellen Wilkinson

Post-war 1945-51

  • Ellen Wilkinson’s peace
  • The Equal Pay Commission
  • Women and work after the war
  • The squatting movement 1946
  • Bessie Braddock and Barbara Castle

1950s housewives

The 1950s

  • Women and work
  • Leisure
  • Sex and Marriage
  • Equal pay
  • Peggy Duff and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
  • Claudia Jones
  • Ann Jellicoe and Shelagh Delaney

Shrew front cover October 1969

The 1960s and  1970s

  • Social and cultural change
  • The Permissive Society
  • The Underground
  • The women strikers at Ford and Equal Pay
  • Patricia Veal and the United Nurses’ Association
  • The Leeds Textile Workers strike, 1970
  • Women’s Liberation movement, 1969 to 1978

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