Alexandra Kollontai was a Marxist revolutionary and champion of women’s liberation best known for founding the Zhenotdel or “Women’s Department” which worked to improve the conditions of women’s lives in the Soviet Union, fighting illiteracy and educating women about the new marriage, education, and work laws put in place by the Revolution.
This weeks Illustrated Woman in History was submitted by Róisín Hanley. It is featured in the Women’s History Month 2019 zine. Click here to buy Bernadette Devlin, a radical feminist and Catholic activist in Northern Ireland, was a founder of People’s Democracy. After one failed attempt to be elected, she became the youngest woman ever elected …
This weeks Illustrated Woman in History was written by Aimee Miles and illustrated by Sophia Parsons Cope. It is featured in the Women’s History Month 2019 zine. Click here to buy Elaine Black Yoneda was born Elaine Rose Buchman in September 1906 to Russian Jewish immigrant who had escaped their lives as factory laborers in …
Constance Markievicz was submitted by Faye Quinn for the Women’s History Month 2019 zine which will be available in March. Submissions are still open! Constance Markievicz was an Irish political in the early 1900’s. She fought in the centre of the Easter Rising for 6 days and was then sentenced to lifetime imprisonment. She was …
Susan Lawrence was one of the first three Labour women MPs, and the first woman to represent a London constituency. Lawrence began her political life as a Conservative member of London County Council. In 1912, she met trade unionist Mary Macarthur in 1912 and was converted to socialism. She rejoined the council as a member of the Labour …
Ellen Wilkinson was the first female Minister of Education and the second woman to become a Cabinet Minister. Wilkinson was known by some as “Red Ellen”, as in the early 1920s before she entered Parliament she was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Before entering politics, Wilkinson worked for a women’s suffrage …
Kathrine Stewart-Murray, Duchess of Atholl, was a Scottish noblewoman and Scottish Unionist Party politician. Stewart-Murray was active in Scottish local government, despite the fact that she herself had been an anti-suffrage campaigner prior to WWI. She served on the “Highlands and Islands Medical Service Committee” that was credited with creating the forerunner of the National …
Margaret Wintringham was the first female Liberal MP and the first British-born woman to take a seat in Parliament. Winteringham had begun her working life as a school headmistress, a magistrate and a member of the Grimsby Education Committee. She was a member of the National Union of Women Workers, the British Temperance Association, the National Union …
Margaret Bondfield was a British Labour politician, trade unionist and women’s rights activist. She became the first female cabinet minister, and the first woman to be a privy counsellor in the UK Bondfield began work as a shop assistant, after completing her apprenticeship she began work as a living-in assistant where she was shocked by …
Megan Lloyd George was the first female MP to represent a Welsh constituency. Lloyd George grew up in No. 11 and then No. 10 Downing Street while her father, David Lloyd George, was Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister. Her first language was Welsh, and it wasn’t until she was four that she …