Women's History Scotland was founded as the Scottish Women's History Network in 1995. We have existed in our current form since 1998 and became Women's History Scotland in 2004.
Membership
We have a membership drawn from across Scotland, the UK and overseas which includes academics, independent scholars, teachers, students and anyone interested in women's and gender history. If you would like to join WHS please click here.
Who runs WHS ?
WHS is run by a Steering Committee, elected each year by the membership at the AGM. We meet on a regular basis. The Steering Committee co-ordinates all WHS activities, acting as a focal point for projects, conferences and publications.
Current Steering Committee members:
Lynn Abrams (Convenor) Professor of gender history at the University of Glasgow. Her primary research interests are in modern European and Scottish women's and gender history. She is a co-editor of Gender in Scottish History since 1700 and author of The Making of Modern Woman: Europe 1789-1918 (Longman, 2002) and Myth and Materiality in a Woman's World: Shetland 1800-2000 (MUP, 2005).
Esther Breitenbach is an ESRC postdoctoral fellow at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests include: gender equality policy machinery and policies; women in Scottish politics; Scottish women's history; Scottish participation in the British Empire. She has written widely on women in Scotland, and on gender equality and equal opportunities issues. She has worked in social policy, including secondments to the Scottish Executive Equality Unit, and to the Women and Equality Unit in the DTI. She co-edited (with Eleanor Gordon) The World is Ill Divided: Women's Work in Scotland in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (EUP, 1990) and Out of Bounds: Women in Scottish Society 1800-1945 (EUP, 1992), Her doctoral thesis was on 'Empire, Religion and National Identity: Scottish Christian Imperialism in the 19th and early 20th Centuries'.
Rosalind Carr (Website Editor) is a lecturer at the University of East London. She completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2008 with a thesis entitled 'Gender, National Identity and Political Agency in Eighteenth-Century Scotland'. She has published articles on Scottish masculinities, and women and Scottish politics. Before coming to Scotland she worked at the Public Record Office of Victoria and the National Archives of Australia in Melbourne, and also volunteered with the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives. Currently completing the book Gender and Scottish Enlightenment Culture (contracted to Edinburgh U.P.), her next project will investigate Scottish masculinities and violence in the imperial 'frontier' c.1780-1830.
Elizabeth Ewan (International Officer, Newsletter Editor) has a PhD in Scottish History from the University of Edinburgh and is University Research Chair in history and Scottish studies at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. Her research focuses on medieval and early modern Scottish women, gender, and crime. Her publications include Townlife in Fourteenth-Century Scotland (EUP, 1990) and the co-edited books, Women in Scotland c.1100-c.1750 (Tuckwell, 1999) and The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women.
Linda Fleming completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2005. She is now working as a postdoctoral Research Assistant for Scottish Readers Remember, an AHRC funded study being undertaken at Napier University in Edinburgh. Her research interests include the cultural history of twentieth century Scotland, immigration and ethnicity in nineteenth and twentieth century Scotland and the uses of personal testimony in historical work.
Eleanor Gordon is Professor of gender and social history at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on the history of the family in the nineteenth century - see Public Lives: Women, Family and Society in Victorian Britain (Yale University Press, 2003). She was an associate editor of the Oxford DNB and an adviser and contributor to The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women. More recently she co-edited Gender in Scottish History since 1700. She was co-founder of the Scottish Women's History Network with Esther Breitenbach.
Louise Jackson is a Reader in Social History at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests centre on the relationship between gender, criminality, policing and regulation in modern Britain. Publications include Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (Manchester UP, 2006) and (with Shani D'Cruze) Women, Crime and Justice in England Since 1660 (Palgrave, 2009).
S. Karly Kehoe is a lecturer with the Centre for History at the University of the Highlands and Islands. She completed her PhD in History at the University of Glasgow in 2005 and followed this with a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Guelph in Canada. Her work concentrates on religion, gender and identity in modern Scotland and Ireland and she published her first book, Creating a Scottish Church: Catholicism, gender and ethnicity in nineteenth-century Scotland in 2010. She is an advocate of public engagement and is currently running an Edinburgh Beltane Beacon for Public Engagement project with pupils from Inverness Royal Academy entitled "Looking Back to Move Forward: Slavery and the Highlands".
Ann Kettle (Treasurer and Membership Secretary) has recently retired from the University of St Andrews where she is an honorary senior lecturer in mediaeval history. She was one of the first to introduce a course on the history of women in a Scottish university and for 25 years taught an honours module on 'Women in Mediaeval England'. Her main research interests lie in English social and economic history and she has published several articles on female domestic servants and prostitution in later medieval England. Various other activities have given her a research interest in the careers of modern female academics and earned her an OBE for services to higher education.
Hannah Little is a graduate of History of Art and English Literature, (University of Edinburgh), Hannah worked as an archivist at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and at the Glasgow University Archive Services before undertaking a postgraduate masters in archival management in 2006. She completed her doctoral thesis, entitled, ‘Genealogy as Theatre of Self-Identity: a study of genealogy as a cultural practice within Britain since c. 1850’, at the University of Glasgow in 2009. She currently works as archivist for Glasgow Women’s Library and is responsible for managing and promoting the library’s rich and diverse archival collections.
Alison T. McCall gained her history degree as a mature student through the Open University. A member of the Aberdeen and North East Family History Society since 1984, her main interests are in family and local history, and in the education and careers of women in Victorian Aberdeenshire. She has recently completed work on two WHS resources for schools project, and is currently working on a PhD thesis on education and opportunity for women in mid/late Victorian Scotland.
Elizabeth Macknight is an Australian academic who lectures in French history at the
Eilidh Macrae is a PhD student in the Department of Economic and Social History at Glasgow University. Her research interests are in the field of gender and social history, with her thesis focussing on women, body culture and physical recreation in Twentieth Century Scotland. She is a member of both the Historical Perspectives Postgraduate Committee and the Centre for Gender History’s Hufton reading group. This year Eilidh was appointed as one of two postgraduate representatives for the Social History Society, and she had published in the Women’s History Magazine.
Amy Tooth Murphy is a PhD student at the University of Glasgow. Her thesis, jointly supervised in the Departments of History and English Literature, is an examination of lesbian oral history and lesbian literature in Britain from 1945-1970. She is also secretary of OurStory Scotland, a voluntary LGBT oral history project committed to recording, archiving and performing the life stories of LGBT people in Scotland. Her research interests include lesbian history, lesbian literature, oral history theory and methodology, and gender, feminist and queer theory.
Lesley Orr is a feminist activist, educator and historian, currently based at Scottish Women's Aid as national training and development worker for the Scottish Executive Violence Against Women National Training Strategy. Previously she has lectured in feminist theology and church history. She is the author of A Unique and Glorious Mission (John Donald, 2000). Her main research interests are embodiment, gender, social movements and religion in modern Scotland. She is currently co-ordinating an oral history project for Scottish Women's Aid, and is involved in an innovative social justice degree programme at Queen Margaret University. She led an action-research project at the University of Edinburgh - Out of the Shadows: Christianity and Violence Against Women in Scotland.
Juliette Pattinson lectures in history at the University of Strathclyde. Her research interests focus on gender, personal testimonies and war and her book Behind Enemy Lines: Gender, Passing and the Special Operations Executive in the Second World War, was published by MUP in 2007. She is currently involved in two research projects: the wartime work of the FANYs (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) and men in reserved occupations during the Second World War.
Rose Pipes (Database) is a free-lance editor and writer, formerly a commissioning editor for Oliver & Boyd educational publishers in Edinburgh. She has researched and written two works of local history and several articles relating to nineteenth century co-operative housing in Edinburgh, and is the co-ordinating editor of The Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women.
Deborah Simonton Before moving to Denmark as Associate Professor of British History, she taught history at the University of Aberdeen and is a former convenor of WHS. Her research interests lie in issues of gender, work and education in the 18th century and the development of gender and urban identity in Europe. Her Women in European Culture and Society, Gender, Skill and Identity (Routledge) was published in January 2011. She edited The Routledge History of Women in Modern Europe (2006), co-edited Gender in Scottish History since 1700 (EUP, 2006) and Gendering Scottish History: An International Perspective (Cruithne Press, 1999), and authored A History of European Women's Work, 1700 to the Present (Routledge, 1998). She is currently researching on and leading a major international network funded by the Danish Research Council on Gender in the European Town.
Andrea Thomson is a PhD student in the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow, looking at marriage and marital breakdown in Scotland during the late twentieth century. As part of her research, she examines the issue of domestic violence in Scotland from a feminist perspective. Andrea is a Carnegie scholar and involved in convening the Hufton postgraduate reading group at the Centre for Gender History (based at the University of Glasgow). She presented a paper at the 2010 WHS Annual Conference.
Perry Willson (Vice-convenor) holds a Chair of History at the University of Dundee. Her publications include The Clockwork Factory. Women and Work in Fascist Italy (OUP, 1993), Peasant Women and Politics in Fascist Italy: the Massaie Rurali (Routledge, 2002), (ed) Gender, Family and Sexuality: the Private Sphere in Italy 1860-1945 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) and Women in Twentieth Century Italy (forthcoming Palgrave
Macmillan and Laterza). She is chair of the Association for the Study of Modern Italy, a member of the editorial board of Modern Italy and of the advisory boards of Gender and History and of the on-line journal Storia delle donne. She is also an active member of the Società delle Storiche (the Italian equivalent of the Women's History Network).
