Women's history

Christians ‘airbrushed women out of history’

A portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft.

History hero Jo Brand chooses Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97)

A 1970s evening dress. (© National Museums Liverpool)

100 Years of Women’s Fashion

A portrait of the brilliant pianist and composer Clara Schumann.

My history hero: Clara Schumann (1819-96)

Alfred the Great and Æthelflæd, 13th century

The Anglo-Saxon cunning woman

A sketch of a young woman miner pulling a cart filled with coal. From the report of the Royal Commission, c1842. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS/Corbis via Getty Images)

The scandal of female miners in 19th-century Britain

An example of an anti-Suffragette postcard from the early 20th century.

Anti-Suffragette postcards

Hard labour: a woman tarring and flinting in Oxford Street, central London, 1919. (Getty Images)

First World War

The Library “Our Excess Girls": women after the First World War

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Calories & Corsets: A History of Dieting Over 2000 Years

A statue of Joan of Arc in the home where she is thought to have been born, in Domrémy-La-Pucelle, eastern France. (PATRICK HERTZOG/AFP/Getty Images)

Where history happened Joan of Arc

A woman at a floral tribute to Neville Chamberlain at a florist in Ludgate Circus, London, 1938. In the wake of the Munich agreement, the prime minister was understood to be a hero of women everywhere. (Photo by Harry Todd/Getty Images)

Second World War

The Library Guilty women?

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Dreamers of a New Day: Women who Invented the Twentieth Century

Portrait of physician Elizabeth Blackwell. (Photo by Time Life Pictures/Timepix/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)

My history hero: Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910)

A woman puts a foundling, or her own unwanted child, into a revolving doorway in a hospital or orphanage wall, intended for unwanted children. (Getty Images)

A mother’s love: tokens left with London’s foundling babies

A pregnant woman receives a piece of beef

General Early Modern

“A taste for husbands’ buttocks”: the bizarre history of pregnancy cravings