Jane Robinson (1)Kirja-arvosteluja

What a difference one hundred years makes. The idea of not being able to travel as a woman by oneself is unfathomable to me. This made Robinson's Unsuitable for Ladies even more of a joy to read. Her comments after some of the entries were appreciated and sometimes very much needed, even though I didn't always agree with her.
All in all, I loved the writings of smart, courageous, and independent women. While most traveled with a purpose, (serving in the war was a popular excuse to go abroad), it was the women who traveled out of curiosity and leisure that fascinated me the most. Wealth was the great commodity and motivator in the days of opium pills and ether treatments.
Notable women included one woman who dreamed of riding an ostrich; another who felt that plain boiled locusts were the most palatable. Another woman was funny about bugs like fleas while another desired to be immune to scorpion venom. One woman worried about being seen as a woman while she traveled dressed as man. Another woman had a more pressing concern as she watched her horse fall over a cliff. Still another survived a bear attack. Yet another willingly joined her husband on a funeral pyre.
These were very different times. Imagine a time when it was acceptable for ladies to view battlefields of Waterloo and Crimea, with all of their bloodshed and death. Imagine wearing the elaborate and heavy diving equipment of 1910. Imagine watching a native receive a tattoo by rat or shark tooth.
In truth I think Robinson missed an opportunity to publish a really robust book. It would have been great to see maps of the time period these ladies traveled, illustrations of the fashions, and maybe some photographs or illustrated portraits of the more notable lady travelers.
Favorite women: Florence Nightingale saying her mind was out of breath; Myrtle Simpson trying to figure out how to travel with a newborn; the alias Honourable Impulsia Gushington; Barbara Toy naming her Landrover "Polyanna"; Robyn Davidson bringing her camels to the beach for the first time.

What a fun adventure! So many places and stories, good and bad. This made me want to travel, explore the world as these women did. Nice anthology, I might read some of the full books, not just excerpts.
Read for class

An entertaining survey of the trials and triumphs of women entering the professions in the UK from the Victorian era onwards, concentrating on the years up to WW2. It's quite chatty and in some cases light-hearted, but with a serious point to make that some of the prejudice and discrimination of the early years has still not left us. Recommended.

From a recommendation on Instagram, I found this potted history of the first 'professional' career women to be interesting, inspiring, infuriating - bloody men! - and sorry but also slightly boring. I was expecting each 'pioneer' to be given their own chapter, like mini biographies, so that I could get to know them but the focus is on the historical prospects of women doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, and the layout is therefore rather choppy. The same women appear in each chapter, yet with the focus on wartime opportunities and post-war prejudices, balancing work and home life, how the public viewed working women, the marriage bar and even leisure time. Although I appreciate all of the well-researched stats and sources, I'm just more of a people person!

My main gripe with the subject is that the crux of the uphill battle faced by the first women professionals can be summed up in one word: men. They made the rules to benefit themselves and then actually quoted such stupid arguments like lack of precedence and protecting the livelihood of the 'breadwinner' (like women can't work to support a family) back at the intelligent and determined women who dared to challenge the status quo. 'Power was a man's birthright. Who were women - untutored, temperamentally unfit, inexperienced and over-emotional - to trespass now?' Of course women are only good for marriage and motherhood, and naturally they can't have families AND careers. ARGH!

That annoyance aside, I have nothing but admiration for the women throughout history who, for whatever reason, thought, 'Why can't I?' and promptly did. Men tried to keep them in their place - the home - by enforcing or misinterpreting archaic laws, pricing women out of education and generally belittling their female counterparts, but the Sexual Discrimination (Removal) Act in 1919 and the eventual removal of the marriage bar were on the side of the professional working woman. Not that we've quite reached a level of 'natural justice' even now.

A fitting tribute told in a personal, approachable narrative, but the author's scattergun approach is a bit repetitive at times.

I have never understood why history seems to celebrate the violent, destructive and generally anti-social methods of the suffragettes in their bid to gain 'votes for women' just before the First World War. Now I know why - the fight for female suffrage was a dual-party campaign, divided between the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) of the Pankhursts and the non-militant National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies lead by Millicent Fawcett. (Plus many other smaller groups.) While the Pankhursts and Co were smashing windows, destroying works of art, committing arson, chaining themselves to railings and throwing themselves under horses, Fawcett and her ladies were thinking of practical demonstrations of how women could handle responsibility and organise themselves respectably enough to manage their own affairs - and cast their votes. Hearts and Minds is a powerful account of the suffra-gists campaign for women's votes, and the 'Great Pilgrimage' to London of 1913, ending with a mass rally of over 50,000 women in Hyde Park.

Inspirational and emotive on the whole, Jane Robinson's account of 'the Great Pilgrimage and how women won the vote' is a must-read for all modern female voters who might be thinking 'Why bother?' Because of all the abuse and heartache these women went through for a cause - a right - they believed in, including public attacks and force-feeding in prison. My view, after reading this, is that small-minded men have been running scared of strong women since time immemorial, and so had to come up with ridiculous and hypocritical 'laws' like women being mentally and emotionally incapable of understanding and taking part in politics. Whether the suffragists and suffragettes won women the vote, or whether the war brought a necessary change in the law, there is no denying that these women deserve our respect.

When I borrowed a copy of Jane Robinson's study of illegitimacy in the early twentieth century, my interest was purely academic. While reading the varied accounts of 'bastard' children, single mothers and social prejudice, however, I realised that there for the grace of being born in 1980 and having two loving and supportive grandparents go I. The terms 'illegitimacy' and 'bastardy' mean nothing to modern families - aside from the economical factor of the parish and then the state having to support unwed mothers, I can't understand why there was ever an issue - but I do have personal experience of not being able to fill in half of my family tree, and what the not knowing can do to a child's confidence. This book, and the personal histories within, made me realise just how lucky I have been, but also given me cause to regret the questions that I never had the nerve to ask, and now will never have the chance to.

Covering all aspects of illegitimacy between the Great War and the Swinging Sixties, from birth control (or lack thereof, and the astonishing naivete of earlier generations) to mother and baby homes - reading about 'Margaret' and the abuse she suffered in the Magdalene laundry brought tears to my eyes - adoption and even child migration, In The Family Way is a fascinating, engrossing and emotional social history. Viewers of programmes like Long Lost Family will be familiar with the shame and enforced separation heaped on young girls without a husband or a supportive family, but the darker secrets of illegitimacy are far more upsetting - the tokens left as keepsakes with the foundlings of Coram Hospital, and the children packed off to Australia or Canada for a 'new life' of misery.

Beautifully and respectfully told, Jane Robinson has captured all the heartache and hypocrisy of illegitimacy, which is now thankfully a condition of the past, both legally and socially.

As the title suggests, this book discusses the first women in Britain to attend university. Broadly covering from the mid-late 19th century up until the second World War, it describes the opposition faced by prospective students, including doctors who believed that education could cause infertility (!), the belief that men would not want to marry an educated woman, and the widely held belief that women just did not need to be educated, when their sole purpose in life was to marry and have children.

Rather than giving a chronological account of how universities came to accept female students (it’s worth noting that Cambridge University would not award degrees to females until 1948, although females were allowed to study there prior to that date – Oxford beat them by 28 years by finally agreeing to award degrees to women in 1920), it focuses instead on what university life was like for women during the period covered, such as when women could only talk to men when there was a chaperone present, people would be expelled for extremely minor transgressions.

The book is packed with personal anecdotes, and includes many excerpts from the diaries and writings of former students. As expected, there are some truly inspirational stories included, as well as some more sombre accounts of student life from those who were not happy with university life, and found themselves ill-equipped to cope with their new circumstances. There are tales of families who struggled against convention and lack of finances, to send their daughter(s) to university to get an education, and stories of others who found help elsewhere. It also makes the point that for a very long time, having a degree was not considered any advantage in looking for a career, unless you wanted to be a teacher – indeed it was practically expected that if a woman did pursue a career after her degree, it would be in teaching.

The book is inspiring and well written…definitely recommended.

I'm not embarassed to admit that this book has resided in my bathroom for the past year or so; its entries are the perfect length for such a setting. I would never have thought that a bibliography - that seemingly driest of genres - could be so entertaining. But this one is written with characteristic British wit and erudition. The lady travellers chronicled within its pages exhibit both the best and worst characteristics of the British Abroad. A rollicking good read.

An enjoyable biography of a fascinating woman. Mary Seacole, Jamaican "doctress" and entrepreneur, did things that simply weren't done in the Victorian age—at least not by anyone else. Robinson fills in many of the gaps left by Seacole's breezy autobiography, and she does a great job of providing the historical context for this one of a kind woman.

There's a surprisingly wide assortment of history packed into this 200-page book—Jamaica; New Granada (Panama) during the Gold Rush; the Crimean War. I'd never heard of Seacole's friend Alexis Soyer, French chef and inventor of the soup kitchen, and I learned some things about her not so friendly counterpart, Florence Nightingale. Robinson points out that Nightingale, 34 at the time, needed her parents' permission to accept the British government's commission to establish a corps of nurses during the Crimean War, a detail that contrasts deliciously with the lifelong self-direction of Seacole.

The biographer is a bit too eager to bring up completely unrelated matters that allow her to footnote her own other works ("A certain Lady Hodgson, involved in an African uprising some fifty years after this Crimean experience of Mary's…"), and I quibble with a few of her interpretations, but I appreciate the way Robinson celebrates Seacole's unique experiences and achievements without seeking to turn her into a paragon. Seacole comes alive as an individual here: intrepid, entertaining, imperfect.

Cambridge University only started awarding degrees to women in 1948. For once, Oxford was more progressive. Women were allowed to graduate there already in 1920. This is the charming story of the first female cohort that started out to conquer academia which started in the early 19th century and is still ongoing if one seeks gender parity in full professorships. The book is filled with gems and nuggets about a strange and now lost Victorian world. As always in a British context, the class context is both present and ignored. Academic aspirations are a profoundly bourgeois idea. The aristocracy is not known for breeding and caring about intelligence. The peasants and workers simply could not afford this type of luxury.

"It was there that the Bronte sisters went, and where their friends became pupil-teachers, ploughed back into stony ground before they had a chance to flourish in the world" (p.28). Only medical progress made investment in female education a non-futile endeavor. Death in child-birth cut short too many a promising life. Convents were among the few places that invested in female education and given the longevity of nuns could reap its benefits. As only one out of ten of the first cohort of bluestockings married, an academic education had a similar secular effect. It would have been helpful to set this tiny number of female students (720+335 during a twenty year period in two institutions) in context to the total population to see that these were truly exotic pioneers. The shocking bigotry these women had to endure is truly breathtaking. One was denied time-off during the 1930s to give birth due to the reason that no man ever claimed the same benefit ...

Relying on personal recollections and letters, the book does not fully reveal the private life of the students. It is hard to reconcile the draconic regimented lifestyle told in this book with the general level of licentiousness as told in Simon Winchester's account about Joseph Needham's time at Cambridge during the 1930s. A saucier account might have tried to pry loose the stockings.

This is mostly about British women and university education, to be precise. I really enjoyed this book -- it focuses a lot on individual women and their experiences as told in correspondence and from interviewing relatives. Some parts were a little rage-inducing, but most of the time reading about these women was inspiring and/or hilarious.

I should read more history books - finding ones I like is the problem. This book is all about the experiences of the first women to attend English universities starting in the 1830s or so and running more or less up to the time that degrees were being granted to women by pretty much all universities, Cambridge being one of the last to permit that in 1948. As someone who grew up expecting to go to university and expecting that all opportunities would be open to me it was a bit of an eye opener. Even the author mentions that she was expected to go into a teaching career as a woman armed with a 1970s degree, something that was off the radar by the time I was getting my 1990s degree. I'm very glad that these women paved the way for me!

It's a fascinating read full of strong characters (not always the "undergraduettes" themselves) and happy endings but also the stories of those for whom things went wrong, who weren't in the right places, those who got educations they didn't want and those who didn't get the educations they wanted. I loved reading it and have a new perspective on things as a result. It's one of those things that you're aware of but hearing some more of the story is welcome.

A very enjoyable, interesting and stimulating read about the first female university students in the UK. It made me want to know and read more about the inspirational women who paved the way to the opportunities so many of us take for granted.

Acquired via BookCrossing 26 Nov 2010 - mini bookring

The inspirational story of the women who, from the late nineteenth century through to the inter-war years, paved the way for all of us British female graduates. From undergraduettes who were thought to be damaging their chances of child-rearing, through chaperones, women only dances and thickets of rules and regulations, Robinson draws out personal histories through letters and diaries and shapes her material well into themes such as applying for University, friendships etc. She doesn't ignore the darker side of life but this is essentially a life-affirming and positive read, very well done and filling a gap that hadn't previously been looked at, as far as I know.½

this book is non fiction, and it is filled with facts. However it was still an easy read. The back story wovern arround the facts make it a narritive that you could follow.
many times I felt that I would have liked to know more about the individuals mentioned, but I have to realise that this is a book about a general area not an autobiography.
In short this book left me wanting to know more about the area. It is a general coverage of the subject not an indepth essay. it does this function well

I found this book to be curiously frustrating for two reasons. The first is of course that I would like to have read the works anthologized in their entirety, and found the little snippets to be tantalizingly short. This is criticism is a bit unfair, as that is the nature of anthologies, and many of the works here are difficult to find, so I am of course grateful to the editor and publisher for providing what they did provide.

The other thing I didn't like about this book was the voice of the editor, which I found to be somewhat patronizing of the writers she anthologized, as she humorously refers to their quaint ways and attitudes. I'm sorry, but these women were not quaint, they were courageous, and their attitudes were those of their time. I don't like the modern habit of looking down on the Victorians as quaint, misguided folk. Certainly they had their blind spots, but, I'm sure, so do we.

This quibble aside, the extracts in this book have inspired me to seek out some of the original works, and it serves both as an introduction to the literature and a corrective to the male-centered genre of travel writing.

A book to read when you are feeling jaded - these women will remind you that life is not a dress rehearsal - go for it!