It’s International Women’s Day today and I’ve been thinking about the women who inspired me. On Friday I was at the unveiling of a Blue Plaque to one very inspirational woman – Bristol-born suffragette Emmeline Pethick Lawrence. She was brought up in Weston-super-Mare and the Plaque was placed on her childhood home, Lewisham House, 80 Bristol Road Lower, Weston-super-Mare. Afterwards, I spoke at a panel event which was part of Weston-super-Mare Literature Festival. W riter and explorer Jacki Hill-Murphy told us all about some remarkable women travellers, including Isabella Bird whose biography she’s just written. Biographer Kathryn Atherton , author of Suffragette Planners and Plotters: The Pankhurst/Pethick-Lawrence Story , shared Emmeline Pethick Lawrence’s remarkable story with us. I gave a short talk about one of my own Inspirational Women – Mary Wollstonecraft. Here is the text of the talk, in which I explain why she is, for me, such an Inspirational Woman. ...

Women’s history is, broadly speaking, about putting women back into history by, for example, telling the story of forgotten and marginalised women or reassessing women’s contribution to history. I think there’s another important aspect to women’s history, and that’s how we approach the sources we have. We have to learn how to be critical, how to assess the material before us, how to “read against the grain”. This was recently brought home to me (yet again) while I was reading the introduction to The Memoirs of James Hardy Vaux edited by Noel McLachlan and published in 1964. Written over fifty years ago, the introduction itself is now effectively a historical document.       A view of Sydney Vaux (1772–?) was an English pickpocket and swindler who operated under a number of aliases. Vaux himself uses the words “pickpocket and swindler” in the title of the first edition of the Memoirs published in 1819, although McLachlan’s edition omits them. He was ...