Review of Tracing Your Female Ancestors, (Pen and Sword Books, 2019) by Adele Emm.
(This review first appeared in Who Do You Think You Are? magazine)
By Ruth A Symes
Family history – like all histories – originally dealt
with the lives of men. Next came books that paid lip service to the lives of
females in the past. With refreshing candour and by making admirable use of the
vast range of primary resources now available in archives, libraries and
online, Adele Emm has moved things on a stage further by giving the lives of
women centre stage in this book. At last, researchers can fully immerse themselves
in a properly gendered social history of the last two hundred years with all
its discriminations and differences of emphasis.
In these pages, you will find remedies for the menopause,
records of uterine cancer and ‘falling wombs’, female bigamists (who considered
their first husbands dead after transportation to Australia), real accounts of women
who starved themselves to feed their children, those who ‘pleaded [their]
belly’ (i.e. that they were pregnant) when they were arrested, and much, much
more. There is drama aplenty but gentler
– and equally interesting – matters are not neglected: how the weekly wash
dominated the daily lives of most women, for instance, or the role of policemen’s
wives in taking care of female prisoners. Access to new and different records
makes for vivid prose. The familiar discussion of punitive legislation on
prostitution, for example, is brightened up by the inclusion of Soho courtesan
Julia Grant’s ‘dazzling white teeth and blue eyes,’ a detail taken from a rare mid
nineteenth-century ‘listings magazine’.
If Emm doesn’t cover the experiences of your female
ancestors exactly, she will undoubtedly give you umpteen ideas about where to
look next and how best to understand what you eventually find.
women's history, women, history, genealogy, women and politics, representation, suffrage, suffragettes, females, feminists, genealogy, family, family history
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