Unearthing Miss Marple

 My review of  Sister Sleuths – Female Detectives in Britain

By Nell Darby (Pen and Sword, 2021)

This review first appeared in Who Do You Think You Are? magazine

Review by Ruth A Symes

An impressive forensic examination of the hitherto hidden history of female detectives working outside formal police structures, Sister Sleuths looks at all kinds of women investigators, from neighbourhood snoops, through paid sleuths (who worked part-time alongside other complementary employments such as acting and spiritualism), to the full-time doyennes of detective agencies. 

The story interweaves with the more familiar history of women’s increasing emancipation in the last two hundred and fifty years, glancing off – amongst other things – the rise of the New Woman of the 1880s and 1890s, women’s work in World War One, and the women’s suffrage movement. Each of these played a distinctive part in encouraging and sustaining female detective activity. Family history researchers will enjoy lively evidence culled from newspapers and court records as well as certificates, censuses and the 1939 Register.

Feminine talents (such as the ability easily to gain confidences) were considered to make women particularly suitable for investigative work, but the numerous proto-Miss Marples also embraced adventure, and excitement, and demonstrated physical and intellectual prowess that easily rivalled that of their male counterparts. Far from simply prurient curtain-twitchers, these talented women were undoubtedly important to the preservation of the social order in many British cities and towns.

crime, criminals, detectives, police force, investigators, history, women's history, Britain, British, England, English, Victorian, World War One, World War I

A Worldwide Web of Ancestors

 

My review of An Infinite History (Princeton University Press, 2021) by Emma Rothschild.

This review first appeared in Who Do You Think You Are ? Magazine.

Review by Ruth A Symes

Behind the silent records of family history, the past is noisy. Our ancestors were not individuals living in isolation, but members of ever-changing social networks who shared news and information with the many people who lived around them and (through the networks of those people) with the world beyond.  Rothschild’s study of the networks around an unknown and illiterate French woman, Marie Aymard, in the obscure provincial town of Angouleme in the years leading up to the French Revolution, examines this proposition in fascinating detail.  

Making prolific use of archival sources, the investigation spins first around 83 townsfolk who came together one December afternoon in 1764 to witness a prenuptial agreement.  The largely familial and neighbourly network, broadens to include the next ring of social contacts in other parts of the town and country, and then moves out further still to include contacts who operated in other parts of the world, but had links back to Angouleme. Academics would describe the time dimension of this kind of history as ‘flat’ or ‘horizontal,’ but Rothschild also introduces a ‘vertical’ component by tracing some families on into the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Even amateur family historians will speculate on what they might learn by similarly scrutinising the networks around their own ancestors; the possibilities are truly ‘infinite’.

Angouleme, French Revolution, France, French, women's history, family history, genealogy, networks

All Those Revolting Women !

 

My review of A Century of Female Revolution: From Peterloo to Parliament, by Glynnis Cooper, (Pen and Sword Books, 2020).

This review first appeared in Who Do You Think You Are ? Magazine.

Review by Ruth A Symes

On August 16^th 1819, some of the marchers at the renowned political demonstration in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, were wearing the long straight Empire-line dresses fashionable in the period. Such restrictive clothing hardly suggests that they were out to cause trouble for the Establishment, or that they anticipated having to run away from the sabre-wielding Yeomanry (who went on to kill and injure many) that afternoon.  Fascinating ‘feminine’ details such as this, encourage the reader to re-examine the arguments about the degree to which the crowd incited the ‘massacre’ of Peterloo.

This is a refreshingly accessible history. Cooper consistently foregrounds women’s contribution to the debates on enfranchisement, showing how these were always informed by the ‘key’ aspects of nineteenth-century politics: the Corn Laws, the shifts of power between Tories and Whigs, improvements in public health, the abolition of slavery and the slave trade, the rise of the Labour Movement and much more.  

The attainment of the vote for (many but not all) British women just after the First World War did not arise from nowhere: it was the result of (at least) a century-long struggle. This history adroitly joins the dots between women’s less well-publicised sorties into politics (early Female Reform Societies, and contributions to the male-dominated Chartist and Trade Union movements), and better-known elements (the Suffragettes, the work undertaken by women in the War, female MPs in the House of Commons).  It is satisfying to understand how each foray by women into the enfranchisement debate helped shape the next, ensuring, that that half of the population long deemed ‘too ruled by emotion and debilitated by menstruation and childbirth to be able to vote with a clear head,’ were eventually allowed to have their say.

women's history, women, history, genealogy, women and politics, representation, suffrage, suffragettes, females, feminist, revolution, riots, uprisings

Finding the Women in Your Family

 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