Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827-1891) was an English educationist, artist, philanthropist, and feminist. Her personal correspondence is quite extensive, containing letters exchanged with her family, friends, and acquaintances. The bulk of her epistolary archive though consists of letters sent to her. Instead of viewing this fragmentation and…

A central principle of 1970s feminism was a concern with making women visible and the historical creation of women's public voices is an important methodological premise of feminist research. When written, biographies of female actors "recovered" from the condescension of posterity, can illuminate the telling of individual and collective…

In 1914 opportunities for working-class women's sports participation were limited and peripheral, but the 1980s, policy reforms resulted in the then Sports Council identifying women as a "target group". Subsequently the notion that barriers to women's participation are issues to be identified and resolved has become commonplace in…

There has been little exploration of emotional labor in researching the learning of adults, and emotional labor on the part of research contractors has scarcely featured in published debates. The article explores the role of emotion in this context from a critical feminist perspective, drawing on life history data from a study of the learning…

This paper considers Olive Banks' work on charting the history and development of British feminism, and particularly her use of collective biography as a research and analytic tool. It is argued that while this has been seen as the least "fashionable" aspect of her work, it took forward C. Wright Mills' contention for one definition of…

In this article, a biographical overview is offered of the life of [Estelle] Sylvia Pankhurst (1882-1960), suffragette, political activist, artist and writer, in order to provide a context for her 1959 proposal for an Ethiopian women's college, which is published for the first time in this journal. Sylvia, one of five children born in Manchester,…

I explore the question of men's participation in higher education (HE) in relation to shifting, discursive and intersecting masculine subjectivities by drawing on qualitative interviews with men participating in HE. The paper contributes to a sociological understanding of the impact of masculine subjectivities on higher educational participation…