Frida Kahlo was a resilient lady. She had plans to become a doctor, a politician, and an artist, yet such plans were tarnished in 1925. Following being impaled by an iron handrail whilst riding on a bus, Kahlo became a patient. However, during her years of recovery, Kahlo created art which exhibited the perspectives of a woman with disabilities.
The effect of gendering nations as female in literature, and what that means for the next generation of female writers, by Charlie Clark
To be a woman is not a place of neutrality. To be a woman in literature, to read of your body as a site of battles and uprisings, of famine and protest, destroys any sense of impartiality. There is a long-standing tradition of gendering the nation: the motherland, the mothership, the innate feminine sense of home. But what happens when this sense of gender becomes so deeply tied in with a sense of nation that the two have become almost inseparable?
When Bernadette Devlin Fought For Her Soul: The Life Of An Irish Revolutionary, by Aisha Munir
Devlin was born in 1947 to a working-class Catholic family in Cookstown, Tyrone. Tyrone was a predominantly Catholic county, but Cookstown was mixed. She described the tension between Republicans, who believe in a united Ireland, and Unionists, who support British involvement to create a ‘unified’ state.
Revolutionary Fashion: Creating the image of the future in early 1920s Russia, by Isaac Sinclair
The early years of the USSR were exciting and turbulent. Rapid industrialisation, education, and the rise of gender equality led to a feeling of great hope for the country’s future. Whilst women who lived in rural areas continued to wear traditional hand-sewn Russian dress, women living in urban areas of Russia began to style themselves based on the Western ‘New Woman’ who was independent, childless, smoked, and drank alcohol.