Women on the Move

Refugees, Migration and Exile

Edited By: Katherine Holden, Fiona Reid

£34.99

This innovative collection brings women migrants clearly into view. Spanning four centuries, its culturally diverse contents explore common themes of exile, spirituality, and identity through personal narratives. A valuable resource for migration and gender studies.

This is an innovative and wide-ranging edited collection which brings women clearly into view, reflecting their disproportionately high numbers within migrating populations. Spanning four centuries, its contents are culturally diverse but address some important common themes and questions. Beginning with a useful survey of women in migration studies in early modern Europe, subsequent chapters explore the following topics: the exile experiences in Europe, firstly of English Brigittine nuns, and secondly of Catholic Gentlewomen displaced by the English Reformation; the dual national identities of a French woman moving to America during the revolutionary period; the lives of two women preachers moving to an American city with a large migrant population in the mid 20th century; and finally, autobiographical narratives of Islamic women exiled in body and/or mind from their countries of origin in the late twentieth century. The authors and editors consider the significance of spirituality amongst women migrants, address the difficulties of generalising from individual experiences and consider issues raised by a particular focus on elite women. The focus on personal narratives crosses disciplinary boundaries making it a valuable resource for students and researchers interested in migration history, autobiography, personal narratives, social history and gender and women’s studies.

Fiona Reid is Senior Lecturer in European History at the University of Glamorgan, Wales. She is the secretary of the West of England and South Wales Women’s History Network and she sits on the committee of the National Army Records Society. She has published widely on the social history of war in the twentieth century and is the author of Broken Men: Shell Shock, Treatment and Recovery in Britain 1914–30 (Hambeldon Continuum, 2010). She is currently part of the Leverhulme-funded “Outcast Europe” research centre at the University of Glamorgan and is working on the history of displacement during the long Second World War. Her forthcoming work (with Sharif Gemie and Laure Humbert) is Outcast Europe: 1936–1948 which will be published by Hambledon Continuum in 2011.

Katherine Holden is Senior Lecturer in History, e-Learning and Blended Learning at the University of the West of England in Bristol. She is a founder member and treasurer of the West of England and South Wales Women’s History Network and has also been an active member of the UK Women’s History Network over the past two decades. She served on the steering committee of the UK network between 1997–2001, hosting the annual conference in Bath in 2000, and again from 2006 when she became Network Convenor and judge of the Claire Evans Prize. Some of her key publications in women’s and gender history are: The Shadow of Marriage: Singleness in England 1914–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), The Family Story: Blood, Contract and Intimacy 1830–1960, co-authored with Leonore Davidoff, Megan Doolittle and Janet Fink (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1999), “Imaginary Widows: Spinsters, Marriage and the ‘Lost Generation’ in Britain after the Great War,” Journal of Family History 30/4 (2005): 134–48, and “‘Nature Takes No Notice of Morality’: Singleness, and Married Love in Interwar Britain,” Women’s History Review 11/3 (2002): 481–503. Her current research project on the history of nannies in Britain will focus partly on the global dimensions of this form of employment, including the movement of women between cultures and across local and national boundaries.