Showing results by author "Jane Robinson" in All Categories

Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders focuses on the lives of pioneering women forging careers in the fields of medicine, law, academia, architecture, engineering and the church. In her startling study into the public and private worlds of these unsung heroines, Jane Robinson sheds light on their desires and ambitions, and how family and society responded to this emerging class of working women.

1913: the last long summer before the war. The country is gripped by suffragette fever. These impassioned crusaders have their admirers; some agree with their aims if not their forceful methods, while others are aghast at the thought of giving any female a vote. Meanwhile, hundreds of women are stepping out onto the streets of Britain. They are the suffragists: nonmilitant campaigners for the vote, on an astonishing six-week protest march they call the Great Pilgrimage.

Everyone knows three things about the Women’s Institute: that they spent the war making jam; the sensational Calendar Girls were WI; and, more recently, that slow-handclapping of Tony Blair. About 215,000 women in the UK belong to the WI. Their membership crosses class and has recently begun to recruit huge numbers of young women.

Only a generation or two ago, illegitimacy was one of the most shameful things that could happen in a family. Today the concept of illegitimacy no longer exists in law, and babies' parents are as likely to be unmarried as married. This revolution in public opinion makes it easy to forget what it was really like to give birth or be born out of wedlock. In the Family Way tells secrets kept for entire lifetimes and rescues from the shadows an important part of all our family histories.

In the 1940s, Walter L. Shaw was thinking of speakerphones, conference calls, and call forwarding. Ahead of the world by decades, Shaw spent a lifetime inventing and patenting the many means of communication we take for granted, but he was repeatedly cheated by shrewd businessmen and big corporations.