West of England and South Wales Women's History Network Blog

On Friday 9 June 2923 - a very hot day! – Exeter Civic Society unveiled a blue plaque at 88 Pennsylvania Road, the home for over thirty years of Mary Willcocks, author, lecturer and feminist.  At the Blue Plaque unveiling, 88 Pennsylvania Road, Exeter Mary Willcocks (1869-1952), was a novelist and suffrage activist who spent most of her life in Exeter. She was born on a farm close to Dartmoor, which provided the background for many of her novels, featuring strong women characters, often set in rural Devon. She moved to Exeter in 1907 when her early novels proved successful enough for her to risk abandoning teaching for life as a freelance writer and speaker. The publication of her seventh novel in 1913 prompted a feature in the Devonian Year Book with a portrait photograph showing her in her forties.    Mary Willcocks in the Devonian Year Book During her first ten years in Exeter she campaigned for votes for women, organising campaigns across Devon and Cornwall for the Na...

Carrie de Silva was our key note speaker at the WESWWHN Annual Conference on Gender and Commemoration in October 2021. In her address Carrie discussed women celebrated in street names and the consequences of the persistence of cultural norms in public commemoration of women’s lives.   Some of you reading this will have heard of the street names project and may have heard a Zoom talk I did a few months ago. The project was launched, in a small way, at the London School of Economics in 2019. I intend to produce a book of brief biographical notes of some of the women who have a street named after them in the UK and also a paper considering some of the deeper issues highlighting, in my view, the importance of the visibility of women in public spaces and the potential impact that a lack of such representation may have on individual women’s self-perception and personal development. Note that an unreconstructed view of gender has been taken as all those found, to date, clearly identif...