Thatcher maintained throughout her life that Hayek’s famous Road to Serfdom, which she read while an undergraduate at Oxford, had a profound impact on her thinking. Road to Serfdom is Hayek’s account of the fall of Weimar Germany, in which he argues that the introduction of democratic socialism—e.g. a planned economy where the people voted on the plan—would always lead towards totalitarian thinking, including the rise of National Socialism in Germany ..read more

Punchy, loud and readily available, Barbara Kruger makes art for an age that is, in her words, a 'car crash of narcissism and voyeurism ..read more

A cosmopolitan aesthete, a feminist pacifist, and a sharp wit, Lee was an art historian, literary critic, and fiction writer who lived in a picturesque villa near Florence between 1906 and 1935. Lee attributed the mystical aura of her house to what she described as its intimate sense of history rather than to its architectural features or its geographical environment, but today’s visitors find that its allure has as much to do with its tenant.  ..read more

Royal portraiture was a means of propaganda before the invention of photography because it could be displayed for important political figures and guests to see, and it could convey a subliminal message to this targeted audience based on what the royal who was depicted wished to convey to key political influences. Examining the fashion choices of Queen Mary I in this portrait reveals how these fashion choices conveyed a certain message to her targeted audience about her power, status, and wealth as the queen of England ..read more

Mary A. Ward was one of the most successful women in fin-de-siècle Britain. Under her pen name, ‘Mrs. Humphry Ward’, she achieved significant fame as a novelist in the early twentieth century: the international publication of her novels both propelled her into the role of breadwinner for her family, a position rarely occupied by women in this period, and granted her extensive opportunities for world travel ..read more

Painting desire in all the electric colours of fairground rides and magazine covers, Pauline Boty was the heroine at the centre of British Pop Art, an artistic movement dominated by men. It exploded onto the London art scene in the mid-1950s with the exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’ at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, where the works showcased employed eye-catching text and bold imagery to celebrate youthful exuberance, commercial culture and sexual liberation ..read more

Reading is a haunting experience in Australia. The handful of bush ballads rote learned in primary school – plodding iambs blending with those of English poems and nursery rhymes – quickly sediments beneath heapings of Austen, Browning, and Conrad. Colonial Australian writing falls within the remit of History class, and only recently has First Nations literature been sprinkled into curricula: tokenistic hundreds-and-thousands ..read more

Open positions: Deputy Editor Science Editor Humanities Editor Head of Publicity We’re building our team for Michaelmas 2023. We’re an online student-run journal that publishes essays on women’s history and achievements. We’re looking for team members from both Oxford Brookes and Oxford University. We’d love to hear from you, so please send over your CV ..read more

Markievicz was a feminist, a socialist, an anti-Imperialist, an artist, a revolutionary. It may sound like a mouth-full, but all of her identities must be read together. While its easy to think of early European feminists as insular, privileged aristocrats — and she did have her time in the Temperance Movement — Markievicz was truly intersectional at a time when almost nobody else understood her aims ..read more

Unique amongst her academic colleagues in being equipped to approach the ‘pantheon’ of William Blake (1757 – 1827) from the perspective of a fellow poet, Dr Kathleen Raine (1908 – 2003) recognised the importance of not simply reading what her subject wrote but reading what he read ..read more