WHS is run by a Steering Committee, elected each year by the membership at the AGM. We meet on a regular basis. The Steering Committee co-ordinates all WHS activities, acting as a focal point for projects, conferences and publications.
Current Steering Committee members
Yvonne McFadden (Convenor) is a Research and Teaching Associate in History at the University of Strathclyde, where she is Co-Director of the Scottish Oral History Centre. She currently works as a research on an oral history on the project the Lost Villages of East Ayrshire collecting stories about living in mining communities in the twentieth century. Yvonne completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2015 entitled, ‘Creating a Modern Home: Gender, Culture and Consumption in Post-War Suburban Glasgow, 1945-1975’ which examined the relationship between housing, gender, social mobility and work.
Eleanor Peters (Vice Convener) is a PhD graduate and a recipient of an Elphinstone Scholarship from the University of Aberdeen who investigates the intersection between gender, technology, and science. She is especially interested in researching women’s roles as mediators of science and technology. She completed her undergraduate MA in History with First Class Honours at the University of Aberdeen and is published in Notes and Records: The Royal Society Journal of the History of Science, Women’s History Review and the Journal of Scottish Historical Studies. She is currently working on a project to celebrate the centenary of the founding of the Electrical Association for Women.
Eleanor Gordon is currently an affiliate in Economic and Social History at the University of Glasgow where she was Professor of Gender and Social History from 2004. She is a co-editor of Gender in Scottish History since 1700; co-author with Gwyneth Nair of Murder and morality in Victorian Britain: the story of Madeleine Smith (MUP, 2009) and Public lives: women, family and society in Victorian Britain (Yale University Press, 2003); and co-editor with Esther Breitenbach of The World is ill divided: women’s work in Scotland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (EUP, 1990) and Out of Bounds: Women in Scottish Society 1800-1945 (EUP, 1992). She is currently co-authoring a monograph based on research arising from the ESRC funded project ‘A History of Working-Class Marriage in Scotland, 1855-1976‘
Linda Fleming completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow in 2005. She is currently Research Associate on the AHRC funded project The Redress of the Past: Historical Pageants in Britain, 1905-2016. Her research interests include the cultural history of twentieth century Scotland, immigration and ethnicity in nineteenth and twentieth century Scotland and the uses of personal testimony in historical work. She is a contributor to the The Women’s Suffrage Movement in Scotland, 1867-1928: A Learning Resource.
Mairi Hamilton (Membership Co-ordinator) is a PhD student in the Centre for Gender History at the University of Glasgow. Her thesis examines narratives of women’s experiences of abuse within domestic settings in nineteenth-century Scotland. This research project is funded by the AHRC through the Scottish Graduate School of Arts and Humanities (SGSAH). She has a MSc in Gender History and a MA with First Class Honours in History from the University of Glasgow. Mairi first became a member of Women’s History Scotland in March 2018 and then joined the steering committee in November. In April 2018, Mairi was selected as a recipient of the inaugural Women’s History Scotland Research Bursary, which was used to fund her first conference paper. Her research interests include sexual violence, subjectivity and the self, the body, and gendered identities.
Louise Jackson is a Professor of Modern Social History at the University of Edinburgh. Her research interests centre on the relationship between gender and the law in modern Britain. She is currently involved in the AHRC project ‘Gender Equalities at Work – An Interdisciplinary History of 50 Years of Legislation’. Previous publications include Women Police: Gender, Welfare and Surveillance in the Twentieth Century (MUP, 2006), (with Shani D’Cruze) Women, Crime and Justice in England Since 1660 (Palgrave, 2009), (with Angela Bartie) Policing Youth: Britain 1945-70 (MUP, 2014) and (et al.) Police and Community in Twentieth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh UP, 2020)
Ann Kettle (Treasurer) in an honorary professor in the School of History, University of St Andrews where she taught and researched for forty years. She was one of the first to introduce a course on the history of women in a Scottish university and for 25 years taught an honours module on ‘Women in Mediaeval England’. Her main research interests lie in English social and economic history and she has published several articles on female domestic servants and prostitution in later medieval England. She has edited several volumes for the Staffordshire Record Society and contributed articles to several volumes of the Victoria History of the Counties of England. Various other activities have given her a research interest in the careers of modern female academics and earned her, in 2002, an OBE for services to higher education.
Helen MacDonald is the IT/Systems administrator at Glasgow Women’s Library. Having studied Physics before gaining an MSc in the History of Science, she joined GWL in 2005 (and combines both with a continued interest in the history of women and science). In 2010 she helped to develop the Women of Scotland project with Women’s History Scotland, building the website that now allows anyone in Scotland to record and map memorials to women (womenofscotland.org.uk). Following the public launch of the site in March 2012, she has continued to administer and promote the site through social and traditional media. She is interested in developing online resources and tools that open women’s history to a wider audience.
Rebecca Mason is an early modern historian, with expertise in Scottish gender, legal and social history. She is interested in the daily lives of ordinary Scottish women from the past, and is currently completing a book on women’s navigation of legal systems and property rights in early modern Scotland. She holds a PhD in History from the University of Glasgow (awarded 2020), and has held funded postdoctoral positions at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London (funded by the Economic History Society) and the University of Glasgow (funded by the Economic and Social Research Council). She is currently an Editorial Fellow at History Workshop Online and a Women’s History Network Early Career Fellow. She was elected an Early Career Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2020, and was awarded runner-up in the Royal Historical Society’s David Berry Prize in 2021 for the best published article in Scottish history. She is an Associate Research Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Fellow of the Raphael Samuel History Centre.
Alison McCall gained her history degree as a mature student through the Open University. She completed her PhD, entitled “The Lass o’ Pairts: Social mobility for women through education in Scotland, 1850-1901” at the University of Dundee in 2014. Her interest in Women’s History developed from an early interest in genealogy and local history. Alison is one of the admins of the Mapping Memorials to Women project http://womenofscotland.org.uk/
Victoria McIntyre graduated from the University of Queensland with a BA (Hons) in History in 2015 and with an MA in the Cultural History of Modern Europe from Utrecht University in 2017. Her Masters thesis entitled, “‘A Sad Tale of Domestic Life’: Identifying ‘Separate Spheres’ in Violent Crime By and Against Domestic Servants in Dundee, ca. 1860-1910”, focused on the private and public lives of domestic servants in Dundee, including their attempt to form a trade union in 1872. Victoria is currently adapting her thesis into a stage play and won a Playwrights’ Studio Scotland award in recognition of this in 2019. She currently works in administration at the University of Edinburgh.
Hannah Speed is a first year PhD student at the University of Glasgow. Her thesis is provisionally entitled ‘Women’s life-writing and the suffrage campaign in Scotland c.1870s-1970s’. She previously completed an MSc in Gender History at the University of Glasgow, and a BA (Hons) in History at the University of Oxford. Her main research interests lie in women’s activism in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She combines her studies with working part time as a Policy Advisor at the Department for Education.
Alison Duncan recently completed a doctorate in Economic and Social History at the University of Edinburgh and is currently tutoring at the University of St Andrews. She is also writing a monograph on ‘old maids’ which will demonstrate that the latter were not the crazy cat ladies of eighteenth-century caricature, but resourceful and determined social self-promoters
Deborah Simonton is Associate Professor of British History, emerita, University of Southern Denmark, Visiting Professor, University of Turku, and a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Formerly she was Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Utah State University (2016). She has published widely on women’s work, gender and towns and girlhood, and recently published Gender in The European Town (2023) and Co-edited the Routledge History of Loneliness (2023) with Katie Barclay and Elaine Chalus. She also co-edits the Routledge Studies in Eighteenth-century Cultures and Societies with Elaine Chalus. Other publications include A History of European Women’s Work (1998), Women in European Culture and Society and a companion sourcebook (2006, 2007). She is General Editor of The Routledge History Handbook on Gender and the Urban Experience (2017). With Anne Montenach, she won Association of American Publishers Prose Excellence Award for The Cultural History of Work (6 vols, Bloomsbury, 2018). She is also contributing to the Cultural History of Luxury and the Cambridge History of Urban Europe. Deborah is also Chair of the Essay Prize Committee.