Sybil Oldfield at Seventy‐Two: humanistic feminism—or thinking back through our grandmothers

Beginning with her autobiography, Oldfield traces the impact of her German‐English background on her lifelong anti‐militarism and her own need for ‘life‐savers’ in life, history and literature. Her feminism, deeply influenced by Virginia Woolf, is defined as humanism applied to women as well as men. The thread linking all her biographical writing has been her drive to resurrect the most humane of our forgotten ‘grandmothers’, whether Victorian mould‐breakers or German Resistance heroines. However deeply theoretically unfashionable, Oldfield’s biographical approach to women’s history is rooted in her conviction that the living cannot do without the dead and that it is possible for us to reach them.     

Nineteenth-Century Lawyers and Railway Capitalism: Historians and the Use of Legal Cases

Abstract

The railway was a key factor in nineteenth-century economic development. R.W. Kostal considered the interaction of the industry with lawyers in his book Law and English Railway Capitalism 1825–1875. Yet his conclusion that the law coped badly with the new industry is vitiated by his failure properly to analyse the way the courts applied legal doctrine. In areas such as preincorporation liability for railway companies’ debts, rating and compulsory purchase, the courts applied well-established principles. Even new law in cases like Priestley v Fowler can only be understood in terms of common law principles.     

Compiling the first dictionary of british women humanitarians: – Why? what? who? how?

The history of early 20th century humanitarianism has been a neglected field in the context of a period of wars, dictatorships and apparent regression to barbarism. Nevertheless, humanitarianism, defined as response to the desperate need of strangers, has also been a significant aspect of 20th-century history. The rediscovery of more than a 150 mostly forgotten British women who were heroic in their different fields of humane rescue restores an inspiring birthright and raises the question of ethical choice in the selection of subjects for historical research.