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This will change the way you think about women’s contributions to history
Annabelle Hirsch’s new book A History of Women in 101 Objects is a playful, intelligent and incisive look at the marks and impressions women have made throughout time, writes academic and writer Julia Bell
One of the most moving historical objects I have encountered was in the Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney. It was a small wooden box, which would have contained the possessions of an Irish orphan girl, perhaps as young as 14, who had been sent out to the colonies to escape the horrendous conditions of the Great Famine that would go on to claim over a million Irish lives and displace over a million others.
Transportation was also a colonial convenience; the arrival of young, hardy, fertile girls would not only provide domestic workers, but wives for the ex-convicts, who were expanding the reach of the colonial project into the hinterlands of New South Wales, farming the once-indigenous lands. At the time, the ratio of men to women was eight to one.
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