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.

Hirsch gives us the story of the female experience as ‘a compendium of women and their things’ (A History of Women in 101 Objects by Annabelle Hirsch)