Rediscovery; and er, same old, same old
This, I think, does count as actual rediscovery of a neglected, if not entirely forgotten, author of the 60s/70s: Lost Beneath the Waves of Time: Jane Gaskell in/and the ’60s (and reading that I realise that she was a lacuna in those studies of Angry Young/Rebel Women Writers of the same period, but probably she was just too Out There and In Genre to be on the radar of people who were looking at those other writers?)
I wrote a bit about Gaskell here when I finally, after many years of yearning, obtained a copy of The Shiny Narrow Grin, in which I did position her as being very much Of That Particular Period (and suspect that means that elements in her works will not have worn well from the perspective of the present-day reader?)
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On the other paw, I noticed via GoodReads that somebody has perpetrated a volume Women in White Coats: How the First Women Doctors Changed the World of Medicine, which came out last year, and is apparently about:
[T]he remarkable story of three Victorian women who broke down barriers in the medical field to become the first women doctors, revolutionizing the way women receive health care.... Motivated by personal loss and frustration over inadequate medical care, Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake fought for a woman's place in the male-dominated medical field. For the first time ever, Women in White Coats tells the complete history of these three pioneering women who, despite countless obstacles, earned medical degrees and paved the way for other women to do the same.
That would be, the three women whose role in the entry of women into the medprof in Victorian Britain has been extensively written up and about whom there was a TV mini series. Why do we never hear about the other women who were involved in that struggle in anything like the same rehearsed detail? If author has been doing so much delving into archives (rather than previous books on these women), has she not come across (e.g.) autobiography of Florence Fenwick Miller?
Also, white coats were not standard medical wear until really late in the C19th, so, ANACHRONISM ALERT!!!
It's a bit sad to see the reviewers saying they'd never heard this story (you know, I think this is yet another area where my consciousness was initially raised by the strip cartoon version in a girls' comic in the 1950s...): but I still think, by now, people could be telling The Bigger More Inclusive Picture and not just doing Singular Heroines.
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