Showing results for "A Mother" in Modern

What was mothering like in the past? When acclaimed historian Sarah Knott became pregnant, she asked herself this question. But accounts of motherhood are hard to find. For centuries, historians have concerned themselves with wars, politics and revolutions, not the everyday details of carrying and caring for a baby. These details matter: they shape our feelings and give structure to our hours. But they leave little historical trace. Much to do with becoming a mother, past or present, is lost or forgotten.

In the quiet Cotswolds village of Great Rollright in 1944, a thin and unusually elegant housewife emerged from her cottage to go on her usual bike ride. A devoted mother of three, attentive wife and friendly neighbour, Sonya Burton seemed to epitomise rural British domesticity. However, rather than pedalling towards the shops with her ration book, Sonya was heading for the Oxfordshire countryside to gather scientific secrets from a nuclear physicist. Secrets that would enable the Soviet Union to build the atomic bomb.

Best-selling author and historian Lucy Worsley tracks a new course through Queen Victoria's life, examining how she transformed from dancing princess to the Widow of Windsor and became one of Britain's greatest monarchs along the way. Taking 24 significant days from Victoria's life, from her birth, her wedding and her coronation to her husband's death, and many more in between, allows us to see Victoria up close and personal, examining how she lived hour to hour.

Dulcie Bodsworth was the unlikeliest serial killer. She was loved everywhere she went, and the townsfolk of Wilcannia, which she called home in the late 1950s, thought of her as kind and caring. The officers at the local police station found Dulcie witty and charming, and looked forward to the scones and cakes she generously baked and delivered for their morning tea. That was one side of her. Only her daughter Hazel saw the real Dulcie. And what she saw terrified her.

In 1943, as the Nazi power swept across central Europe, Rosa, her husband Emanuel and their daughter, Judy, were forced into hiding. But after a year and a half of living a terrifying, day-by-day existence, they were betrayed. As they arrived in Auschwitz, Rosa was torn from her husband and her only daughter. Could she dare to hope she would see either of them again?

In the Shadow of the Empress is the sweeping family saga of beautiful Maria Theresa, the only woman to inherit and rule the vast Habsburg empire in her own name, and three of her remarkable daughters: lovely, talented Maria Christina, governor general of the Austrian Netherlands; spirited Maria Carolina, the resolute queen of Naples; and the youngest, Marie Antoinette, the glamorous, tragic queen of France, perhaps the most famous princess in history.

Malka was three when the German invaders forced her family into the Jewish ghetto in Volodymyr-Volynskyi, a city in present-day Ukraine. Her father was killed in the first pogrom, but before he died he said to her mother Rivka: ‘save the children’. And despite her heartbreak, that is what she set out to do. Rivka kept Malka and her two older brothers alive through eighteen traumatic months, as the ghetto got smaller and smaller. They saw the worst of humanity but there were acts of kindness too.

As a reporter, Jacques Peretti has spent his life investigating important stories. But there was one story, heard in scattered fragments throughout his childhood, that he never thought to investigate. The story of how his mother survived Auschwitz. In the few last months of the Second World War, 13-year-old Alina Peretti, along with her mother and sister, was one of 13,000 non-Jewish Poles sent to Auschwitz. Her experiences there cast a shadow over the rest of her life. Now 90, Alina has been diagnosed with dementia.

Born in the midst of the Wars of the Roses, Margaret Beaufort became the greatest heiress of her time. She survived a turbulent life, marrying four times and enduring imprisonment before passing her claim to the crown of England to her son, Henry VII, the first of the Tudor monarchs.

A story of love, war, and life as a Jewish immigrant in the squalid factories and lively dance halls of New York’s Garment District in the 1930s, My Mother’s Wars is the memoir Lillian Faderman's mother was never able to write. The daughter delves into her mother's past to tell the story of a Latvian girl who left her village for America with dreams of a life on the stage and encountered the realities of her new world: the battles she was forced to fight as a woman, an immigrant worker, and a Jew with family left behind in Hitler’s deadly path.

On 3rd June 1947, as British India descended into chaos, its division into two states was announced. For months the violence and civil unrest escalated. With millions of others, Marina Wheeler's mother, Dip Singh, and her Sikh family were forced to flee their home in the Punjab, never to return. Through her mother's memories, accounts from her Indian family and her own research in both India and Pakistan, she explores how the peoples of these new nations struggled to recover and rebuild their lives.

On 19th June 1953, Ethel Rosenberg became the first woman in the US to be executed for a crime other than murder. She was 37 years old and the mother of two small children. Yet even today, at a time when the Cold War seems all too resonant, Ethel's conviction for conspiracy to commit espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union makes her story still controversial.

Seven years after the death of his mother, Malka, Stanley A. Goldman traveled to Israel to visit her best friend during the Holocaust. The best friend's daughter showed Goldman a pamphlet she had acquired from the Israeli Holocaust Museum that documented activities of one man's negotiations with the Nazi's interior minister and SS head, Heinrich Himmler, for the release of the Jewish women from the concentration camp at Ravensbrück. While looking through the pamphlet, the two discovered a picture that could have been their mothers being released from the camp.

Holocaust survivor Henry Melnick was born in Lodz, Poland. Shortly after the Nazis occupied Poland in 1939, he was sent to perform slave labor in the Nowy Sącz, Tarnów, and Szebnie ghettos and work camps. He was then transferred to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Buna, Dora-Mittelbau and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps.

SpeechWorks presents this collection of the greatest speeches of great women. Represented here are some of the most famous women of recent history, including athletes, politicians, businesswomen, diplomats, heads of state, activists, philanthropists, and more. You will hear the actual voices of these women, recorded at public functions at which they were the featured speakers.

Weaving together the voices of three generations of women - Rita, her daughter, Leslie, and her granddaughter, Mikaela - the memoir provides powerful and inspiring evidence of the resilience of the human spirit, relevant to every culture in every corner of the world. Unimaginably devastating and incredibly uplifting, this firsthand account of survival and healing offers a poignant message of hope in our own uncertain times.