Jane Robinson (historian)
British historian & essayist b. 1959
Jane Robinson (born 1959) is a British social historian specialising in women's history. She has published on female pioneers in a range of fields including education, travel, and the professions, and on other women's social history topics including suffrage, illegitimacy, and the Women's Institute.
Life
She was born in Edinburgh, educated at Easingwold School and Somerville College, Oxford, worked in the antiquarian book trade for 10 years and now lives near Oxford writing and lecturing.
Research and writings
In 1994, she published an anthology of women travellers' writings, Unsuitable for Ladies. Her 2002 work Pandora's Daughters (Women Out of Bounds in the United States) discussed "Enterprising women" including early French writer Christine de Pizan, criminal Moll Cutpurse, and Christian Cavanagh who joined the army in male disguise. In 2005 she wrote Mary Seacole, a biography of the nurse who was in 2004 voted "the top black Briton of all time", and her 2009 book Bluestockings describes women's entry into English universities from the 1860s to 1939, and was the BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.
In 2011 Robinson published A Force to be Reckoned With, a history of the Women's Institute; she says in the introduction that "the WI members I've come across - past as well as present - have had more humour, courage, spirit, eccentricity and common sense than any other individuals I've ever written about. And that's saying something."
In 2015 she published In the Family Way: Illegitimacy Between the Great War and the Swinging Sixties, a book on attitudes to illegitimacy, described in The Telegraph as "bone-chilling".
Her 2018 book Hearts And Minds: The Untold Story of the Great Pilgrimage and How Women Won the Vote tells the story of the Suffragists, who campaigned for women's suffrage in Britain separately from the Suffragettes and marched on London in 1913.
Her 2020 book Ladies Can’t Climb Ladders - The Pioneering Adventures of the First Professional Women explores the lives of pioneering women forging careers in the fields of medicine, law, academia, architecture, engineering and the church in the period following the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Jane Robinson (historian)” is british historian & essayist b. 1959. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Jane, Robinson and historian, not as a finished interpretation.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 1, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6152675. VIAF identifies the subject as 100281508. The Library of Congress control number is n96107710. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959, 1994, 2002 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jane Robinson (historian)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.