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Bluestocking Oxford

Oxford-based online journal celebrating and investigating the intellectual and artistic achievements of women throughout history.

We are an Oxford-based online journal celebrating and investigating the intellectual and artistic achievements of women throughout history. Get in touch and write for us by contacting [email protected], we'd love to hear from you!

19/11/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Hedwig Klein: Between Language and Erasure under the Third Reich' by Shelly Foreshaw Brookes on our website now!

One of the most widely used Arabic dictionaries today has a dark history. Jewish scholar Hedwig Klein (1911-1942) was singled out by the N***s for her virtuosity as an Arabic philologist. As she watched those around her deported to concentration camps, the autocratic regime put Klein to work on a dictionary that would spread Hitler's ideology to the far reaches of the East. Her scholarship was appropriated and unacknowledged, and the purposes which it served violated all her moral and religious values. Shelly Foreshaw Brookes brings Klein's work to light and stresses the importance of fighting against intellectual appropriation and persecution. She writes:

'Forced to relocate to a Jewish-designated house, she witnessed the deportation of her family and neighbors. Under N**i orders, she continued her work on the Arabic-German dictionary– labouring in the very field she loved to serve a government intent on her eradication. The cruelty of this irony is hard to fathom: her passion for Arabic scholarship was being used to further genocide.'

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15/11/2025

We invite you to join us at Christ Church for Bluestocking Film Salon: Somewhere Else Entirely, a rare insight into the life and work of one of Britain’s renowned poets – Ruth Fainlight – in a film created by acclaimed photographer and close friend, Emily Andersen. It offers a vivid portrait of Fainlight, now aged 94, delicately drawing out different fragments of the poet’s life and exploring themes of memory, time, loss and friendship.

The film screening in the Michael Dummett Lecture Theatre will be followed by an exclusive Q&A with Emily Andersen and Ruth Fainlight, hosted by Bluestocking Editor-in-Chief Olivia Hurton. We will be discussing the dialogue between poetry and film, creative processes, and Fainlight's literary friendships with Sylvia Plath, Robert Graves and others.

After the talk, we invite you to join the speakers and the Bluestocking team at the drinks reception. The dress code is poets and muses, so come in your artistic fineries and prepare for an enchanting evening!

07/11/2025

DEADLINE EXTENDED! THERE IS STILL TIME TO BE A PART OF THIS YEAR'S BLUESTOCKING TEAM AS SCIENCE EDITOR 💙

Love science, writing and women's history? We’d love to hear from you. Please send over your CVs and a short covering letter to [email protected].

05/11/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Vivienne Westwood: Punk Anarchist or Monarchist?' by Jessica Phillips on our website now!

It's Bonfire Night, the time of year when the history of anarchism is thick in the air. But what about the original sartorial rebel, Dame Vivienne Westwood (1941-2022)? The woman who opened a shop called S*X, who went knicker-free to Buckingham Palace, and who was a master of repurposing rubbish to make haute couture. Surely she was punk incarnate. In her article for Bluestocking, Jessica Phillips puts Westwood's punk credentials to the test. She writes:

'Perhaps it is audacious for me to challenge the relationship between the Mother of Punk, Vivienne Westwood (1941-2022), and the clothes that she created. But, I do not think that the term ‘punk’ fits Westwood’s fashion brand as we know it today. The fact that the punk aesthetic has defined her legacy demonstrates the success of her fashion at shocking its audience and stoking up controversy, but ultimately it has overshadowed the more conservative politics of its designer.'

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23/10/2025

BLUESTOCKING IS LOOKING FOR NEW TEAM MEMBERS!

Want to join one of Oxford University's most exciting publications? Our mission is to champion the intellectual history of women through publishing brilliant new writing and hosting salons. We need a team of heroines to make it happen. Send us your CV and a covering letter outlining your experience and enthusiasm for women's history. If you have questions about any of the roles or want some more information, email [email protected]. Undergraduate, master's and doctoral students are all encouraged to apply. Applications due by 2nd November 2025.

22/10/2025

Check out our latest article: 'A singularissima donna in Renaissance Italy: The cultural patronage of Alfonsina Orsini de’ Medici' by Céline Rémont-Ospina on our website now!

If you were a Neapolitan noblewoman in Renaissance Italy, how would you wield political influence? With lavish art, of course. Learning from no other than Ferrante, King of Naples, Alfonsina Orsini de ' Medici (1472-1520) used her independent wealth to commission spectacular palazzos and jewel-like paintings. Her intention: to flaunt her dynastic power - she hailed from the famed Orsini line and married into the House of Medici - and cement her close relationship with Pope Leo X. Céline Rémont-Ospina transports Bluestocking readers into the world of Alfonsina's patronage, rebuking contemporary detractors, who thought her a spendthrift, and highlighting some of her greatest achievements. Rémont-Ospina writes:

'Alfonsina's negative reputation has continued throughout the ages, with twentieth-century scholarship – probably following contemporary historians – portraying her as greedy and despicable. Alfonsina was certainly capable of manipulating her surroundings, and without her status or wealth she may never have achieved anything; but the same could be said of her male relatives who, in contrast, have remained prominent figures in cultural memory.'

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08/10/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Sylvia Plath's Fig Tree: Navigating Feminist Choice' by Cosima Yeo on our website now!

Sylvia Plath's only novel The Bell Jar (1963) contains imagery as arresting as anything found in her poetry. At its centre is an exploration of female identity in crisis, one epitomised by a fast-fading fig tree. But why has this striking, poetic image been so often uninterrogated by scholars? And what are its implications for third-wave principles of choice feminism? Cosima Yeo attempts to untangle the branches of Plath's thought, following a path of clues left in poems, journals, and her novel. Yeo writes:

'Critical to the simile of the fig tree is a notion of binarism: to choose is to forsake. Each fig represents a distinct identity, and when chosen excludes all others. This double-bind seems central to The Bell Jar, as Esther manifests both a sense of abhorrence at the thought of housewifery, and a compulsive need to adhere to societal expectations.'

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24/09/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Cinema of True Love: Celine Song's Materialists' by Maisie Corkhill on our website now!

Based on Celine Song's stint as a matchmaker in New York, Materialists perplexed critics when it hit the big screen. Was it a romantic comedy, as the marketing campaign insisted, or a cynical critique of the way capitalism has been hardening hearts? In her article, Maisie Cork looks at transactional relationships and their history in cinema and discovers where the value of Song's Materialists lies. She writes:

'To me, Song’s vision for Materialists is crystal clear [...] It confronts how we cannot help but assign value to people, so that Lucy’s client has to remind her (and us), “I’m not merchandise. I’m a person”. [...] Mainstream body modifications, like preventative botox, and more outlandish procedures like the cosmetic height surgery mentioned in the film (available since before 2020) are marketed as a shrewd investment in your future – if you can afford it. Our era yearns for a storyteller like Song to question whether there may still be something authentic that survives at this stage of human relationships under capitalism.'

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10/09/2025

Check out our latest article: 'The Politics of Charm: Nancy Mitford, Satire, and the Elegant Face of Fascism' by Ava Doherty on our website now!

Nancy Mitford's novels glitter with satire; indeed, to read one is like having the pleasure of sitting next to a great raconteur at a country house dinner party. But for all her willed breeziness and irresistible wit, Mitford's writing style often sits uncomfortably with the gravity of the issues explored. Society-shaking political movements, like fascism and communism, are never treated with moral seriousness. The heroine of The Pursuit of Love (1945), Linda Radlett, is presented as constitutionally incapable of experiencing 'wider love for the poor, the sad and the unattractive'. In her article, Ava Doherty tries to make sense of Mitford's lack of ideological seriousness. She writes:

'What happens when satire flatters its subjects and readers just enough to escape moral ambiguity? Mitford's work, at its core, performs a delicate balancing act between critique and seduction. Her prose simultaneously mocks aristocratic excess while rendering it irresistible through stylistic brilliance. '

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27/08/2025

Check out our latest article: ''Paper is Deynty': How the Paston Women Wrote History' by Yasmin Beed on our website now!

The fifteenth-century Paston Letters are a treasure trove for historians inquisitive about the workings of women's lives in the late Middle Ages. Written by the women of the Paston family themselves at a time when the use of scribes was pervasive and many were illiterate, they are a rather remarkable occurrence of early women speaking to us in their own voices. Thatcher Ulrich, the feminist historian, once said that the 'real drama is in the humdrum': the duties of domestic management, the preparations for an imminent birth, and even the suggestive details of a shopping list. Yasmin Beed browses the manuscripts, illuminating a world of history shored up in parchment and ink. She writes:

'The women of the Paston letters were making history in the living of their lives and in the writing and collecting of their letters, but this history can only be realised if an interest is taken in their lives and in what we can learn from and about them.'

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15/08/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Jenny Saville and The Anatomy of Painting' by Ruby Tipple on our website now!

Jenny Saville (1970-now) is a painter of voluptuous proportions. With photographic precision, she limns the folds, creases and protrusions of the body, challenging the brushstrokes of Old Masters who made of real and imperfect flesh flawless ideals. Instead her bodies are an affront; rendered in oil paint, they ooze from the canvas in spectacular textured layers, producing a feeling of uneasiness, pain and abjection that is underwritten by sympathetic tenderness. Ruby Tipple takes a trip to the National Portrait Gallery's retrospective of the artist, finding a brilliant but imperfect show. She writes:

'When seen alongside her other works from the 1990s and 2000s in the National Portrait Gallery, her visceral and sometimes gory work comes together here to form a strangely beautiful impression. So much of her work focuses on surgical modification, bloodied scars, and imperfection, yet her technique and brushstrokes are unflinchingly vivid for the viewer, shedding light on the unpalatable bits that are often unseen. Walking through these first rooms (the exhibition is in chronological order), there is a chilling sense of fragility created by her images – life at its most precarious, in full display.'

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01/08/2025

Check out our latest article: 'Daphne du Maurier and Fashion' by Belle R () on our website now!

Novelist Daphne du Maurier (1907-1989) is best known for haunting novels that brim with gothic intrigue and high romance. Yet fashion played an important, and hitherto undervalued, role in du Maurier's personal life and her fiction, vitally enriching the worlds she inhabited. Taking a closer look at this sartorial influence, Belle R uncovers its bearing on the creation of identity. She writes:

'Du Maurier grew up in a theatrical family. Her father was actor-manager Gerald du Maurier, who was deeply involved in the world of theatre – a space in which clothing and appearance are integral to defining characters’ identities. There is an argument, therefore, that this environment may have significantly influenced du Maurier’s understanding of clothes as more than just fabric—they became costumes, signifiers of identity, and tools for navigating both the personal and public spheres.'

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