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The Women Who Built Bristol
Containing 250 inspiring women, three sheroic dogs and one heartbroken barmaid from Easton, this is a bursting compendium of brilliant women from pin makers to police chiefs, from workhouse inmates to secret agents who helped to shape Bristol into the vibrant city it is today. The book contains 30 commissioned illustrations and spans almost 900 years from Princess Eleanor of Brittany (1184-1241) who was imprisoned in Bristol Castle for 39 years by her uncle King John who stole the throne from her. The most recent entry is author Helen Dunmore who died in 2017. Author and editor Jane Duffus has compiled the book on behalf of Bristol Women's Voice and many of the entries are provided by guest writers, women historians and academics. It's the most comprehensive book about Bristol women to date and seeks to celebrate the less well-known women of our past as well as the key big names.
- GenresNonfiction
472 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2018
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91 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
July 12, 2020
I like the idea of this book. The idea is a collection of stories of women, sung and unsung, remarkable and ordinary, who are connect to the city of Bristol. It's ambitious in scope, and contains short biographies of a great many brilliant women.
The execution of the book, however, is regretfully lacking. Many of the entries read like lifeless CVs, and are crying out for more personal insight. The alphabetical organisation detracts from any flow, endlessly referring back and forth to other entries flung far and wise in the text. Some sort of grouping of suffrage campaigners, artists, theatre people and so on would have greatly increased the book's utility. Referencing is slapdash. There's no index.
One major failing, however, is my own. I simply don't know enough about the suffrage movement, and I hope to address that by further reading inspired by this tome.
The execution of the book, however, is regretfully lacking. Many of the entries read like lifeless CVs, and are crying out for more personal insight. The alphabetical organisation detracts from any flow, endlessly referring back and forth to other entries flung far and wise in the text. Some sort of grouping of suffrage campaigners, artists, theatre people and so on would have greatly increased the book's utility. Referencing is slapdash. There's no index.
One major failing, however, is my own. I simply don't know enough about the suffrage movement, and I hope to address that by further reading inspired by this tome.
March 24, 2022
I've been excited to read this for ages but I was left a bit disappointed. The breadth of stories is okay, but there's a lot of focus on white, middle class suffrage, and those stories have a lot of detail compared to the other types of women represented. I understand that this bias is hard to break because those are the women who have a lot of primary documentation, but it still made the whole tapestry of Bristol's womens' history feel a bit one-dimensional. My favourite section was the "women at work" chapter at the end of the book which shed a great light on working class women's lives.
Overall I'd say it's probably worth a read, but you won't get a complete picture of Bristol. I'll read the 2nd book to compare.
Overall I'd say it's probably worth a read, but you won't get a complete picture of Bristol. I'll read the 2nd book to compare.
November 8, 2025
as a women currently living in bristol I had to read about the women who built bristol
March 8, 2020
The format of this book is a bit disappointing, the women are listed in alphabetical order rather than being structured in chapters of types of achiement or era. It is great as a reference book but not very readable
October 7, 2024
Very informative book with women from a wide range of backgrounds, including ethnic, and time periods. There are short summaries of each of the 250 ‘sheroes’ by different authors/ researchers but some of the links to Bristol are tenuous at best. It would be useful to have a categorical index or two to help manoeuvre through the book which is easier to dip into rather than be read cover to cover. It’s good to learn about Bristol’s history, including its links to slavery and impact of the brave suffragettes, as well as learning about the influence of each of the remarkable women.
September 7, 2020
Easy and enjoyable to read. I learned a lot about the history of Bristol, the bits you don't normally hear about
March 6, 2018
The Women Who Built Bristol is an exciting compendium of women who have pushed boundaries, and pioneered social and scientific breakthroughs.
The rules of the book are that every woman included must have been born, lived or died in Bristol. This is a neat way of ensuring that you get a good overview of people who have affected the city’s makeup – after all, there are plenty of women included who were born abroad (such as Andrée Peel, the French Resistance fighter who moved to Bristol after the war), who nonetheless have helped to define Bristol’s character.
Other pioneers from the panoply include: Janet Vaughan, a haemotologist who revolutionised our understanding of anaemia and how to treat it; Fleur Lombard, a firefighter who died heroically fighting a supermarket fire – the first female firefighter to die on duty in the UK; Annie Kenney, a working-class suffragette who became one of the Pankhursts’ right-hand women and took over the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) after years of Bristol-based activism.
Inherently, when you read across a mass of different lives like this, a few themes stick out. One is the difference that wealth makes to helping women push against oppressive boundaries – it becomes fairly striking across the course of the book, and highlights the need for those people who are born into greater privilege to fight as allies for the rights of those who are not.
Another is the fact that so many of these women came from Quaker backgrounds. Quakerism holds the tenet that women and men are spiritually equal, although in practise this tends to get lost under male structures. It seems all it takes is a small crack in the wall of patriarchy for women to use their skills, tenacity and self-belief to push for a more equal world.
While there are working-class stories in the book, the greater presence of middle and upper classes made it a relief to see a set of entries at the back specifically devoted to the lives of working women in a number of Bristol’s factories. This helps to give the book balance, and also reminds us: women have always worked.
The book is put together, largely written and edited by Jane Duffus (who has also contributed articles to the Heroine Collective), but there are a number of different other contributors joining the fray to write about women in their specialist areas. This is a great decision, because it lends the book a number of perspectives and voices, which keeps it vivid. My personal favourites were the contributions from Dr. Suzi Gage, with detailed entries on female doctors breaking their way into the profession, and Amy Mason, a comedian who writes about producers and hoaxers with mischievous joy. Their passion for their subjects really sparkles.
It does feel like suffrage and unionism in the 1800s and 1900s make up the bulk of the book. Of course, many such individual pioneering women are still under-documented, and their inclusion is fascinating, important and vital. I suspect that the very fact that women tend to be written out of history makes it difficult to add balance from earlier times, especially given the book’s geographical parameters, but given that the title references 1184-2018, it would have been nice to get even more insight into the breakthroughs made by women from the 12th century to the 18th.
An interesting aspect you encounter early on is that the women are presented warts and all. This occasionally creates some uncomfortable reading, but at the same time, we need to be able to laud positive contributions to the world as well as denounce negative ones. That said, there were a couple of entries that I felt didn’t quite get this balance right – where, for me personally, the negatives outweighed the positives.
For the purposes of this review, I read the book cover-to-cover, but I don’t think that is necessarily the best way to do it. Really this should serve as a resource to drop into, pick out someone in a field you want to be inspired by or to learn about. An index of professions by page number is missing, but it’s still possible to consume the stories in this way.
Overall, this is a thought-provoking, inspiring and fierce book, giving much-deserved prominence to a lot of courageous women, many of whom would otherwise have lacked it. It’s a considerable undertaking to pull together such a book too, which makes it all the more commendable. This is definitely a book to buy and to keep going back to over the years.
Please do buy this book direct from Bristol Women’s Voice, as all the proceeds go to help fund their important work.
The rules of the book are that every woman included must have been born, lived or died in Bristol. This is a neat way of ensuring that you get a good overview of people who have affected the city’s makeup – after all, there are plenty of women included who were born abroad (such as Andrée Peel, the French Resistance fighter who moved to Bristol after the war), who nonetheless have helped to define Bristol’s character.
Other pioneers from the panoply include: Janet Vaughan, a haemotologist who revolutionised our understanding of anaemia and how to treat it; Fleur Lombard, a firefighter who died heroically fighting a supermarket fire – the first female firefighter to die on duty in the UK; Annie Kenney, a working-class suffragette who became one of the Pankhursts’ right-hand women and took over the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) after years of Bristol-based activism.
Inherently, when you read across a mass of different lives like this, a few themes stick out. One is the difference that wealth makes to helping women push against oppressive boundaries – it becomes fairly striking across the course of the book, and highlights the need for those people who are born into greater privilege to fight as allies for the rights of those who are not.
Another is the fact that so many of these women came from Quaker backgrounds. Quakerism holds the tenet that women and men are spiritually equal, although in practise this tends to get lost under male structures. It seems all it takes is a small crack in the wall of patriarchy for women to use their skills, tenacity and self-belief to push for a more equal world.
While there are working-class stories in the book, the greater presence of middle and upper classes made it a relief to see a set of entries at the back specifically devoted to the lives of working women in a number of Bristol’s factories. This helps to give the book balance, and also reminds us: women have always worked.
The book is put together, largely written and edited by Jane Duffus (who has also contributed articles to the Heroine Collective), but there are a number of different other contributors joining the fray to write about women in their specialist areas. This is a great decision, because it lends the book a number of perspectives and voices, which keeps it vivid. My personal favourites were the contributions from Dr. Suzi Gage, with detailed entries on female doctors breaking their way into the profession, and Amy Mason, a comedian who writes about producers and hoaxers with mischievous joy. Their passion for their subjects really sparkles.
It does feel like suffrage and unionism in the 1800s and 1900s make up the bulk of the book. Of course, many such individual pioneering women are still under-documented, and their inclusion is fascinating, important and vital. I suspect that the very fact that women tend to be written out of history makes it difficult to add balance from earlier times, especially given the book’s geographical parameters, but given that the title references 1184-2018, it would have been nice to get even more insight into the breakthroughs made by women from the 12th century to the 18th.
An interesting aspect you encounter early on is that the women are presented warts and all. This occasionally creates some uncomfortable reading, but at the same time, we need to be able to laud positive contributions to the world as well as denounce negative ones. That said, there were a couple of entries that I felt didn’t quite get this balance right – where, for me personally, the negatives outweighed the positives.
For the purposes of this review, I read the book cover-to-cover, but I don’t think that is necessarily the best way to do it. Really this should serve as a resource to drop into, pick out someone in a field you want to be inspired by or to learn about. An index of professions by page number is missing, but it’s still possible to consume the stories in this way.
Overall, this is a thought-provoking, inspiring and fierce book, giving much-deserved prominence to a lot of courageous women, many of whom would otherwise have lacked it. It’s a considerable undertaking to pull together such a book too, which makes it all the more commendable. This is definitely a book to buy and to keep going back to over the years.
Please do buy this book direct from Bristol Women’s Voice, as all the proceeds go to help fund their important work.
August 7, 2018
An excellent reference book. I would suggest reading it from cover to cover, as it gives useful insights into the history of Bristol. I work at M-shed in Bristol which the museum that looks at the city's industrial and social history. I occassionaly do tours there, and this book is a treasure trove of information.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews