Helen McCarthy

The Endell Street wards were named after female saints and had colourful bed quilts and easy chairs, striking a very different note from the ‘chilly whitewashed walls and gloomy brown blankets’ of standard army hospitals. The WSPU motto, ‘Deeds Not Words’, was embroidered on the curtains in the recreation room, where entertainments were put on throughout the war.

My first child​ was born in a hospital room in East London on a February morning after 12 hours of labour. Our doula, who had arrived the previous evening, bringing cushions in a supermarket carrier bag, fetched me a hot chocolate and a blueberry muffin. It was the best breakfast of my life.

This is a maternal anecdote. It is fairly boring, and definitely trivial. Yet place such moments...

At some point​ in the mid-1960s, large numbers of ambitious young men in Britain and North America lost their enthusiasm for elite, male-only colleges. The prospect of spending three or four years in an exclusively masculine environment had diminishing appeal. The absence of women felt ‘unnatural’, ‘unhealthy’, and increasingly at odds with the social and...

About 15 years ago​, when I was renting my first flat in London, a man from the Office for National Statistics paid me a call. A letter had arrived a week earlier informing me that my postcode had been randomly selected for the annual General Household Survey and that I could expect a visit. My interrogator was in his mid-fifties, tall, well-spoken, and wearing a long dark overcoat which...