The Good Friday Agreement, reached on 10 April 1998, was a careful balancing act, reflecting the competing demands and aspirations of the different parties to the talks. Yet, despite the widespread euphoria that greeted the deal, this was only a beginning. Implementing the Agreement has been a difficult process, depending on the willingness of the political representatives of Northern Ireland’s two communities to work together. That willingness has frequently been missing…

The Good Friday Agreement: the background

The partition of Ireland in 1921 followed more than a century of unrest between Britain and Ireland. Under the Act of Union of 1800 Ireland lost its parliament in Dublin and became governed directly from Westminster. For much of the 19th and into the 20th century, varying states of tension and conflict developed as unionists campaigned for Ireland to remain part of the UK, while nationalists campaigned for either home rule or an independent Irish state. The issue of Irish home rule dominated domestic British politics from 1885 to the start of the First World War.

In April 1916, the Easter Rising shook Dublin, as a group of Irish nationalists proclaimed the establishment of an Irish Republic and clashed with British troops in the capital. The rising, which resulted in the loss of 450 lives and destroyed much of the centre of Dublin, was ended by the British within a week. However, the public mood shifted decisively when the 15 leaders of the rising were executed by the British authorities in May 1916. The executions and imposition of martial law fuelled public resentment of the British. The next five tumultuous years, including the Irish War of Independence (1919–21), resulted in the end of British rule across most of Ireland.

• Read more | The Easter Rising: when Ireland went to war
• Read more | Bullets and ballot boxes: a history of Anglo-Irish relations since the Easter Rising 

The Government of Ireland Act, which became law in May 1921, split Ireland. Northern Ireland was formed from the six predominantly unionist counties in the north-east of the island. The remaining 26 predominantly nationalist counties formed the ‘south’, becoming the independent Irish Free State in 1922.

The Good Friday Agreement and the Troubles

For 30 years in the late 20th century, Northern Ireland was wracked by a bloody ethno-nationalist conflict known as ‘the Troubles’, which has left over 3,700 people dead and thousands more injured.

At the heart of the Troubles is the division in Northern Irish society. The majority population in Northern Ireland – the unionist community – identify as British and want Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom. The minority community – the nationalists – want Northern Ireland to be reunited with the rest of Ireland, in an independent Irish Republic. As the nationalist community is predominantly Roman Catholic and the unionist predominantly Protestant, the conflict has often been portrayed as a sectarian one. Certainly, sectarian attacks occurred throughout the Troubles. However, the conflict was a consequence of the competing national identities and aspirations of the two communities occupying Northern Ireland.

• Read more | The history of Ireland: 11 milestone moments 

As a result, Northern Ireland’s politics did not develop on class lines, as in the rest of the UK. Instead, Northern Ireland’s politics centred on the constitutional question. Following the partition of Ireland, the unionist community generally voted for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), which remained in permanent control of Northern Ireland’s devolved government from 1921 until its abolition in 1972. Discrimination against the minority, particularly in housing and employment, led to the growth of a civil rights movement in the 1960s, demanding ‘British rights’ for the nationalist population. However, the civil rights movement was met by a loyalist backlash and violence flared. Finally, in August 1969, the British government was forced to step in and deploy troops in Northern Ireland. They were to remain there until 2007.

Out of the violence, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) re-emerged, and the focus of the conflict shifted from civil rights to the constitutional position of Northern Ireland. The IRA dated to back to the Easter Rising and had launched sporadic campaigns since partition directed at trying to achieve Irish unity. Its recent ‘Border Campaign’ (1956–62) had ended in failure and over the course of the 1960s the IRA came to focus more on extreme leftist united front politics rather than militant republicanism. This caused a split in the republican movement in December 1969, from which the Provisional IRA was born. While most nationalists supported the newly formed Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), who sought to achieve Irish unity by political means, there were those in the minority community who supported the IRA’s ‘armed struggle’, attempting to gain Irish unity by force. Unionists fiercely resisted any moves towards a united Ireland. Loyalist paramilitary groups also formed and contributed to the developing violence. The Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) emerged from 1966, and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and its proxy Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) from the early 1970s.

• Read more | The big question: Has terrorism ever achieved its aims?

As the conflict deepened, the death toll rose rapidly. Events like Bloody Sunday, 30 January 1972 – in which British troops killed 13 unarmed civilians and injured several more (one of whom later died from his injuries) while taking part in a protest march – acted as a catalyst to the increasingly bitter conflict.

The prelude to the peace process

Over the course of the Troubles, British governments attempted to develop political initiatives that sought to end the conflict. Edward Heath’s government (1970–74) developed an ambitious programme, resulting in the Sunningdale Agreement of December 1973. This combined a devolved assembly for Northern Ireland, involving power-sharing between unionist and nationalist parties, with the creation of a Council of Ireland to institutionalise links between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. However, this was brought down by a two-week general strike in May 1974, as the unionist population rejected the involvement of the Irish government under the cry that “Dublin is just a Sunningdale away”.

Margaret Thatcher’s government (1979–90) was more modest in ambition, with Mrs Thatcher’s focus on securing cooperation from the Irish government in tackling the IRA. In exchange the Irish government was given the right to put forward its views on Northern Ireland’s affairs. This again infuriated the unionists, who sought to bring the Agreement down.

However, as the 1980s progressed, some significant developments began to reshape the approaches of the participants in the conflict.

• Read more | How should history remember Margaret Thatcher?

Republicans increasingly saw the benefits of combining a political strategy with the armed struggle. Sinn Féin, the IRA’s political counterpart, began contesting elections, and regularly polled between 10 and 15 per cent of the vote. This caused deep concern in both the British and Irish governments and influenced the negotiations leading to the Anglo-Irish Agreement. The ‘bullet and ballot box’ strategy caused tensions within the republican movement that had to be carefully managed by Gerry Adams, who became Sinn Féin president in 1983. Experience of the drift to far left politics in the 1960s and the ingrained abstentionism – the refusal to accept the legitimacy of, or to take seats in, political institutions in the Republic, Northern Ireland, or Westminster –  in the republican movement made many suspicious of political engagement.

The IRA had not been defeated and a flow of weapons was reaching Ireland from Libya. Significant IRA attacks continued, such as the attempt to assassinate Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet in the 1984 Brighton Bombing. However, Sinn Féin could achieve electoral legitimacy by contesting elections, for example through Adams’s election as a Westminster MP in 1983. In addition, in 1988 Adams began a series of talks with John Hume, leader of the constitutional nationalist SDLP. While the Hume-Adams talks had no immediate successes, they were influential in steering the British and Irish governments towards the Downing Street Declaration, which would come in 1993.

There was also some movement from the British government. Influenced by Hume, the Northern Ireland Secretary, Peter Brooke, delivered a speech in November 1990 in which he declared that the British government had “no selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland”. Instead it was for the people of Northern Ireland to decide its constitutional future. Coupled with this change in mood music, Brooke also approved the opening of a secret communication channel between MI5 and the republicans.

Brooke also sought to get Northern Ireland’s constitutional parties talking to each other. He proposed that inter-party talks should cover three strands: the first dealing with relationships within Northern Ireland; the second dealing with relations between the two parts of Ireland; and the third dealing with links between the British and Irish governments. The talks began in April 1991, but quickly became bogged down in procedural disagreements. But the three-strand format was to be at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement.

The Downing Street Declaration and IRA ceasefire

The peace process picked up momentum in 1993. The British prime minister, John Major, worked closely with the Irish Taoiseach [prime minister], Albert Reynolds, on a joint declaration that was hoped would form the basis of a peace initiative. This resulted in the Downing Street Declaration of 15 December 1993. The declaration recognised the two different traditions in Ireland and stated that peace could only come through reconciling the differences between them. The two governments committed themselves to building that process of reconciliation and creating appropriate political structures to facilitate it.

In parallel to the Downing Street Declaration, Reynolds worked to persuade the IRA to declare a ceasefire. Both Reynolds and Hume were convinced that tying Sinn Féin into a cross-nationalist coalition would show them the benefits of using purely political means. This would involve nationalists in Northern Ireland, the Irish government, and Irish America, and would provide the republicans with access to the highest political levels in Washington.

To show Sinn Féin the benefits of constitutional politics, Reynolds lobbied the US president Bill Clinton to grant Gerry Adams a visa to visit the United States. Clinton agreed, and Adams was granted a 48-hour visa to visit America in February 1994, despite most of Clinton’s senior advisors being against the move, and much to the fury of John Major. The visa was important as part of the wider choreography of peace making. But it did not lead to an immediate IRA ceasefire. Indeed, a month later the IRA demonstrated its continued reach by attacking Heathrow Airport. However, the visit was important as part of the process of debate within the republican movement, and finally, on 31 August 1994, the IRA announced its ceasefire. The ceasefire was followed in October 1994 by a ceasefire called by the loyalist paramilitaries.

However, the ceasefires did not lead directly to all-party talks. Instead, the peace process quickly became bogged down over the question of arms decommissioning – the hand-over, or verified disposal, of weapons. The IRA would not consider anything that could be perceived to be surrender and Sinn Féin argued that decommissioning should be negotiated as part of a process of ‘demilitarisation’. But neither unionist politicians nor the British government would countenance talks with Sinn Féin until decommissioning had taken place. Unionists had been disconcerted by republican celebrations following the announcement of the IRA ceasefire; they were not willing to take Sinn Féin at their word.

In an attempt to break the impasse, the British and Irish governments created an international decommissioning body, chaired by former US Senator George Mitchell. This was part of a ‘twin-track’ approach, with decommissioning to accompany political talks rather than precede them. Mitchell delivered his report in January 1996, setting out six principles that should be endorsed by all parties to the talks. This included a commitment to exclusively peaceful means. Mitchell recommended that all parties should sign up to these principles and that some decommissioning could take place during the talks. However, this was not enough to prevent the slide back to violence. On 9 February 1996, the IRA released a statement announcing the end of its ceasefire. An hour later a massive explosion rocked Canary Wharf, killing two people.

What was the Good Friday Agreement?

The election of Tony Blair’s Labour government, on 1 May 1997, was transformational. Blair was as committed to the peace process as Major had been, but had the advantage of being able to approach Northern Ireland without the baggage that Major had accumulated over seven years of talks.

The IRA renewed its ceasefire on 20 July 1997, opening the way for Sinn Féin to be included in the inter-party talks that had begun under Mitchell’s chairmanship. The question of decommissioning remained though, and the British and Irish governments sought to fudge the issue rather than allow it to derail the process again. This led to Ian Paisley’s hard-line Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) walking out of the talks, never to return. The DUP rejected the notion of making any concessions on the constitutional position of Northern Ireland or negotiating with Sinn Féin, whom they considered terrorists. While deeply unhappy, the more moderate UUP remained in the talks. Given the DUP’s declared desire to break the talks, Mitchell wrote later in his memoirs that their decision to walk out actually helped the process of reaching an agreement. However, it was to have a lasting impact on the politics of Northern Ireland, as the DUP’s opposition to the Good Friday Agreement severely hindered its implementation. Sinn Féin entered the all-party talks on 15 September 1997, having signed-up to the Mitchell Principles.

After marathon negotiations, agreement was finally reached on 10 April 1998. The Good Friday Agreement was a complex balancing act, reflecting the three strands approach. Within Northern Ireland, it created a new devolved assembly for Northern Ireland, with a requirement that executive power had to be shared by parties representing the two communities. In addition, a new North-South Ministerial Council was to be established, institutionalising the link between the two parts of Ireland. The Irish government also committed to amending Articles 2 and 3 of the Republic’s Constitution, which laid claim to Northern Ireland, to instead reflect an aspiration to Irish unity, through purely democratic means, while recognising the diversity of identities and traditions in Ireland. Finally, a Council of the Isles was to be created, recognising the ‘totality of relationships’ within the British Isles, including representatives of the two governments, and the devolved institutions in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.

Referendums were held in both Northern Ireland and Republic of Ireland on 22 May 1998. In Northern Ireland 71 per cent of voters backed the Agreement, with 29 per cent voting against. While this was a significant endorsement, an exit poll for the Sunday Times found that 96 per cent of nationalists in Northern Ireland backed the Agreement, compared to just 55 per cent of unionists.

What is the legacy of the Good Friday Agreement?

The Good Friday Agreement was hard won. But it has faced considerable challenges over the 20 years since its signing.

On 15 August 1998, 29 people were killed when dissident republicans exploded a car bomb in Omagh. This represented the largest loss of life in any incident in Northern Ireland since the start of the Troubles. While the Omagh bombing was committed by republicans opposed to the Agreement, it returned the spotlight to the question of decommissioning paramilitary weapons, which the Good Friday Agreement had stated should happen within two years. Unionist anger at the refusal of the IRA to give up its weapons was combined with frustration at the refusal of Sinn Féin to accept the reformed Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).

Under these circumstances, power-sharing proved impossible to sustain. Meanwhile, voters in each community started to turn away from the moderate parties, and instead support for Sinn Féin and the DUP increased, displacing the SDLP and UUP in the process. For a significant part of the decade following the Good Friday Agreement, devolution was suspended because of the inability of the largest parties from each community to reach agreement on power-sharing. Progress was made on decommissioning, which was confirmed to have been carried out in September 2005, but political agreement remained elusive. Eventually, the British and Irish governments hosted crunch talks at St Andrews in October 2006. There, Sinn Féin finally agreed to accept the PSNI, while the DUP agreed to share power with Sinn Féin. In May 2007, an Executive comprised of the DUP, Sinn Féin, UUP and SDLP was finally able to take office. This time, the institutions created under the Good Friday Agreement were to remain in being until the current political crisis led to the collapse of the Executive in January 2017.

Despite the fragility of the institutions created and the continuing bitterness between politicians representing the two communities, the Good Friday Agreement remains an important landmark in Northern Ireland’s history. The Good Friday Agreement was able to bring to an end 30 years of violence, and allows Northern Ireland’s two communities to pursue their contrasting aspirations by purely political means.

Dr Alan MacLeod is a historian of modern Britain and Ireland and Lecturer in Modern British History at the University of Leeds. He is the author of International Politics and the Northern Ireland Conflict: The USA, Diplomacy and the Troubles (IB Tauris, 2016).

This article was first published by HistoryExtra in April 2018

Edinburgh in the 1820s was a city of contrasts. The New Town was the playground of the affluent, lined with beautiful houses and grand assembly and concert rooms, where the wealthy could indulge in intellectual pastimes. The Old Town, however, was crowded and filthy, packed with dingy inns and taverns. As well as selling pints of ale, many also offered sexual services to their customers. The city’s sex industry had been expanding since around 1760, and by the turn of the 19th century, South Bridge had become notorious for street walkers and brothels, and attracted residents from across the city in search of pleasure.

On 8 February 1823, William Howat, a writer’s clerk, dined and drank through the afternoon with a group of friends at his lodgings in Broughton Street, on the edge of New Town. At 9 o’clock the men decided to head down to South Bridge to continue their fun. They ended up at Mary McKinnon’s tavern. Mary, the licensee, was out visiting a friend. But her employees and lodgers, Elizabeth MacDonald, Mary Curly and Elizabeth Grey, took the men into a private room, served them drinks and joined them.

• On the podcast | Kate Lister discusses the long and varied history of sex work, from the courtesans of Edo Japan to the mollyhouses of Regency London

Soon, things turned nasty. The men claimed that they had drunk their whiskey, paid for it and prepared to leave, but the women had blocked their way, insisting they buy more. There was a scuffle, and some of the women hit them. According to the women, however, it was the men who had turned violent. They allegedly refused to pay for their drinks, smashed furniture, punched Grey and struck MacDonald with a candlestick. Frightened, Curly ran to fetch McKinnon, who hurried back with several of her neighbours and joined the affray.

Howat was stabbed in the ruckus and later succumbed to his wounds, claiming on his hospital deathbed that McKinnon was his assailant. However, when questioned by the authorities, McKinnon insisted that she “did not have a knife in my hand between leaving the grocer’s shop and being apprehended”.

Despite this, McKinnon was convicted of murder – a verdict no doubt encouraged by the judge at her trial, who instructed the jury to place more weight on the evidence of the men, and to disregard the testimony of the women who – as likely sex workers – were of “vitiated character”. She was hanged on 16 April 1823. Her case highlights the increasingly moral lens through which sex work was viewed in 19th-century Britain, which put women at risk and devalued their lives.

In the 1850s, the US was a divided country. Despite the growing strength of the abolitionist movement, slavery persisted in 15 southern states. In 1850, a second Fugitive Slave Act reinforced the power of slaveholders to drag back enslaved people who had fled to one of the free states. Yet despite the dangers, the prospect of freedom still tempted some to attempt an escape.

Among those were the Garner family, who tried to flee in early 1856. They lived in Boone County, Kentucky, by the Ohio river – the dividing line between the free and slave states. Margaret Garner, 22, and her four children were enslaved by Archibald K Gaines, of Richwood. Margaret’s husband, Robert, and his parents were enslaved by a neighbouring man, James Marshall. Life was unimaginably cruel and hard for Margaret and her family.

Her marriage to Robert was not legally recognised by the state. Because they were enslaved by different men, they were unable to live together, and could see each other only when their enslavers permitted it. Their children automatically became the property of Margaret’s enslaver, and could be sold at any time. Margaret had been forced to raise them as a single parent, balancing motherhood with the demands of the Gaines family, who insisted on virtually round-the-clock service.

On 27 January 1856, the Garner family made their bid for freedom. In the dead of night, when temperatures had dropped below –20°C, Robert and his parents left the Marshall farm, collected Margaret and the children and travelled 16 miles to the banks of the Ohio river. Avoiding the police watchmen, they crept across the frozen water, carrying the children in their arms. In the early hours of the morning the Garner family arrived at a relative’s house in Cincinnati, where they waited for assistance from members of the Underground Railroad.

• Read more | Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad: how one woman saved hundreds from hell

But their plan soon unravelled. Within hours, the house was surrounded by marshals, armed with a warrant to force them to return to their slaveholders. Knowing capture was inevitable, Margaret cut the throat of her young daughter Mary, declaring: “Before my children shall be taken back to Kentucky, I will kill every one of them.”

Margaret was apprehended before she could follow through with her threat. The Garners were taken to gaol, where Margaret explained her actions to the clergymen who visited her: “I knew it was better for them to go home to God than back to slavery.” Under the terms of the Fugitive Slave Act, Margaret did not face trial for the murder of her child but was instead returned with the rest of her family to the custody of the slaveholders, and a life of misery.

On 22 July 1886, a “ladies nurse” named Elizabeth Taylor urgently summoned a local doctor to her home in Melbourne, Australia. After swinging open the door, she confided: “I’m in trouble.” Three days earlier, Elizabeth had performed an abortion on a 21-year-old unmarried actress named Julia Warburton. Such an operation was illegal in Australia at the time, and punishable by long-term imprisonment.

Despite this, many desperate women in Julia’s situation still turned to “practical mid-wives” like Elizabeth. Early pregnancy could be terminated by taking drugs, often called “Female Pills”’. And if the pills failed to work, surgical abortion performed by a medical professional or a knowledgeable woman in the community was available for a fee.

• Read more | The long fight over abortion rights in the United States

Yet while such services were widespread, and even discreetly advertised in reputable newspapers, they were not always safe. On 19 July, Julia visited Elizabeth to undergo the illegal operation. Three days later, she was dead. Elizabeth called a doctor, one known to perform abortions himself, whom she thought would be sympathetic. But although she tried to convince him to issue a death certificate stating that Julia had died from enlargement of the liver, the doctor refused, and Elizabeth was arrested for murder.

This wasn’t the first time that Elizabeth had been in trouble with the law. Between 1882 and 1885, she had been accused of causing the deaths of three other women who had undergone illegal surgical abortions. On each occasion, a lack of witnesses and evidence meant that Elizabeth had walked free. This time, Elizabeth hired expensive lawyers who argued that Julia had already ended the pregnancy by taking pills, and that Elizabeth, as a midwife, was merely trying to save her life by removing what the body had failed to expel naturally, such as the placenta.

Elizabeth was convicted of manslaughter and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment. On her release, Elizabeth restarted her business, and further encounters with the authorities soon followed. She died, while serving her final sentence of imprisonment for manslaughter, in 1909.

• Read more | The gender pain gap: perceptions of women’s health through history

Abortion in the 19th century often conjures up images of dirty backstreet procedures by unskilled women keen on making a quick buck. Elizabeth Taylor, however, was both skilled and connected to medical professionals. Although implicated in the deaths of at least eight women, it is likely that she performed successful procedures on many, perhaps hundreds, of others. “Although I have a bad name,” Elizabeth once said, “I am not nearly as bad as people [make] out.”

England in the early 1920s felt ripe with possibilities for young women. Job opportunities abounded, thanks to the expansion of education and the after-effects of the First World War. Dress hems were shorter, hair cuts were sleeker, cinemas and dancing clubs proliferated – yet equality remained a distant prospect. For most women, marriage was still the destination, where many were required to give up their careers. A married woman still needed her husband’s permission to open a bank account in her own name. Social purity campaigns warned against sex outside marriage.

In 1922, following a sensational murder, the “New Woman” – embodied by Edith Thompson – was put on trial. Born in 1893, Edith had made the best of her opportunities. After leaving school she had secured a clerical job at a wholesale milliners in the City of London. She was quickly promoted, taught herself French, and was sent on business trips to Paris. Then, in 1916, she married her long-term boyfriend, Percy – probably because she felt she had to rather than because she wanted to.

• Read more | Flappers, sanitary pads and public drinking: was the 1920s a time of increased liberation for women?

In 1920, the couple managed to buy a house in Ilford – at that time a suburban paradise for the middle classes. Still, the marriage was lacking; they had so little in common. “I told him that I did not love him, but that I would do my share to make him happy and contented,” Edith wrote in a letter. “It was an easy way out of a lot of things to promise that.”

By 1921, Edith was involved in a passionate affair with Freddy Bywaters, a shipping steward eight years her junior. When Freddy was at sea, the lovers continued their relationship through letters in which they wrote about their shared love of literature and theatre. They wanted to make a life together. There was just one obstacle: Percy. “We had talked about making my husband ill,” Edith later admitted, “and I was to give him something so that if he had another heart attack he would not be able to resist it.”

On 3 October 1922, as Edith and Percy walked home from Ilford train station after a night at the theatre, Freddy leapt out from behind some bushes and stabbed Percy to death. Days later, Freddy was charged with murder. So, too, was Edith, after dozens of letters from her addressed to Freddy were found in his possession. The prosecution claimed that these missives contained incitements to kill Percy. Freddy and Edith were both convicted of murder – Edith, it is now recognised, on the flimsiest evidence – and were both hanged on 9 January 1923.

We often think of stalking as a uniquely contemporary phenomenon, and a crime perpetrated almost entirely by men. But the case of Christiana Edmunds provides a rare and instructive example of a 19th-century female stalker. In 1867, Christiana and her mother, Ann Edmunds, moved to a fashionable address in the centre of Brighton. They were keen for a fresh start: their previous life had been marred by the mental illness and death of both Christiana’s father and brother, as well as the pressures of their declining wealth.

The three other remaining siblings, including Christiana’s two sisters, had all married and moved away to start families of their own. Whether by choice or not, Christiana remained unmarried and had assumed the role of companion to her widowed mother. Things started to look up, however, when Christiana met Dr Charles Beard. As her doctor and close neighbour, Charles was kind and attentive. Christiana fell in love. She began to write letters to Charles, and made frequent house calls.

There was just one problem: Charles was already married, to Emily Beard, and the couple had five young children. One evening in September 1870, while Charles was away, Christiana unexpectedly called on Emily with some chocolate creams from John Maynard’s confectionery shop. Anxious that Emily should try one, Christiana popped a chocolate into her mouth, before making an excuse and leaving. As the chocolate tasted strange, Emily spat it out, but she spent the rest of the night feeling ill.

When Charles returned, he was convinced that Christiana had tried to poison his wife and ended their friendship. Determined to prove him wrong by framing the confectioner, Christiana embarked upon a poisoning spree. Between March and August 1871, Christiana contaminated batches of chocolate creams from Maynard’s shop with strychnine – a poisonous alkaloid commonly used in pesticides, odourless but bitter-tasting – which were then randomly distributed around Brighton.

• Read more | Nell Darby’s historical cold cases: the mystery of the vanishing widow

Many adults and children fell ill. On 12 June, Sidney Barker, a four-year-old boy on holiday in Brighton with his family, died. To deflect suspicion, or perhaps in search of attention, Christiana, posing as another victim, gave evidence at Sidney’s inquest. In the days after, she wrote to Charles: “My dear boy, do esteem me now. I am sure you must. What trial it was to go through, that inquest!”

Charles did not renew their friendship. Christiana’s poisoning scheme was eventually discovered, and on 16 January 1872 she was convicted of the murder of Sidney Barker. A post-trial diagnosis of insanity saved her from the gallows, and she spent the rest of her life at Broadmoor Criminal Asylum.

Rosalind Crone is professor of history at The Open University, and author of Violent Victorians (Manchester University Press, 2012) and Illiterate Inmates (Oxford University Press, 2022)

Looking for a new podcast recommendation? In Women’s History Month, learn more about remarkable women through history and their stories with these fascinating episodes from the HistoryExtra podcast…

Madame Restell: the abortionist who shocked and fascinated 19th-century New York

Jennifer Wright discusses the dramatic life of Madame Restell, a New York businesswoman who made millions – and horrified many – by selling abortions and birth control in the 19th century

Sirens, succubi & sex symbols: a history of female monsters

Sarah Clegg explores how and why historical myths have portrayed women as monstrous beings – from seductive, child-killing monsters to mermaids, sirens and vampires

Medieval women: everything you wanted to know

Eleanor Janega busts popular myths surrounding women in the Middle Ages, revealing how society was more open-minded than we might initially expect

Female spies who forged the CIA

Nathalia Holt discusses four women who undertook life-threatening missions and harnessed crucial intelligence in the early days of the Central Intelligence Agency

Breastfeeding: a cultural history

From ancient baby bottles to the perceived moral dangers of wetnursing, Joanna Wolfarth investigates what we can learn from changing attitudes to breastfeeding through history

How six women programmed the world’s first modern computer

During the Second World War, six talented mathematicians were brought together to make history. These women had one mission: to program the world’s first and only supercomputer. Speaking with Rachel Dinning, Kathy Kleiman explores the vital but overlooked role the “Eniac 6” played in the history of computing during and after the Second World War

Njinga: queen, warrior, diplomat

Luke Pepera tells Kev Lochun about the dramatic life and reign of Queen Njinga, the formidable 17th-century ruler of Ndongo and Matamba, in modern-day Angola

Women who served in WW2

Tessa Dunlop explores the lives of the last surviving women who served in Britain’s armed forces during the Second World War

Countryside campaigners: four women who fought for our green spaces

Matthew Kelly explores the lives of four women who helped to protect the English countryside in the 19th and 20th centuries

Warrior queens & quiet revolutionaries: forgotten women from history

Author Kate Mosse shares inspirational stories of women from across global history – including the forgotten life of her great grandmother Lily Watson

Want to know more about women’s history? You can read our articles on the topic here.

When did you first hear about Zola?

In my school sixth form, when we read short stories in French. I had a wonderful French teacher, who introduced us to Zola’s L’Attaque du Moulin. One of the joys of studying a foreign language is the pleasure you get when you suddenly discover that you can read an adult story by a foreign writer in their own tongue. It’s like discovering a new set of clothes that you never knew you had!

What kind of person was he?

His family had Italian origins, so he felt rather despised as an outsider – at this time the French had a kind of racist word for people from the southern Mediterranean: “méteque”. And I think it was this that made him so desperate to get France’s highest award, the Legion of Honour. You get a sense of him thinking: “Aren’t I the most popular writer in France – don’t I deserve this?” He was also a man with a social conscience, advocating workers’ control of industry.

What made him a hero?

The stance he took during the Dreyfus Affair in the 1890s. At this moment of high crisis in France, Zola was a resolute supporter of Alfred Dreyfus, a French army officer of Jewish descent who was imprisoned on Devil’s Island after being wrongly convicted of treason. The affair split France down the middle and a lot of French people proudly called themselves anti-Semites – newspapers even carried the words “the anti-Semitic newspaper” on their mastheads.

On the podcast | Simon Sebag Montefiore describes some of history’s most fascinating letters:

What was Zola’s finest hour?

The famous “J’Accuse” letter he wrote – published on the front page of a prominent Paris newspaper in 1898 – in which he accused the French army and government of obstruction of justice and anti-Semitism. Doing so endangered his career, and indeed his life. Zola exposed the conspiracy between the government and the military, incurring the wrath of many powerful people. He was found guilty of libel, removed from the Legion of Honour, and forced to flee to England, staying in London for nearly a year (where, incidentally, he was appalled by the food). In the end, he returned to France and was pardoned after it emerged that Dreyfus was indeed innocent.

• Read more | What if Britain and France went to war during the 1898 Fashoda Incident?

Is there anything that you don’t particularly admire about him?

Some might see him as a bigamist because he was in effect married to two women: his wife and his mistress, the mother of his children. But the trio tried to resolve an irresolvable situation in a modern way.

What would you ask Zola if you could meet him?

I’d ask him if he was really prepared to go to prison over his J’Accuse letter.

Michael Rosen is a children’s author, poet and broadcaster. His latest book is Many Different Kinds of Love: A Story of Life, Death and the NHS (Ebury, 2021)

This content first appeared in the December 2021 issue of BBC History Magazine

What was it like to travel on the earliest trains, before open carriages, and even toilets? When was the first rail accident? And how did railways transform nations and continents? Christian Wolmar answers listener questions on the history of the railways. Speaking to Ellie Cawthorne, he touches on industrial innovation, passengers’ experiences on early train journeys, and the role of railways in imperialism.

As part of our series of conversations with winners of the 2022 Dan David Prize, Dr Bart Elmore discusses his research into the environmental impacts of global capitalism through history with Helen Carr, from Coca-Cola and plastic use, to pesticides.

The Dan David Prize is the world’s largest history prize, which recognizes outstanding historical scholarship. Find out more at dandavidprize.org.

The 2022 US midterm elections were long expected to be a referendum on Joe Biden’s time as president and the nation’s inflation-ridden economy, but then came a summer surprise: the US Supreme Court returned a precedent-shattering decision that the federal constitution does not protect a right to abortion. Overturning the landmark 1973 Roe v Wade opinion, the court granted each state the power to regulate access to abortion.

Suddenly, the issue – at times dismissed as politically unviable by both Democrats and Republicans – returned to the ballot with fervour. According to US non-profit organisation the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly 40 per cent of poll-goers reported the court’s ruling had a “major impact” on their decision to vote, contributing to the Democratic party’s stronger than expected performance.

Fifty years have passed since the Supreme Court first upheld a woman’s constitutional right to abortion in Roe v Wade. Yet the recent reversal, and ensuing pushback, highlights how central it remains to the American political psyche. Indeed, although it is often elevated as the singular moment of abortion history in the United States, the case – and its place in the nation’s broader medical, racial and social histories – also provides overlooked insights into currents that still influence debates around the subject today.

In 1970, when unwed 21-year-old Norma McCorvey was five months pregnant in Texas, abortion was prohibited except when the pregnancy threatened the mother’s life. Pseudonymised as “Jane Roe”, McCorvey sued district attorney Henry Wade, seeking permission for an abortion and to overturn the state’s ban on the procedure.

McCorvey did not receive an abortion, but three years later the Supreme Court released its ruling. The majority argued that the 14th Amendment of the constitution enshrined a “right to privacy” protecting the decision of a woman and her physician about whether to carry a pregnancy to term. However, the court also held that the right to abortion must be balanced against the protection of potential life. Notably, neither women nor foetuses featured prominently in the decision. Instead, it foregrounded the rights of doctors to medically act in the best interest of their patients – largely sidestepping debates over bodily autonomy and reproductive rights.

• Read more | A brief history of US abortion law, before and after Roe v Wade

Just as Roe focused on doctor-patient relationships, medical professionals have long played a complicated role in regulating abortion in the US. Until the mid-19th century, termination of early pregnancy was legal under common law, restricted only after “quickening” – the point at which a woman could feel foetal movements. By defining the limits of abortion around a woman’s experience of her own pregnancy, the law tacitly reinforced a woman’s right to control decisions concerning her body.

However, growing gender, class and racial anxieties drove male physicians to undertake political action against abortion. In 1857, the fledgling American Medical Association (AMA) sought to centralise its power over medical practice, and specifically limit the growing influence of female midwives providing abortions. Leading the organisation’s campaign, Dr Horatio Storer promoted his belief that increasing abortions among middle-class, married, white women would threaten the enduring political power of white Americans.

The AMA, which at the time excluded women and black doctors from membership, successfully legally established that life began at conception, rather than at quickening. Between 1860 and 1880, at least 40 anti-abortion laws entered state records, reframing abortion not as a medical act dictated by women’s bodily experience, but a grave, immoral crime carried out by those women.

Medical intervention

Yet there were some doctors who still performed abortions in the 20th century. During the bleak Depression era between 1929 and approximately 1939, practitioners rationalised abortion as financially necessary for families. But with the end of the Second World War and a renewed focus on promoting domestic life for women, this leniency waned. These changes illustrate how male physicians dictated sexual politics in the US. Despite its blanket illegality, when abortion was connected to economic needs of the family, it was prioritised as an unfortunate necessity. However, when the decision was linked to a woman’s want for political, financial, or personal independence, it was heavily restricted by medical providers.

As enforcement of abortion bans tightened, procedures were pushed underground, where up to 1.2 million illegal abortions were performed each year during the 1950s and 1960s. Whereas practitioners had led criminalisation efforts a century earlier, now they lobbied for legalisation as maternal deaths from illegal abortion skyrocketed.

Although Roe v Wade focused on medical practitioners, fiery social movements for and against reproductive rights developed in the years surrounding the decision. Generally, mainstream American pro-choice and anti-abortion groups were situated as fundamentally opposed. Yet racial histories complicate this narrative: both groups were dominated by white leaderships which leveraged dangerous racial logics in their campaigns.

• Read more | The American clergy who helped women get abortions before Roe v Wade

For Margaret Sanger, founder of the pro-choice American Birth Control League in 1921, what started as a fight for bodily autonomy and access to education, work and politics, became heavily tied to the mid-1900s racial eugenicist movement. Sanger argued that birth control, including abortion, not only promoted women’s health and freedom, but was essential to “stop the multiplication of the unfit” for “racial betterment”. As late as the 1970s, government-sponsored family planning programmes, championed by mainstream feminist organisations such as Sanger’s, openly encouraged – and in some instances coerced – black, Latina, and Indigenous women to seek abortion and sterilisation.

Following Roe v Wade, and having disavowed the eugenics movement, some feminist groups, including the National Organization for Women, seemingly remained indifferent to the rampant reproductive injustice women of colour experienced, including a federal campaign of forced sterilisation, disproportionate maternal deaths during abortion, and the racist mythologies that inhibited care from doctors, caseworkers, and judges. Speaking to this complicity, law professor Dorothy Roberts concludes in her 1997 book Killing the Black Body that the women’s movement was part of a “systematic, institutionalised denial of reproductive freedom” for black and Indigenous women.

At the same time, some conservative and religious anti-abortion groups such as the National Right to Life Committee drew on civil rights-era rhetoric. Historian Jennifer Holland argues in her 2020 book Tiny You that despite being almost entirely white, anti-abortionists built a “civil rights movement for foetuses” by claiming that only through the protection of the foetus could Americans successfully protect Christianity, womanhood, the traditional family, and the rights of oppressed people.

Yet, this appropriation of civil rights language impugned the reproductive choices of black women within their own communities by presenting abortion as anti-black. Loretta Ross, co-founder of the 1997 SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective, described the painful impact on black women who sought abortions, writing “we are now accused of lynching our children in our wombs and practising white supremacy on ourselves”.

In the 50 years since Roe v Wade, abortion has remained a contested political frontier. However, the intricate histories of the fight over reproductive rights are often lost in the loudest narratives of contemporary activism. The reality of those pasts – filled with gender, race and class discrimination – remain a poignant reminder of the complexities of activism and the need for nuance in policymaking.

Allison McKibban is a history and law researcher, and the engagement coordinator of Birkbeck College’s Sexual Harm and Medical Encounters project

This article first appeared in the February 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine

Decried by reformers as “wicked Noah’s arks” and “rotten leaky tubs”, prison hulks were a looming presence off the shores of 18th- and 19th-century Britain and its empire. Large former navy ships were docked on the Thames and elsewhere, housing convicts awaiting transportation, often in hideous conditions. Dr Anna McKay explains to David Musgrove why these floating prisons existed, what life was like on board, and why the system eventually fell out of use.

• Read more about the brutal history of prison hulks

The widespread disruption caused by the recent series of strikes in the UK – in which even driving test examiners have laid down their iPads – has led to comparisons with the 1978–79 Winter of Discontent, when large-scale action across a range of industries contributed to the fall of the Labour government led by James Callaghan. The current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, was not yet born in 1979, and memories of its events are now fading. Nevertheless, they retain a powerful hold on the political imagination, and have eclipsed other periods of disruption which were of equivalent historical significance.

With important exceptions, the British trades union movement has focused on improving pay and conditions rather than on overtly political objectives. By the turn of the 20th century, after decades of struggle, the union movement had become well established, with more than 2 million members – including many unskilled and semi-skilled workers. Moreover, the Labour Representation Committee was founded in 1900 with the purpose of providing “a distinct Labour group in parliament” in order to promote “legislation in the direct interests of labour”. After a slow start, 29 Labour MPs were elected at the general election of 1906. They helped secure a Trades Disputes Act, restoring union rights that had been removed by the courts. Here was evidence that legal change could be achieved incrementally in the House of Commons; on the ground, unions could concentrate on bettering the positions of their own members via collective bargaining.

• Read more | What was the Winter of Discontent?

This focus on gradual improvement rather than a radical political agenda did not mean that unions were dormant, however. Tough economic conditions helped trigger the “Great Labour Unrest” that swept the UK in the years before the First World War. The first national railway strike occurred in 1911. The following year, the first national miners’ strike succeeded in securing an industry-wide minimum wage. In Liverpool, Llanelli and Tonypandy, strikes were accompanied by riots. There has been much debate over the role played by “syndicalists”: radicals who wanted to secure the control of industry by the workers. But though the situation was fragile, and tough for the Liberal government to manage, most strikers were likely motivated by bread-and-butter issues rather than revolutionary fervour.

Direct action

The First World War swelled union membership further, and strikes were no rarity, including in the munitions industry. An unofficial strike by engineers spread across “Red Clydeside” in 1915, but the action did not succeed in its aims. Anti-war sentiment sometimes played a part in stoking unrest, but so did seemingly trivial issues, as when the Roway Iron and Steel Works in West Bromwich was hit by employees protesting a tax on ginger beer due to the drink being “essential to their work”.

When peace came in 1918, there was a vogue – in the wake of the Russian revolution – for “direct action”, or the use of industrial power outside parliament for political ends. The most celebrated example of this was the Jolly George affair of 1920, in which east London dockers refused to load weapons on to a ship destined for anti-Soviet Poland. But this phenomenon was short-lived, due to setbacks including the fragmentation of the Triple Alliance of three major unions on “Black Friday” in 1921. Mass unemployment further weakened union power.

The general strike of 1926, meanwhile, was quite literally a nine days’ wonder. It was called to combat mine-owners’ plans to cut wages and extend working hours, but in spite of a strong response by workers, the Trades Union Congress (TUC) leadership did not have its heart in the fight. After a court judgment that the strike was illegal, the TUC’s general council agreed to call it off, though the miners continued their ultimately fruitless battle for months. Above all, the TUC wanted to avoid being seen to engage in an unconstitutional challenge to state power. Only in the 1970s and 1980s did the TUC again call for national, coordinated “demonstration strikes”, and even these were merely symbolic, one-day events.

There were, of course, plenty of other strikes in the meantime. The 1959 film comedy I’m All Right, Jack satirised postwar industrial relations, poking fun not only at indolent trades unionists but also at their greedy and complacent bosses. The communist shop-steward Fred Kite (Peter Sellers) is finally laid low when his own wife and daughter go on strike, refusing to perform their domestic chores.

Communists really did have disproportionate power within the union movement, not least because of their willingness to take on arduous organisational roles. But in 1966, Labour prime minister Harold Wilson drew ridicule when he tried to blame a strike by the National Union of Seamen (NUS) on “a tightly-knit group of politically motivated men”. Wilson based this suggestion of communist influence on evidence from MI5, but the militants were exploiting genuine grievances. In the end, the strike secured a transition from a 56-hour week to one of 40.

Collapse of consensus

Many of the conflicts of the 1960s and 70s were driven by the attempts of governments of both complexions to enforce incomes policies, which restricted wage growth to keep prices under control. Though some moderate union leaders were willing to cooperate, they could not always control their members. Public-sector unions expanded and became more radical, and the Winter of Discontent marked the collapse of efforts to govern by consensus rather than by confrontation. When the TUC rejected Callaghan’s pay policy in the summer of 1978, there followed a wave of action that set the scene for Margaret Thatcher’s election triumph the following year. Contrary to myth, the Labour government was brought down not by weakness towards the unions, but rather by its insistence on taking a tough line, at a politically inopportune moment, in the cause of reducing inflation.

A dark time for the Labour movement followed, as the Conservatives introduced laws making it harder to strike, and even banned workers at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) from joining unions. The miners’ strike of 1984–85 was a last-gasp effort to assert union power. National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) leader Arthur Scargill not only wanted to halt pit closures; he sought to use extraparliamentary action to bring down the government. He failed not only because of ministers’ prior efforts to build up coal stocks, but because of his own abandonment of the NUM’s previous postwar pragmatism.

As recent events perhaps show, however, no matter how tough the union laws, workers are likely to turn to action when they believe their living standards are sufficiently threatened. Strikes can be defeated through government or business power, or they can be resolved through negotiation. But unless the underlying factors change they will not go away by themselves.

Richard Toye is professor of history at the University of Exeter. His books include Winston Churchill: A Life in the News (Oxford University Press, 2020)

This article first appeared in the February 2023 issue of BBC History Magazine

On 22 December 1894, after a four-day trial at the Cherche-Midi prison in Paris, seven judges unanimously convicted Alfred Dreyfus, an artillery officer, of collusion with a foreign power. Born in Mulhouse, Alsace, Dreyfus was a patriotic and independently wealthy soldier of Jewish heritage. He was sentenced to the harshest penalty under French law: permanent exile in a walled fortification.

The discovery, three months earlier, of a ripped-up, handwritten note – the bordereau – in a wastebasket by a French intelligence agent operating inside the German Embassy, had shocked the nation. Ever since Germany’s annexation of France’s easternmost regions, Alsace and Lorraine, in 1871, there had been deep mistrust between Paris and Berlin. The note, addressed to the German military attaché, served to validate this paranoia. Its contents divulged information on changes to French artillery regulations, the outcome of a weapons test, and plans to conquer Madagascar.

Suspicion pointed to a spy on France’s general staff, with Dreyfus soon identified as the culprit. His upbringing in a part of France long exposed to Germanic influences, as well as his Jewish ancestry, singled him out as an anomaly in a military culture rife with anti-Semitism and hungry to avenge the defeat of 1871.

Exile and conspiracy

Two weeks after his conviction, on 5 January 1895, Dreyfus was subjected to a humiliating “degradation” on the courtyard of the École Militaire. His sword was snapped across the knee of a towering warrant officer, and his epaulettes and stripes were unceremoniously torn from his uniform. Baying crowds screamed “Judas!” and “Death to the Jews!”, but Dreyfus remained stoic throughout the ordeal, exclaiming: “Innocent! Innocent! Vive la France! Long live the Army!” before being marched off.

That April, he arrived on Devil’s Island, a former leper colony off French Guiana, to begin his sentence. There, he endured appalling mistreatment. Imprisoned within a purpose-built stone hut measuring a mere 4 x 4 metres, Dreyfus was fed rotting pork, manacled to his bed at night, and had his view of the sea obstructed by a palisade. Guards were ordered not to interact with him, and his ability to speak languished.

• Read more | The Fashoda Incident: what if France went to war with Britain in 1898?

Back in France, events were taking a surprising turn. Graphology had been used to convict Dreyfus, with alleged “experts” confirming a match between his handwriting with that on the bordereau. However, in July 1896, Lieutenant Colonel Georges Picquart, the army’s new intelligence chief, discovered that the handwriting was not Dreyfus’s at all. Rather, it belonged to a disgruntled officer, Major Ferdinand Walsin Esterhazy – whose hand was known to Picquart from a letter intercepted that spring. Suddenly, however, his investigation was killed in its tracks and Picquart redeployed to French Tunisia.

Always certain of his innocence, Dreyfus’s wife, Lucie, and brother, Mathieu, waged a tireless campaign to clear his name. In 1897, Esterhazy’s banker notified Auguste Scheurer-Kestner, vice-president of the French Senate, upon recognising his client’s handwriting on one of Mathieu’s public facsimiles of the bordereau. The politician, already aware of Esterhazy’s treachery, lodged a complaint with the minister of war and a court-martial ensued. Esterhazy was acquitted in January 1898 and fled across the English Channel, while anti-Semitic riots erupted in several French cities.

A national crisis

By now, the imbroglio was being referred to as the “Dreyfus affair”. Days after Esterhazy’s acquittal, Émile Zola published an open letter, “J’Accuse…!”, on the front page of L’Aurore (The Dawn). In it, the famed novelist denounced the army’s top brass for conspiring to scapegoat Dreyfus to protect Esterhazy. Zola also warned that the anti-Semitism fuelling the affair would “destroy the freedom-loving France of the Rights of Man” if not confronted.

Later that year, Hubert-Joseph Henry, a lieutenant colonel, was found to have doctored evidence to further incriminate Dreyfus. Under arrest, Henry slashed his throat with a razorblade and became an instant martyr for the anti-Dreyfusards. Édouard Drumont’s newspaper, La Libre Parole (Free Speech), launched a petition to raise funds for a monument, inviting messages from contributors. These were full of dark, anti-Semitic fantasies, with many calling for a general extermination.

Finally, in 1899, a retrial took place in Rennes, France. It was an open secret that nationalists were plotting a coup should Dreyfus be acquitted. With the threat of civil war looming, he was reconvicted, but on a reduced sentence of 10 years’ imprisonment due to “extenuating circumstances” – unheard of for a charge of treason.

It would take another seven years before he was fully exonerated, reinstated to the army and appointed to the Legion of Honour. He fought for France in World War I and died in 1935, aged 75. In September 1995, the French Army finally admitted that Dreyfus had been the victim of a military conspiracy.