CHANGING PERCEPTIONS

Two years after their last collaboration, digital artist Marina Amaral and historian Dan Jones have joined forces once again, this time bringing together a range of colourised images that explore women's lives between 1850-1960

- CHARLOTTE HODGMAN

In 2017-18, when we were working on our first book together, The Colour of Time, we found ourselves repeating what would become a familiar lament: there aren't enough women in here.

No matter how much we willed the photographic archives to offer us an equal balance of men and women, all too often we would find ourselves surrounded by dudes with bushy beards. That is why we decided that, in our third book, we would set ourselves a challenge: no dudes; no beards; no men allowed.

The resulting book recounts a history of humanity between 1850 and 1960, told through women's pictures - a selection of which are shown over the following pages - lives and experiences.

Many of the women featured fought for equality, freedom and opportunity during an age where women's rights were curtailed and suppressed, but this is not a work that focuses solely on social justice or injustice. The women we have chosen feature because their stories are interesting and (in most cases) admirable. It is a celebration of their existence and a platform to highlight their stories.

MARGARET SANGER, 1929

"I see immense advantages in being gagged. It silences me but it makes millions of others talk about Ime and the cause in which I live". So wrote Margaret Sanger in 1929 - the year in which this photograph, which shows her being symbolically silenced, was taken. A trained nurse, Sanger had seen first-hand the suffering that unwanted pregnancies - and illegal abortions - could place on women and campaigned tirelessly for every woman to be "the absolute mistress of her own body". Sanger's commitment to the birth control cause saw her silenced, prosecuted and even imprisoned; nevertheless, she lived to see the contraceptive pill made available to women in the 1960s.