About
The holder of a BSc Honours degree in Social Science and Social History, Helena Wojtczak is a researcher, writer and speaker on women's history. She occasionally gives public talks and lectures and speaks at conferences at universities and museums.
She is an occasional tutor in women's history and the methodology of research for the University of Sussex and the University of Brighton. She has written for the Oxford University Press, Ashgate, the TSSA, the RMT and Hunter House Publishing, as well as numerous newspapers and magazines, and also for various websites including The Victorian Web and Encyclopaedia Titanica, and has appeared on TV and BBC radio.
Her books have received critical acclaim from Dr Dale Spender, Dr Gerry Holloway, Dr Gillian Reynolds, Dr Jo Stanley, Dr Terry Gourvish, the Rt Hon. Tony Benn MP, Glenda Jackson MP, Michael Foster MP, New Statesman, Morning Star, Labour Research Magazine, Steam World Magazine, the President of the RMT, Women's History Review, Gender, Work and Organisation, The Argus, Sussex Express, Open History Magazine, Backtrack, the British Association for British History, Christian Wolmar, Adrian Vaughan, Ray Hatley and many others.
In 2007 Railwaywomen won the joint Writers' News Magazine / David St John Thomas Charitable Trust Award for Best Non Fiction Book and the Silver Cup and prize for Self-Published Book of the Year. Notable Sussex Women has won the Best Non Fiction Prize 2009.
Involution-An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God
Description
<p>“<em>We are not human beings having a spiritual experience; we are spiritual beings having a human experience.”(</em>Teilhard de Chardin<em>)</em></p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;"><em>Involution-An Odyssey Reconciling Science to God </em> is as layered as a French cassoulet, as diverting, satisfying and as rich. Each reader will spoon this book differently. On the surface it seems to be a simple and light-hearted poetic journey through the history of Western thought, dominantly scientific, but enriched with painting and music. Beneath that surface is the sauce of a new evolutionary idea, involution; the informing of all matter by consciousness, encoded and communicating throughout the natural world. A book about the cathedral of consciousness could have used any language to paint it, but science is perhaps most in need of new vision, and its chronology is already familiar.</span></p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;">The author offers a bold alternative vision of both science and creation: she suggests that science has been incrementally the recovery of memory, the memory of evolution/involution</span><em style="line-height:1.6em;">.</em></p><p>“<em> Involution proposes that humans carry within them the history of the universe, which is (re)discovered by the individual genius when the time is ripe. All is stored within our DNA and awaits revelation. Such piecemeal revelations set our finite lives in an eternal chain of co-creation and these new leaps of discovery are compared to mystical experience</em>” (From a reviewer)</p><p>Each unique contributor served the collective and universal return to holism and unity. Thus the geniuses of the scientific journey, like the spiritual visionaries alongside, have threaded the rosary of science with the beads of inspiration, and through them returned Man to his spiritual nature and origin.</p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;">The separation between experience and the rational intellect of science has, by modelling memory as theory, separated its understanding from the consciousness of all, and perceives mind and matter as separate, God and Man as distinct. This work is a dance towards their re-unification: Saints and scientists break the same bread.</span></p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;">All of time and all the disciplines of science are needed for the evidence. Through swift (and sometimes sparring) Cantos of dialogue between Reason and Soul, Philippa Rees takes the reader on a monumental journey through the history of everything – with the evolution of man as one side of the coin and involution the other. The poetic narrative is augmented by learned and extensive footnotes offering background knowledge which in themselves are fascinating. In effect there are two books, offering a right and left brain approach. The twin spirals of a DNA shaped book intertwine external and internal and find, between them, one journey, Man’s recovery of Himself., and (hopefully) the Creation’s recovery of a nobler Man.</span></p><p><span style="line-height:1.6em;">From the same review “</span><em style="line-height:1.6em;">The reader who finishes the book will not be the same as the one who began it. New ideas will expand the mind but more profoundly, the deep, moving power of the verse will affect the heart.</em></p><p><em>(Marianne Rankin: Director of Communications, Alister Hardy Trust)</em></p><p> </p>
Reviews
<p align="left"><font size="2">Women of Victorian Sussex reveals a forgotten world of daily struggles against appalling injustice – tragic, brave, stubborn, desperate and comic. It is an untold story of English society brought to life in vivid and shocking detail. <br /><br />Helena Wojtczak examines the lives of women living in Sussex around the middle of the 19th century. The book explores their status, their work and their dealings with the law and by letting the facts speak for themselves builds up a devastating critique of a profoundly unjust and hypocritical society. <br /><br />What makes this extraordinary book so enjoyable is the wealth of entertaining anecdotes which reveal the astonishing double standards of Victorian society. In fact on virtually every page the reader is delighted by a surprising piece of information, or a delightful way of illustrating it. <br /><br />We start by learning that women far outnumbered men, one visitor remarking that in this respect St Leonards resembled paradise. Nevertheless, women were rigorously excluded from positions of power, authority of influence, it being held a self-evident truth that they were inferior to men. <br /><br />Single women were obliged to seek marriage for financial security; but upon marrying they relinquished their separate existence, being regarded by the law as incorporated into the husband. If they received any education, girls were taught to be submissive, child-bearing wives. The most abusive term that could be applied to a woman was ‘strong-minded’. Many children died in infancy; an unmarried mother was a pitiable outcast; a widow was a pathetic woman in desperate financial straits. <br /><br />This book contains many tales of appalling conditions endured, of little lives lived bravely against all the odds. Perhaps aware that her material could become too harrowing for the reader, Miss Wojtczak is careful to keep the tone light. Sometimes this seems strained – a discussion of crinolines and bloomers appears unexpectedly after an examination of infant mortality – but on the whole it is the very resilience and ‘strong-mindedness’ of the women that provides the light relief. <br /><br />The largest section of the book looks at women’s occupations and here we are presented with a riot of colourful detail and diverting insight. Profitable and interesting employment for Britain’s women just did not exist. The expression ‘women’s work’ was synonymous with low pay and low status. <br /><br />Although the historical records make them all but invisible, we find women doing all kinds of work. A female blacksmith, for example, was not abnormal. We find them running all sorts of shops and businesses, including baths, post offices and laundries, lodging houses and pubs; we see them as actresses, teachers, servants… and we find them walking the streets as ‘nymphs of the pavé’. These glimpses of brave lives led in obscurity are a delight to read, and made all the more so by the many press clippings, advertisements and pictures with which the stories are illustrated. <br /><br />The third section of the book considers women’s position vis-à-vis the law. The parade of injustice beggars belief as we read vivid examples of the law being used to oppress the weakest members of society, or at least offer them no protection from husbands who could mistreat them and repeatedly seize anything they had earned to support their children, leaving them in penury, with the courts’ blessing. <br /><br />Homicides, suicides and infanticides would have presented a gloomy, if sensational, ending, so the author finishes her work with a piece on emancipation, which looks forward to the dawning of women’s rights. <br /><br />Finally an eclectic series of appendices includes such gems as Locations of Female Plumbers, Public Houses with Female Licensees, Causes of Prostitution, Duties of a Workhouse Matron and a profile of the Venerable Cornelia Connelly, foundress of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus. <br /><br />If we had been given this to read at school, instead of the dry-as-dust textbooks that made every history lesson an opportunity for a nap, Britain would be full of keen amateur historians. For this is history at its best – a rich canvas swarming with life: surprising, fascinating, heart-warming and above all, very, very readable. <br /><br /></font></p>
