My summary of the comments and advice from my supervisor

Whilst developing my initial project idea, my supervisor inquired about what academic literature I would be using to support my essay and to use for research, and he advised me that I should not just use informal sources. He suggested using sources such as google scholar. Furthermore, he encouraged me to consider the reliability of a source before I use it for research, in particular for some of the literature I was using. Also, he mentioned that it would be difficult to find sufficient primary sources for the essay for the topic I have chosen. Although part of it would be covering modern times, that is only a small fraction of my essay and for the rest there is little to no opportunity to find primary sources like a survey or questionnaire. However, as a result of a conversation with my supervisor, I concluded that it would be too difficult to cover the entire of history for the essay tittle ‘The history of sexism and how it affects the prevalence of rape in modern society.’ He also mentioned that it would be difficult for me to write about history and politics together in sufficient detail. As a result, I decided to change the title of my essay to ‘To what extent have gender roles affected female royals throughout history?’ and purely focus on history, not the modern politics. Also, this meant I had a much greater interest and excitement for my project, as although I am passionate and interested in politics, I find the research and study rather tedious, whereas I have never grown bored of researching and learning history. I hoped that by doing this I would achieve a much more in depth and through analysis of the history of sexism and therefore be able to cover more of the time periods I initially planned to. However, my supervisor and I both expressed concern over the length of the time period. Therefore, I made the decision to not initially include the Queens from Ancient Egypt (Hatshepsut and Cleopatra) and instead research monarchs from 1519 to present day. The queens I picked out were each chosen because after brief research, I felt they each dealt with the challenge of gender roles in an extraordinary and unique way, therefore I believed they would be perfect representations of their time period and lay the foundations for balanced and just analysis. Also, each queen is very famous and has been researched already by an abundance of historians, which means I will have plenty of sources and evidence to work with. However, my supervisor mentioned that the issue of primary sources still remained. He advised that I should try and either structure my essay title in a way that allows the opportunity for primary research or approach the history based essay at a different angle.