All WHN seminar recordings for the 2020-2021 academic year.

These recordings are available for Women’s History Network members only. Please do not make personal copies or distribute with non-members without the permission of the Women’s History Network and/or the speaker. Please contact seminars@womenshistorynetwork.org for more details.

Keep up-to-date with the current seminar series here

Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England

September 9th 2020. Dr Bronach Kane, Senior Lecturer in  Medieval History at Cardiff University, discussing her research on popular memory, gender and time. Bronach’s 2019 book,  Popular Memory and Gender in Medieval England: Men, women and testimony in the church courts c.1200-1500 is  the winner of the  WHN 2020 Book Prize.

The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth Century American Social Movements

September 23rd 2020. Ana Stevenson is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her topic is ‘The Woman as Slave in Nineteenth Century American Social Movements’. This follows her acclaimed recent publication in the Palgrave history of social movements series.

New Feminist Economic Histories of Women’s Labour in Twentieth Century Asia

October 7 2020. Double-bill:

Women Beneath the Surface: Coal and the Colonial State in India, 1920s-1940s 

Urvi Khaitan, Doctoral Candidate, University of Oxford

This paper studies the tens of thousands of low-caste and adivasi (indigenous) women who worked in coal mines in colonial India. It investigates their exclusion from underground work through a prohibition that was first enforced in 1937, and then its reversal as it was lifted barely six years later in 1943 as a coal crisis rapidly intensified. Battling War-induced famine, over 70,000 women miners helped sustain production goals and were pivotal to the Allied World War II effort.

Women in the Textile Industry: Hong Kong and Bombay, 1945-1970

Hannah Hassani (MPhil, Cambridge)

This study compares and contrasts the textile industries of Hong Kong and Bombay in the immediate post-war period, using gender as the primary tool of analysis. Two major areas shed light on the different industrial experiences of the two cities. What were the working conditions of the women workers, including factory sizes, available facilities and protective legislation? How did women exhibit organised and unorganised resistance via trade unions and other forms of resistance? Introducing gender as an analytical tool helps contextualise and unpack the transition of both cities from cotton and garment manufacturing to financial centres.

Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic

October 21st 2020. Erika Denise Edwards is an associate professor of Latin American History at  the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Edwards’ research centers on the black experience in Argentina. Her recently published the book Hiding in Plain Sight: Black Women, the Law, and the Making of a White Argentine Republic which is a gendered analysis of black erasure in Argentina has won the Association of Black Women Historian’s Letitia Woods-Brown Memorial Book Prize.   Edwards’ research advocates for a re-learning of Argentina’s black past and the origins of  anti-blackness. Her advocacy  extends to community engagement where she currently  serves as a member of the Board of Directors for Latin Americans Working for Achievement (LAWA).

I will hope to see your hand again”: Materiality and Letter-Writing in the Correspondence of Hannah Greg (1766-1832)

November 4 2020. Katie Crowther is a PhD Candidate at the University of York.

Understanding letters as part of a material interaction between pen and paper and sender and recipient, adds new layers of meaning to the sentiments they convey. As an active letter-writer and diarist, Hannah Greg (1766-1834) used the practice as well as the process of writing to navigate various aspects of her life. Greg’s correspondences demonstrate a careful negotiation between paper and ink and her understanding of the material page’s role in the records, sentences and letters that she set to paper. An analysis of the materiality of these writings provides insights into not only the letter-writing practices, but also the means by which paper traces can enliven the current narrative of women such as Hannah Greg.

Women’s Long Battle for the Vote: Surprises on the Road to the Nineteenth Amendment

2 December 2020. Prof. Ellen Carol DuBois, Distinguished Research Professor UCLA.

Women’s Long Battle for the  Vote: Surprises on the  Road to the Nineteenth Amendment is a general audience lecture covering the seventy five years of the U.S. woman suffrage movement with an emphasis on things you might not already know:  the universal suffrage vision with which the movement began; the  unusual route by which woman suffrage first spoke to average women; how so many women were able to vote before the Nineteenth Amendment’s ratification; and how close the amendment came to not passing in 1920.

Make Room for Motherhood: Feminism, Family, and the Unpublished Articles of Crystal Eastman

13 January 2021. Dr Amy Aronson, Fordham University.

Three weeks after the suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1920, the suffragist, labor lawyer, anti-war activist, and feminist journalist Crystal Eastman attended a meeting of the National Woman’s Party. Now that the vote was won, what agenda should the organization – the world’s first women’s political party – pursue? Eastman argued that to win what she christened “this hundred-year war for equality,” women needed a feminist revolution on the home front. To her, the crucial battleground encompassed not merely the drive for independence, but the quest for balance between independence and interdependence, emancipation and devotion.

This talk will sketch Eastman’s vision for feminism and family life in the American post-suffrage era. Early in the 1920s, her ideas, advocated mainly in her journalism, aligned with equalitarian feminists on both sides of the Atlantic. But by later in the decade, some of her work had become too wayward to entertain either in the UK or the USA.  By exploring both her accepted writings and the pieces Eastman could not place in the feminist journals she frequented, this article evinces some critical parameters in feminist thinking during the pivotal years when the next wave of the American women’s movement was struggling to rise.

Colleens, Cottages, and Rolling Green Fields’: The Making of Irish Women

27 January 2021. Dr Shahmima Akhtar, Royal Holloway, University of London.

This paper examines how a transnational vision of Ireland was created in the United States by two philanthropic women in Chicago’s Columbian Exposition of 1893. They each used accessible images of Ireland and the bodies of exhibited women to authenticate their narrative of dying rural industries that needed to be revived. Their specific visions of Irish development and survival were located against the backdrop of significant Irish migration to the United States and capitalised on feelings of nostalgia popular among the newly settled Irish-American population. The paper contributes to studies of Irish identities in Ireland, England and the US at the interface of class, gender and race.

Dr Shahmima Akhtar is a Lecturer in History at Royal Holloway, University of London. She was previously Past and Present Fellow in Race, Ethnicity and Equality in History working with the Royal Historical Society and Institute for Historical Research

LGBTQ+ Roundtable

Special student roundtable for LGBTQ History Month.

Speakers: Eleanor Affleck, Mia Liyanage, Joanne Reed, Fleur MacInnes, Hannah Ayres.

‘“Two women in one house/Never did agree”: Internalizing Misogyny in Late Medieval England and Scotland’, Dr Carissa Harris 

Dr Carissa Harris is Associate Professor of English at Temple University and the author of Obscene Pedagogies: Transgressive Talk and Sexual Education in Late Medieval Britain (Cornell, 2018).  Her research on gender and sexuality analyzes medieval literary and legal texts in conversation with one another as well as with 21st-century news events and legal cases, such as her book chapter discussing Geoffrey Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale alongside footballer Ched Evans’s rape retrial. She has also published essays on medieval histories of intoxication and consent; rape, anger, and feminist art; and medieval lyrics about unplanned pregnancy.

‘Working Women and Global Industrialization: From Puerto Rican Needleworkers to Export Processing Zones’, Dr Aimee Loiselle

_{24th February 2021}

In this video Dr Aimee Loiselle discusses the exploitation of women’s labor and exemptions to sovereignty in Puerto Rico drove the experimentation that fostered export processing zones (EPZs) in the late-twentieth century. Although free-trade advocates present EPZs as a postwar modern business practice, the roots lie much earlier. In the early 1900s, the U.S. government, metropolitan corporations, and Puerto Rican elites in needlework contracting encouraged colonial industrialization on the main island. Puerto Rican women worked in the textile and apparel industry, and also found ways to resist its extreme exploitation by migrating, striking, and unionizing. During the 1970s, as EPZs eroded their industrial employment, Puerto Rican women in the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU) fought to challenge the terms of globalization.

Aimee Loiselle is currently a postdoctoral fellow with the Reproductive Justice History Project at Smith College. She studies the modern U.S. as a hub for transnational labor and capital with an interest in women workers, gender, race, and citizenship. Her work also explores the ways popular culture obscures the complexities of global labor. Loiselle’s first book project Creating Norma Rae: Puerto Rican Needleworkers and Southern Labor Activists Lost in Reagan’s America examines the globalization of textile and apparel labor and manufacturing, and how the movie image of a white southern millhand erased women of color and diverse union activism. She recently received the Lerner-Scott Prize from the OAH and the Prelinger Award from the CCWH.

‘Rethinking Anne Lister’s Sexual Knowledge’, Dr Anna Clark

Dr Anna Clark talks about her research using Anne Lister’s diaries. In 1831, at age forty, Anne Lister wrote that she “found distinctly for the first time” the clitoris.  While one might expect a Victorian woman to be sexually ignorant, Anne Lister’s late-blooming anatomical knowledge is surprising, for she was quite unusual in two ways. First, as her coded diaries reveal, she had clearly been experiencing pleasure through the clitoris and giving pleasure to other women; second, she educated herself in anatomy, and even dissected bodies. By looking at Anne Lister’s quest to find the clitoris, we can understand in more detail how difficult it was for women to conceptualize this important part of their bodies. This paper will also illuminate the debates about changing understanding of anatomy and the one-sex/two-sex models of gender difference.

‘Finding Lydia Harvey: narrative, polyvocality, and historical justice’, Dr Julia Laite

Dr Julia Laite talks about her forthcoming book The Disappearance of Lydia Harvey:  A true story of sex, crime and the meaning of justice, which tells the story of a sixteen-year-old girl who, under the coercion of a charming man and his wife, left her job in Wellington in 1910 to sell sex in Buenos Aires and London, at the height of the ‘white slavery’ panic in the early twentieth century.  Starting from one file in the National Archives, Laite has pieced together the life of Lydia Harvey, as well as the lives of her traffickers and her ostensible rescuers; alongside the trafficking trial that entangled them, and its remarkable afterlife. In this seminar, Laite will introduce the key themes of the book, and consider the techniques she used to research and write this history. She will explore the new trend of global microhistory and the possibilities and challenges of digital archives. She will consider storytelling, especially polyvocal storytelling, as a historical technique, and ponder what exactly it is we think we are doing when we tell the stories of those who have almost disappeared from the historical record.

Dr Julia Laite is Reader in Modern History at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research examines the history of migration, gender, sex and sexuality, as well as family history, creative history and public history. She is the author of the Disappearance of Lydia Harvey (2021), Wolfenden’s Women (2020), and Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens (2012), and is principal investigator of the AHRC-funded project Trafficking Past. 

‘Beauty, Ugliness, and Ideas of Racial Difference: black women in the 19th century’, Dr Rochelle Rowe

‘From Love Lives to Cinderella’, Prof. Carol Dyhouse

Cinderella stories captured the imagination of girls in the 1950s, when dreams of meeting the right man could seem like a happy ending, a solution to life’s problems. But over the next fifty years women’s lives were transformed, not by the magic wand of a fairy godmother, nor by marrying princes, but by education, work, birth control—and feminism.

Carol will be talking about her latest book, Love Lives: from Cinderella to Frozen, published by Oxford University Press.

Carol Dyhouse is Professor Emeritus at Sussex University and author of Girl Trouble: panic and progress in the history of young women (2013), Glamour: women, history, feminism (2010) and Students: a gendered history (2005).

‘Imagining the Black Cook in Victorian England’, Dr Caroline Bressey

This seminar opens up questions about the roles within the hierarchy of domestic labour undertaken by black women workers through the presence of black women who (may have) cooked in British Victorian kitchens.

Dr Caroline Bressey’s work focuses on the historical and cultural geographies of the black presence in Britain. She is Reader in Cultural and Historical Geography at UCL founded the Equiano Centre (2007-2017) to support research into the the black presence in Britain.

Her book Empire, Race and the Politics of Anti-Caste won the Women’s History Network Book Prize in 2014 and the Colby Scholarly Book Prize in 2015. 

‘The Politics of Unshaming in Modern Ireland’, Prof. Lindsey Earner-Byrne

In 2018, when reflecting on a meeting between the President of Ireland and survivors of Ireland’s network of Magdalen asylums, the journalist and public intellectual Fintan O’Toole noted: ‘It was an unshaming’. He was referring to the President’s public denunciation of the treatment of these women and their children. Over the past thirty years the Republic of Ireland has been reframing the story of its authoritarian past, its consequences, its victims, and its legacy. In this process the telling of certain stories about women’s bodies and sexuality has been central. This paper traces the narrative arc of ‘telling women’s bodies’ from the 1980s to the present day arguing that the politics of ‘unshaming’ have often served to imply a break with the past while masking continuity in the Irish state’s treatment of women’s bodies.

Lindsey Earner-Byrne is Professor of Irish Gender History at University College Cork, Ireland. Her first book, Mother and Child: Maternity and Child Welfare in Dublin, 1920s-1960s (2007; paperback 2013) continues to inform debates relating to Ireland’s historic  treatment of unmarried mothers and their children. The Irish Abortion Journey, 1920-2018 (2019) with Professor Diane Urquhart is an all-island history of the Irish abortion journey.

Her research has played a pivotal role in informing public debate and official commissions of inquiry In relation to the history of ‘unmarried mothers’, sexual violence, abortion, poverty, and welfare rights in modern Ireland.

‘Living as Man and Wife’: Women and Cohabitation in Scotland, 1560-1750, Dr Rebecca Mason

30th June 2021

Cohabitation, in very broad terms, can be defined as an arrangement in which an unmarried couple lives together in a long-term relationship that resembles a marriage. Throughout history, Scottish couples cohabited, rather than married, for a variety of reasons, often due to existing impediments to marriage or lack of resources to fund the costs of a wedding ceremony. Today, many couples in Scotland choose to cohabit to test their compatibility before they commit to marriage. For others, the decision to cohabit is a lifelong choice as the social capital of marriage has waned to a simple representation of commitment. As more and more people opt out of marriage in favour of cohabitation, how has the Scottish legal system grappled with the regulation of such private relationships? This presentation shows that the legal regulation of cohabitation in Scotland is, in fact, a historical issue dating back to the reform of marriage law in the early modern period. It investigates the changing effects of cohabitation on the property rights of Scottish women throughout history, with particular focus on the early modern context. In providing this crucial background, it situates ongoing debates surrounding the reform of cohabitation law in Scotland in historical perspective, and explains why this debate presents as a feminist issue.

Lesser-known voices in well-known movements: from Suffrage to Women’s Liberation, Sophie Wilson & Beckie Rutherford

14th July 2021

Jewish Campaigners in the British Women’s Suffrage Movement

Sophie Wilson, PhD Candidate, QMUL

Jewish women, and men, were actively involved in the British women’s suffrage movement and held some prominent positions within suffrage organisations. Many sought to maintain and even assert their Jewish identity, as exemplified by the foundation of the Jewish League for Woman’s Suffrage in 1912. While some key historians have sought to highlight the role of Jewish suffragist, their place within the suffrage thought has not yet been fully examined. The movement drew heavily on contemporary ideas of racial, imperial, and national superiority to present and promote a unified idea of womanhood, which was predominantly white, Christian, and British, or more often, specifically English. Therefore, the study of Jewish suffragists offers invaluable insight into how a minority group existed within a movement that promoted such identities. This paper will give an overview of the extent of Jewish involvement within the suffrage movement, considering the lived experience of Jewish suffragists, and indicate some of the wider questions this raises as to how the movement conceptualised Jews and Judaism. The study of Jewish campaigners, and suffragist responses, can offer new and valuable insight into the histories of suffrage, gender, religious and racial thought, and British Jews.

Disabled Women Organising: Rethinking Agency within the Women’s Liberation Movement

Beckie Rutherford, PhD Candidate, University of Warwick

Disabled women have always been involved in feminism and women’s rights activism but only in the 1970s did they begin to organise specifically around their shared experience of disability and womanhood. The stories of their activism and campaigning are, however rarely included in historical narratives celebrating the Women’s Liberation Movement. The ways in which disabled women were involved in the movement often differ from stereotypical ideas of what ‘second wave’ feminism looked like – for example, many of their campaigns focussed on making existing feminist resources and spaces more accessible. This paper will introduce the work of three disabled women’s groups: Gemma (a support group for disabled lesbians), Sisters Against Disablement and Feminist Audio Books (both collectives of disabled women and non-disabled allies). I will argue that the work of the women involved in these groups is crucial to broadening our understanding of the many different forms that feminist activism could take during this period. By recognising the agency and innovation of disabled women’s organising, I advocate a wider and more creative understanding of activist histories in general.

Early-Career Fellows and Independent Fellows Celebration Roundtable

28th July 2021

Sarah Fox, ECR Fellow

‘“Contrary to her Profession as a Midwife”: skill, scandal, and the licensing of early modern midwives.

In 1663 Anne Knutsford, licensed midwife of Nantwich in Cheshire, was issued with an inhibition against practising midwifery by the Church for ‘lyeing, sweareing and curseing’ amongst other allegations.[1]  As if to confirm the charges, Anne allegedly ‘abused the authority of this court when the inhibition was served upon you & left with you, saying it should serve to wipe your arse with or to that effect’.  According to the statements of her neighbours and local women, Anne ignored the church’s order and continued to deliver women of their babies.  Anne’s combative and direct approach, along with the concerns of her neighbours offers a fascinating opportunity to study midwifery care, community and neighbourly interactions, and narratives of women’s skill and occupational responsibility in the early modern North.

[1] Cheshire Archive Service, EDC 5/1663/16.

Sarah Birt, ECR Fellow

Shops on the Strand: women in business in early modern Westminster, 1600-1740

The early modern period witnessed significant metropolitan expansion, which saw London’s population rise dramatically. The Strand, an important thoroughfare connecting the City of Westminster to the City of London, developed as a lively site of commerce. The New Exchange, opened in 1609, and the Exeter Exchange, built in 1676, were established as new locations for retailing beyond the boundaries of the City, featuring shops run by women and men. Key changes therefore took place in retailing in this period, with women retaining an important role in this process. This paper introduces ‘Shops on the Strand’, a postdoctoral research project by Dr Sarah Birt, which was funded by the Women’s History Network in 2020-2021.

Elizabeth Barnes, ECR Fellow

Refugees and Officers: narratives of race, gender, and sexual violence during the American Civil War, 1861-1865

As enslaved women fled plantations and crossed Union lines during the American Civil War, they encountered a new system of justice. Previously denied legal protection against sexual violence, the Black women who lived under US Army jurisdiction were able, for the first time, to seek redress for the crimes committed against them. The resulting court martial files offer a wealth of information about attitudes towards race, gender, and rape within the US Army – a force ostensibly fighting against slavery but as impacted by prevailing racist thought as all other areas of American life. This paper examines the comments that senior officers left on the trials of white men convicted of sexually assaulting Black women, highlighting how the realities of the war shaped these men’s views. Frequently, officers expressed outrage, indignation, and disgust at the ways their juniors treated formerly enslaved women. This outrage rarely translated into action, however: conviction rates and sentences were low, and Black women remained especially vulnerable to violations by soldiers. This gap between rhetoric and reality offers one avenue for understanding the limits of emancipation and equality in the aftermath of the conflict.

Katie Holmes, Independent Researcher, www.RunYoung50.co.uk

“I would like to see women running as far as the toughest man”
Dale Greig and the women’s marathon

In 1964, women in the UK were not permitted to run further than 3 miles in cross country and one mile on the track. Road running was almost exclusively the preserve of men. Worldwide, women’s participation in athletics was limited by “myths about female biology and sporting potential” (Hargreaves, 1994). At the Tokyo Olympics in 1964, the longest distance for women was the 800m, for men it was the marathon. It was to be another 20 years before the women’s marathon appeared on the Olympics programme.

On 23rd May 1964, Dale Greig (1937-2019), an accomplished athlete from Paisley, became a rulebreaker when she competed against men in the Isle of Wight Marathon. Was Greig a determined trailblazer or a reluctant champion of women’s rights?

This session will set Greig’s decision to run a marathon in the context of the organisation of men’s and women’s athletics in the UK, the limited opportunities for women to compete in road races and the prohibition of women at the marathon distance.

Drawing on contemporary reportage, interviews given by Greig in later life and recollections of people who knew her, it will examine the tension Greig experienced between the social significance of the act of running the marathon and her personal motivations.