Introductory post

Decided that it might be a good idea to have a blog linking to my website. People have asked me whether there's any way to find out when pages on my site are updated, so this can be a place where I note changes and updates to Lesley Hall's Web Pages. It's also a place where I could post updates on my academic activities - publications, forthcoming conferences etc I'm attending, media appearances, etc (NB the media don't always tell me when my 30 seconds of fame is going to go out).

Over the course of time this blog has got a bit more discursive than the above might suggest, and now includes occasional book reports, impressions of conferences, seminars  and other events attended, and thoughts more generally on archives, history, and other matters within the general remit.

Unglamorous but necessary

Yet another thing that archivists suspect is under-appreciated by, if not completely unknown to, the general public, is the central importance of cataloguing to what they do. (Even if is also the activity that tends, frustratingly, to be the one that gets pushed down the priority list by more immediate demands.)

One still finds people who make an initial contact, or just come in, and think that the way to engage with an archive is to start with the first box and go until they reach the last file in the last box.

A good catalogue performs the function of the London Tube map in providing an overview and showing how the items within the collection are related to one another. It will probably also include helpful background information on the person or institution and a general account of the collection, what it contains, notable gaps, state of order when found, etc.

A recent post by a colleague on the Wellcome Library blog draws attention to the importance of the contextual information about the individual item that the classic archive catalogue provides, and the impact of new online approaches, their advantages and disadvantages.

Another message of caution pertaining to archives

Organisations usually already have archives, and the priority, if they are worried about the preservation of their history, is to do something about those archives that they are sitting on. It's a nice flourish to run around collecting oral histories from aging individuals who have been associated with the organisation from the outset, or at least for a very long time, or to ingather bits of memorabilia. But it's not the most vital thing.

The core action point should be to talk to an archivist about the existing archives. It doesn't necessarily have to be an archivist whose repository might take the archives, just somebody who can give the essential advice about physical storage, what to keep and what to throw away, and someone who can advise on what repositories might be interested,  from either local or thematic collecting policies.

The next thing is to get those archives into decent storage (and preferably not one of the more expensive commercial storage firms) rather than the coal cellar or the loft where pigeons have started roosting and to which entry is restricted to able-bodied persons who can manoeuvre up the rickety drop-down ladder and through the hatchway.

It is always possible that it is quite feasible for the archives to be retained in a secure and safe manner on site, catalogued on the premises (preferably by a qualified archivist, or at least with professional input), and made available for ongoing research by interested parties. In most cases this is likely to present problems (archives take up space which may well be at a premium, who is going to deal with researchers, etc) , and negotiations should be opened with an archival repository.

If an organisation wants its history to be reliably preserved, its records need to be in a secure store with appropriate environmental controls, and the intellectual control over what's there needs to be gained via cataloguing, or at least, an adequate inventory identifying what's there and where it is located.

Once this end has been attained, it provides a sound basis for all those other activities.

Possibly I am in unduly pedantic mood

Over the past few hours on Twitter I have irked by some simplistic or unthought-through invocations of history.

Just because something has not happened before during one particular (youngish) person's lifetime, doesn't make it a unique phenomenon in history. It is one that can probably even be discernable with other people's living memory (what about the 'New Poor' between the wars or the Great Depression?)

The 1890s/1910s were not a period of uncomplicated British Imperialistic confidence and triumphalism.

Just because a method of contraception exists, doesn't mean that everybody, everywhere, will have access to it, particularly if it's a pharmaceutical product, which will a) be subject to national or regional regulatory licensing systems as to whether it may be prescribed b) is under the control of the medical profession.

Possibly more than six and sixty ways

Thinking about a conversation I had last week, I wonder how many times I have been asked whether I have some appropriate qualification relevant to the subject matter of the archives I catalogue. To which I think any archivist would respond that there are basic principles of archival practice and it doesn't really matter what you deploy them upon, providing it's an archive of some sort. Actually, I think this has mostly arisen in the context of am I a proper medical doctor (no, my PhD is in fact in history of medicine, so perhaps I am licensed to apply leeches when needful...). I don't think anyone assumed, when I was at the India Office Records, that everybody there was an Old India Hand or had even visited it in the days when it was at the end of the Hippy Trail. (It does help to have some knowledge rather than a completely blank slate to work with.)

That having been clarified, people may want to know if there are rules for cataloguing a particular archive, to which the response is usually, it depends. Just because a particular arrangement was appropriate for one archive, doesn't mean that it can be generalisable to all archives, because every archive is unique, and probably idiosyncratic, outside of certain bureaucracies which stick to protocols laid down in the heyday of public administration. Individual repositories may have local conventions, and certain kinds of records may fall into recognisable structures. But particularly when dealing with personal papers, anything goes, or can go.

There is no secret handshake

It irks archivists when people talk about 'hidden gems' in the archives, because this lazy cliche tends to mean items which are in fact in the catalogue and may well have been publicised, but have not previously come to the attention of the individual who invokes this expression.

I am not entirely sure whether it is the same people who talk about hidden gems who think that in order to access the riches of an archival collection they need to speak to an archivist, preferably in person. That's actually what catalogues are for. An archivist can probably give you a general sense of what is in a collection, and possibly even more important, what isn't. But on the whole, the information on what we know about any given collection will be included in the catalogue description. I have processed many collections of archives during my career, and not all of them are entirely fresh in my memory by now, should you ring up and ask me about them.

On the whole, and doubtless with some exceptions, what archivists like to do is get the usable information about their holdings out there where people can look at it themselves. It should not be necessary, given a well-run archive, to need to know a specific name and possibly have a secret handshake ready in order to find out what they've got.

Or maybe this is just a version of 'do my research for me': the hope that talking to the archivist will obviate the need to actually look at the archives.

A couple of interesting events in the near future

Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction (IWR9)

15 November 2013, 09:30 - 17:30

CRASSH, Seminar room SG1, Ground Floor

• Description
• Programme

Limited places,  Online registration required 

Deadline to Register Online is: Friday 8 November at 3.00pm
Student fee £10.00
Full fee £12.00

CIRF’s 9th annual Interdisciplinary Workshop on Reproduction will focus on the theme ‘Communicating Reproduction’, with the aim of considering how reproduction is constructed and communicated within academic institutions and broader society. The workshop will explore this theme and promote contact and exchange among researchers working on various aspects of reproduction in different disciplines. The purpose of the workshop is to provide opportunities for productive interdisciplinary discussion and evaluation, and give speakers and audience members the opportunity to make interdisciplinary research connections, to share ideas, and to begin new collaborations.

Open to all, but places are limited. Please book online.

Fee include lunch, refreshments, and conference material.

AND

London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine
Keppel Street, London WC1E 7HT

Professor Simon Szreter (Cambridge University) , 'How much Venereal Disease was there in Georgian London? Can we estimate the population prevalence of STIs before the twentieth century?'

The venereal diseases feature strongly in Boswell's diary and consequently Georgian London has passed into literature and popular history as a byword for sexual licence. But is this at all justified as a general description of the capital and its population? Can we hope to know anything about the population prevalence of STIs in Britain before the twentieth century?

Simon Szreter presents new research undertaken in collaboration with Kevin Siena (author of Venereal Disease, Hospitals and the Urban Poor. London's Foul Wards 1600-1800)

The lecture will be chaired by Professor Kaye Wellings, LSHTM and the vote of thanks will be given by Professor Dame Anne Johnson, UCL.

Tuesday, 19th November 2013, 5.30 pm - 6.45 pm John Snow Lecture Theatre B, Keppel Street Building  (Followed by a reception in the Atrium)

ALL WELCOME!  RSVP to Ingrid James: Tel: 020 7927 2434  or email ingrid.james@lshtm.ac.uk

Funded by the Wellcome Trust 

An undesirable practice

Just had occasion to look something up in a recent work of popular, yet scholarly, history based on a great deal of archival research, since I remembered that when I read it the author mentioned consulting a certain archive at a particular repository.

However, in the 'List of Archives' at the end, all we get are the names of the various repositories, and absolutely no indication of what actual collections in any given repository had been consulted. This is something that strikes me as extremely bad practice. Most of the repositories listed (except where the onsite records of a particular organisation had been consulted) hold very large numbers of archival collections, and in many instances several which the author of this work might have consulted.

I did, in the end, manage to find the information I was seeking through trawling through the footnotes of the chapter in which the archive was most likely to have been referenced. But this should not be necessary.

At least, however, the information had been footnoted in reasonable detail. It is extremely annoying to archivists when scholars cite some item - sometimes not even the actual file, but a single letter within a file or volume - with no reference, except perhaps to the very large collection within which it might be found, or with no indication at all as to the specific collection, only to the repository as a whole. Furthermore, if scholars have been given access to uncatalogued or partially-catalogued material, it behooves them to be particularly meticulous in contextualising any material they cite so that in due course it can be located by other researchers.

Sex and the Medical Officer of Health

The Wellcome Library's exciting new project : London's Pulse: Medical Officer of Health reports 1848-1972 (post on the Library blog here) has opened up this enormously valuable resource to a wide range of researchers.

The responsibilities of the Medical Officer of Health were wide, ever increasing for many decades up to and beyond the inception of the National Health Service. However, it may not seem obvious that these reports have anything to offer to the historian interested in sexuality.

In fact, Medical Officers of Health were one group of the medical profession (rather like women doctors) who were taking an interest in the subject of birth control at a period when most doctors were reluctant even to talk about it, and a search across the London MOH reports demonstrates that at least some of their number were mentioning the topic (if not always with approval) from the early 1920s.

They had already been tabulating induced abortion among the causes of mortality within their areas for a much longer period.

Sexually transmitted infections were another public health concern and searching on 'venereal' or 'syphilis' or 'gonorrhoea' produces a substantial number of hits.

By the 1940s and 50s, Marriage Guidance had come to be seen as falling within the purlieu of the MOH's interests and work relating to sex education of young people also features.

There are therefore a number of intriguing research possibilities that spring to mind that could be based on this new resource.

My recent cataloguing activities

Recent posts at the Wellcome Library blog on collections/items I've been processing lately:

Having a ‘typewritten conversation’: one letter, but a long and important one, from Sir Robert McCarrison to George Scott Williamson and Innes Pearse of the Pioneer Health Centre, Peckham

The Blood is the Life: the Harrison-Howell Blood Transfusion Collection

‘One of the great leaders among medical women in India’  on the papers of Dr Margaret Ida Balfour, (1866-1945), CBE, MD, CM FRCOG.

Forthcoming conferences of interest (that I probably shan't manage to get to)

IN CONVERSATION WITH THE WOMEN’S LIBERATION MOVEMENT
October 12th 2013, British Library
A day of dialogues between Women’s Liberation activists and younger feminists.
Today Britain is experiencing a resurgence of feminist activity. From online activism to protests at the impact of government policies, women are on the march again. What is the relationship between this new feminism and the Women’s Liberation movement of a generation ago?
On October 12th the British Library will host a day of discussion on the British women’s movement. Inspired by the new ‘Sisterhood and After’ oral history archive at the BL, women’s liberationists will be talking about their experiences as feminist activists with younger women who are working on the history of second-wave feminism.
In sessions on race, sexualities, reproductive choice, the rise of women’s history, and class and work, we will both celebrate and critically examine British feminism and its legacies. There will be lots of time for audience members to pose their own questions and provide their own memories of the time, so we encourage anyone with an interest to attend. The day will close with a question: what now for the women’s movement?
For a full programme, please see below.
Tickets will be £15 for the day (£5 concession). Pre-booking is essential, through the British Library’s Box Office, which can be accessed online (http:/boxoffice.bl.uk), via telephone (+44 (0) 1937 546 546), or in person at the Information Desk at the British Library.
‘In Conversation with the Women’s Liberation Movement: Intergenerational Histories of Second Wave Feminism’ has been supported by the Sisterhood and After: an Oral History of the Women’s Liberation Movement project at the British Library, the University of Sussex, the Raphael Samuel History Centre, and the History of Feminism Network.
Programme:
9.30-10:00         Arrivals. Refreshments will be provided
10.00-10:30       Introductions
10:35-11:20       Session 1 Women’s History
Interviewees:  Sally Alexander and Catherine Hall
Interviewers:  Lucy Delap (King’s College, London) and Rachel Cohen (De Montfort)
11:25-12:10       Session 2 Reproductive Choices
Interviewees: Denise Riley and Jocelyn Wolfe
Interviewers: April Gallwey (Warwick) and Freya Johnson Ross  (Sussex)
12:10-13:10         Lunch (not provided; sandwiches can be purchased in the BL or locally)
13:10-13:55         Session 3 Sexualities
Interviewees: Sue O’Sullivan and Beatrix Campbell
Interviewers: Sarah Browne (Nottingham) and Charlotte Jeffries    (Cambridge)
14:00-14:45        Session 4 Race
Interviewees: Gail Lewis and Amrit Wilson
Interviewers: Nydia Swaby (SOAS) and Terese Jonsson (London Metropolitan)
14:45-15:15          Coffee Break
15:15-16:00           Session 5 Work and Class
Interviewees: Cynthia Cockburn and Lynne Segal
Interviewers: Bridget Lockyer (York) and Kate Hardy (Leeds)
16:05-16:30       Closing remarks: Susuana Antubam, Women’s Officer of the University of London  Union
Please contact Sarah Crook at s.r.crook@qmul.ac.uk or Signy Gutnick Allen at signy.t@gmail.com with any questions about the event.

Women as Wives and Workers: Marking Fifty Years of The Feminine Mystique
Saturday 30th November 2013 at Royal Holloway University of London

2013 marks the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique’s publication.  From the outset, Betty Friedan’s text had an enormous influence on academic and popular audiences, selling millions and shaping feminist discourse about the housewife throughout the Western world.  Yet at the same time, full-time housewifery was becoming both a less common experience and a cultural battlefield.  Since the 1950s, levels of employment amongst married women (notably white women) have risen enormously.  Women have increasingly been confronted with the ‘superwoman’ paradox, which Friedan herself encapsulated: writing about ‘the zombie housewife’ and ‘the problem that has no name’ whilst being a working wife and mother.  Many other women likewise negotiated domesticity and paid work, but their experiences were by no means uniform and were shaped by various other factors including race, age, sexuality and socio-economic status.
This conference aims to draw these themes together by offering an opportunity to explore The Feminine Mystique alongside discussions of women and employment.  Areas of consideration may include but are not limited to:
Women’s paid employment      
The Feminine Mystique, its impact and critiques, for example with regards to race
The international impact of The Feminine Mystique
Domesticity and the figure of the housewife: experiences, rights, cultural portrayals
Discourses of motherhood and fatherhood        
Evolving notions of family
Gender and education                                                 
Notions of ‘having it all’ and being ‘Superwoman’
The National Organization for Women: its impact, legacy and critics
The development of women's organisations and networks since the 1960s

We invite papers that address these topics either broadly or specifically. While papers with a particular emphasis on mid-twentieth century America may be given priority, we also encourage scholars to present work with a comparative perspective (across time and/or space) or looking at other geographical areas. Panel submissions are also welcome.  A special issue of History of Women in the Americas based on the conference papers is planned, subject to the usual peer review procedure.
‘Women as Wives and Workers: Marking Fifty Years of The Feminine Mystique’ is the sixth annual conference of the Society for the History of Women in the Americas (SHAW) and is being co-organized with The Bedford Centre for the History of Women at Royal Holloway University of London.  The conference organisers are Helen Glew (University of Westminster), Jane Hamlett (RHUL), Sinead McEneaney (St. Mary’s University College) and Rachel Ritchie (Brunel University).
A 250-word abstract and a short biography should be emailed to thefemininemystiqueat50@gmail.com by Monday 14th October 2013.  Please use the same email address for any other enquiries about the event.


Women’s History Network, Midlands Region:
Military Women
Saturday, 23rd November 2013, 10.30am-3.30pm, University of Worcester
Provisional Programme:
10.30am    Registration and Coffee
11.00am    Keynote address Title TBC
Dr Lucy Noakes, University of Brighton
12.00noon    ‘Arms and the Woman: Memories of Weapons Training in the Second World War’ – Dr Corinna Peniston-Bird, Lancaster University
12.30–1.30    Sandwich Lunch
1.30pm    'Handbags and Hand Grenades' – Dr Kate Vigurs, University of Leeds
2.00pm    ‘Captain Flora Sandes: From Croydon to the Trenches’ - Louise Miller, Independent scholar
2.30pm    ‘Cultural Transformation Associated with Women’s Integration into UN Peace Missions – Chilean Case Study’ - Fabiana Santa Rosa Pierre, PhD candidate, Universidad de Chile
3.00pm    ‘Gender in the Secret World: Women Workers and Secrecy at Bletchley Park during the Second World War’ - Dr Chris Smith, Aberystwyth University
Conference Fee:    £15
Concessions [unwaged/retired/postgraduate students] - £7.50
University of Worcester and local School/College students - Free
Postal address:    Dr Wendy Toon, Department of History, University of Worcester, Henwick Grove, Worcester, WR2 6AJ.
For further details, please contact: Dr Wendy Toon w.toon@worc.ac.uk or 01905-855305

An original misreading of the Labouchere Amendment

In spite of the amount of historiography there now is on homosexuality in C19th Britain and the ways it was controlled and policed, one still comes across people asserting that the 1885 Labouchere Amendment to the Criminal Law Amendment Act 'made homosexuality illegal' (even though male-male sex had been a capital crime until 1861 - with the last actual executions taking place in 1834 - when life imprisonment was substituted under the Offenses Against the Person Act).

But this is in entirely new realms of misunderstanding the Amendment:

An 1885 legal reform known as the Labouchere Amendment had an unforeseen loophole that suddenly made masturbation (as well as fellatio) legal. 

As if masturbation had previously been legal and as if the law had taken specific cognisance of fellatio before 1885. Variations on penetrative sex between two men had usually been subsumed under 'attempted sodomy' or 'indecent behaviour'. Demands for oral sex within marriage sometimes featured a part of a plea of cruelty in matrimonial cases.

But masturbation, as opposed to indecent exposure, was not illegal. The 'solitary vice' would surely have presented particular difficulties in policing. But, as I argue in Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain, 1880 to the present it provides a particularly striking example of a sexual behaviour which, though not illegal, was nonetheless highly stigmatised and subjected to other forms of control.

Perhaps the author of the article believes that the law mandated the imposition of similar preventive devices upon conviction?

Forthcoming appearances

Giant Microbes: Syphilis

'Sex and the City: The STDs of Old London Town' (scroll down) at History in the Pub, A London Historians Event, Tues 8 October, 7pm, doors open 6:30pm. The Bell, Middlesex Street, Spitalfields. Tube: Aldgate, Aldgate East or Liverpool Street. Booking form here

A version of this talk will be reprised at an event at Barts Pathology Museum, 18 Feb 2014, details tba


'“Send in the Clones”? Naomi Mitchison (née Haldane)’s Musing on Reproduction, Breeding, Feminism, Socialism and Eugenics from the 1920s to the 1970s', Cambridge Interdisciplinary Reproduction Forum Mon 4 No, 5 pm

Lucy Bland, Modern Women on Trial: Sexual Transgression in the Age of the Flapper (Manchester University Press, 2013)

I have fallen sadly behind in writing up my reading of recent months, but hope to repair this omission. Starting at perhaps the wrong end, i.e. the most recent book bearing on my general research interests read.

Lucy Bland's long-awaited follow-up to her classic and pioneering Banishing the Beast, Modern Women on Trial, does not disappoint. While some of the material may be familiar from the various articles and chapters she has previously published, this is not just one of those volumes which appear to consist of lightly-edited articles put together within one cover, and with the gentle reader apparently expected to draw out the connections between them. It is  a very good thing to have Bland's insights altogether in one volume and not to have to chase up  the original articles, but this book is a good deal more value-added than that. Modern Women on Trial effectively links the matter in the separate chapters together throughout, not just in a brief covering introduction or conclusion, by emphasising the common themes and threads that join these scandals and causes celebres of the period 1918-1924.

It is a very good read: I was reading it in the interstices and the aftermath of a fairly intense conference but still found it compellingly engaging.

The various cases dealt with are the Maud Allan 'Cult of the Clitoris' libel suit against the sleazoid journalist Pemberton Billing; the flurry of concern, focusing around the drug-related, or allegedly drug-related, deaths of two young women, the actress Billie Carleton and the dancer Freda Kempton, over 'white women' associating with 'Chinamen' as well as narcotic use by women; the well known trial of Edith Thompson and Freddie Bywaters for the murder of her husband; the shooting of her Egyptian husband by Madame Fahmy; and the extraordinary convolutions of the Russell divorce case. Several of these have been the subject of rather sensationalist popular accounts, but Bland provides a deeper analysis of the responses to these cases across a range of voices, and the resonances with wider social concerns of the time, in particular the changing roles of women, the allure and the threat of modern life, and the continuing impact of  the Great War upon British masculinity.

O O O Shakespeherean Rag

Yet more depressing news about a major library of a major educational institution selling off rare historical items for short term profit: The Director and Trustees of the University of London’s Senate House Libraries are proposing to sell copies of the Library’s first four Shakespeare folios

This is a very disturbing trend: what next, cherry-picking over collections of archives for letters signed by Famous Names that can be flogged off as autograph letters for immense sums? That's really not what care of a collection means.

It seems particularly egregious in the above case since Sterling provided an endowment when leaving his rare book collection to Senate House. As an archivist I thoroughly concede that cataloguing, storage and general collection maintenance are not insignificant invisible costs to accepting a collection. And that potential bequeathers should probably engage in discussions with the place they're intending to leave their stuff before they write the will. But Sterling appears to have done the right things.

Nor can I imagine that these folios are somehow not a good fit with the Library overall. I have certainly come across instances of collections in places which are perhaps not the most appropriate home - where they are one-offs, isolated from related special collections. The importance of the synergy between related materials cannot be over-estimated. Thought should always be given to whether a given repository is really suitable for any particular collection. But the Sterling Library at Senate House is 'an unusually integrated resource for research on the transmission of English literary texts from the 14th century to the present day.... an acknowledged international resource in its area'. How getting rid of well-known gems of the collection will add to its reputation I cannot imagine.

Women's Histories: the Local and the Global IFRWH/WHN conference 2013

This international conference held jointly under the auspices of the International Federation for Research in Women's History and the (UK) Women's History Network took place at Sheffield Hallam University, last Thursday to last Sunday, and what a very good, if sometimes overwhelming, conference it was.

There was a plethora of panels in a wide range of parallel strands, three excellent plenary lectures from Catherine Hall, Jacqueline van Gent, and Mrinalini Sinha providing much food for thought, and a concluding roundtable discussion: 'After the transnational turn: what future for nation-based histories of women?' There were also good informal discussions over coffee, tea, and lunch (and I really must praise the catering, even if there weren't any peppermint tea bags). A very rich experience altogether.

The big take-home thoughts were the complex 'entangled histories' that bring together the local and the global, that very specifically located micro-histories can illuminate transnational issues, and that bringing new actors into the narrative produces, or should produce, a new history with an altered perspective.

With 9 strands over 9 sessions there were surely many wonderful papers and discussions that I missed. However, I did get to a very exciting panel on 'Disentangling evangelical missionaries: gender, sexual and domesticity in globalised localities', the one on 'Prostitution in comparative perspective' (despite the loss of one speaker, this worked very well), and the extremely stimulating one on 'Art and the Making of Cosmopolitan Identities' which provided me with a lot of things I need to follow up. I had hoped to attend the 'Gendered professions, gendered challenges' panel but two speakers had had to cancel, so went to 'Imperial webs and the influence of women', in which I was particularly interested in the paper on female missionary doctors.

My paper on Stella Browne as an internationalist featured in the panel on 'British women internationalists at home', and I found Ruth Davidson's paper on the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom in Croydon raised some issues particularly pertinent to my own current interests. I was, however, feeling rather thwarted at being scheduled at the same time as the panel on 'Mixed-race children and their mothers' including Lucy Bland talking on GI babies after World War II, not to mention that there was also a panel I should have liked to have heard on feminist campaigns against licensed prostitution in the same slot. Always a problem with stranded conferences.

The panel 'Cultural exchange and imperial power'  continued the theme of complicating the missionary narrative. 'International political and cultural exchange among women: Australia and beyond' demonstrated yet again what very exciting work in this area is being done by Australian historians and what large questions it raises. Australia also featured in the very well-attended panel on Sunday morning that I chaired, 'Between Britain and Australia: transnational women's lives': with a very nice paper from Emma Robertson on British skilled women workers from Cadburys going out to Tasmania in the 1920s when the British chocolate firms set up a factory there, and one from Rebecca Jennings on the quite complex cultural exchanges involving Australian lesbians coming to London in the 1970s - this perhaps counter-intuitively revealed that the British women's and gay and lesbian liberation movements of the period were less important than encounters with other Australians passing through London, and with newly available publications from the US movement.

The social side of the conference included two receptions, and a conference dinner at the very impressive Cutlers' Hall.

Noted for own reference, and possible interest to others

Just around the corner at UCL, The Key Ingredient: Food in Social Relationships at The Institute of Archaeology, and Panopticon: Experimental Tales of Jeremy Bentham.

Via The Middlebrow Network:
Women writers of the 1930's - a one day course at the City Lit
Cultures of the Suburbs International Research Network, with information about its forthcoming conference next year on 'Imagining the Suburbs' 

Via Damaging the Body:
Body and Mind: Mesmerism in Nineteenth Century Culture and Literature at  Barts Pathology Museum

Via WISRNet
Revealing Lives: Women in Science 1830-2000 International Conference 2014
TrowelBlazers, which aims to both highlight the contributions of women to geology, palaeontology and archaeology ... while also building a positive, supportive community for women and men working together in those fields today

The pre-history of virtual communities

I was thrilled to see this guest post on the Kinsey Institute blog by Samantha Allen,  Plugged In: Sexual Fetish Communities 1970s to the present since it provides further evidence for something of which I have been aware, the existence of 'virtual communities' not necessarily mediated by face to face contact, going back well before the widespread use of the internet.

While as Allen makes clear it might take a certain amount of effort and know-how to obtain the niche publications she describes, they did exist and provided a point of contact between individuals with common interests.

Similar phenomena can be seen in a range of different areas, whether around limited circulation newsletters, somewhat more conventional periodical publications (the shortlived but influential radical feminist journal The Freewoman forms a prime example), or even correspondence clubs, such as the Cooperative Correspondence Club. The problem is, of course, that except in the case of journals such as The Freewoman, where copies survive in public repositories and the researcher can see the vibrant interchanges that took place via letters to the editor, archives of these kinds of material very seldom survive. Samantha Allen was fortunate that the Kinsey Institute had made a conscious effort to acquire the materials she worked with, while when I interviewed Rose Hacker on an entirely different matter and discovered that she still had the records of the CCC, I strongly advised her to contact a suitable repository (I think I may have mentioned what was then the Fawcett Library) to ensure that this valuable set of documents was preserved and accessible to future generations.

Although communications through these networks moved at a more leisurely pace, nonetheless, by these means, virtual communities were created.

Plugged In: Sexual Fetish Communities 1970s to the Present - See more at: http://kinseyconfidential.org/sexual-fetish-communities-internet/#sthash.YqoqRrP9.dpuf

Plugged In: Sexual Fetish Communities 1970s to the Present - See more at: http://kinseyconfidential.org/sexual-fetish-communities-internet/#sthash.YqoqRrP9.dpuf

Plugged In: Sexual Fetish Communities 1970s to the Present - See more at: http://kinseyconfidential.org/sexual-fetish-communities-internet/#sthash.YqoqRrP9.dpuf

Plugged In: Sexual Fetish Communities 1970s to the Present - See more at: http://kinseyconfidential.org/sexual-fetish-communities-internet/#sthash.YqoqRrP9.dpuf

Is this the birth of a factoid?

It's not Victorian, so doesn't really fit on my Victorian Sex Factoids page, but it's quite a doozy, nonetheless. It's bad enough when articles are 'researched' entirely via Google, but this one seems not even to have been run past Wikipedia

Last week an article in The Spectator asserted that Dr Helena Wright was providing an insemination service for women deprived of motherhood by the Great War.

As the very first comment below the line points out, a few seconds on Google would have shown that the story as given was patently impossible. Wright only qualified in medicine in 1915, and far from setting up a classy Knightsbridge practice, was doing the usual kind of hospital house jobs that were the lot of the recently-qualified doc, at fairly non-elite institutions at that. In 1921 she and her husband went to China as medical missionaries and did not return until the late 1920s, and it was only then that Wright set up a private practice, while also being active with the (already established) North Kensington Women's Welfare Clinic, a pioneer in birth control and marriage guidance provision.

Her manual of marriage advice - which was more about orgasms than motherhood - The Sex Factor in Marriage, did not appear until 1931. Not only, therefore, did she not have lots of grateful readers in the aftermath of the War, she was not even around in the UK to deal with their requests if she had been.

Her papers, and those of her biographer, Dr Barbara Evans, are available in the Wellcome Library.

This does not entirely rule out the veridicality of 'Derek' (this may well be a pseudonym for the purposes of the article anyway: so my cavil about this not apparently becoming a popular British forename until the C20th may be irrelevant) and his superstudly prowess, but the narrative within which it is embedded cannot possibly be true. I have, in fact, come across a mention of a scientist of that name who was a 'super-donor' but this would have been around the 1950s-60s (the Derek in question had barely reached puberty by 1920).

It is always possible that there has been some confabulation and chronological slippage - for example (as I noted in the relevant chapter of Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880) there was a minor furore around AI in the late 1940s, a decade before the setting up of the Feversham Committee by the government. Wrong War?

Wrong doctor? While Marie Stopes did, in the early editions of Married Love (1918), mention the possibility of AI (or non-A I by a sympathetic family friend) for women with infertile husbands, this passage was subsequently dropped, and few if any of the 1000s of letters received by her now in the Wellcome Library even mention the topic. It's quite possible that Norman Haire may have included it in his practice, but this is only speculation. Even by the late 1940s a mere handful of gynaecologists were providing AID to their infertile patients.

Digitisation: not the answer to the space problem with archives

There's recently been quite a furore about the controversial decision of Barnado's children's charity to digitise its remarkable collection of photographs by Dr Barnardo of the 'waifs and strays' whom he was providing with a refuge in Stepney, dating back to at least 1875. While digitising these will provide much wider access to this important collection, concerns have been raised that the original photographs were in line for destruction once this had taken place.

As I have previously commented, digitisation, though a tremendous asset in increasingly availability of historical records to those unable to visit them in person, cannot be considered a robust preservation medium. Photographic and other historians have also raised the issue that the originals may well provide evidence which is not going to be harvested through the digitisation process.

A post on the Voluntary Action History Society blog summarises the current state of play and raises the continuing issue of 'third sector' bodies which hold historical archives which are no longer relevant to their work in the present. While Barnardo's may no longer adhere to Dr Barnard's own practices, but is still closer in aim than some other bodies - the archives of the National Association for the Prevention of  Consumption (prior to their transfer to the Wellcome Library) remained in the custody of a successor body whose concerns had shifted considerably with the decline of TB as a pressing public health problem.

The blog post suggests the sale of the archive as one option, a strategy that raises significant concerns given that much of it must surely remain subject to Data Protection issues. However, it appears that there have been some expressions of interest in providing a home for the archive, and it is to be hoped that it will be placed in some suitable repository where it can be adequately cared for and made available for research.