Yet more getting out more

I managed to get to two seminars at the Institute of Historical Research this week.

On Wednesday I went to hear Angela Davis on 'Gradual Separations and Substitute Mothers: The Influence of Anna Freud's Hampstead War Nurseries on Post-War British Childcare Provision and Practic' in the Psychoanalysis and History series.This is part her much larger project on childcare provision and I realised that I had already heard her speak on other aspects of post-WWII childcare provision. This was an excellent paper on the very particular approach taken by Anna Freud's Hampstead nurseries, which were geared towards child observation and research along with care for children in what were often, given the period fairly dire straits requiring it. Apparently it was always heavily oversubscribed with waiting lists. Its findings had a significant impact on post-war nursery policies in the UK (though on reflection, I note that recent opposition to proposed changes in staffing levels in nurseries has focused almost entirely on the physical and organisational problems, rather than the issues around attachment and psychological security that were central to Freud and Burlingham's work).

There was a good deal of lively discussion, including personal experiences such as the very different approach taken in France (where of course there is a rather longer tradition of childcare outside the home), and bad personal memories of another North London nursery at about the same period, run by idealistic Communists with an ideological commitment to collective childcare.

The following evening I attended the Modern British History seminar, at which Selina Todd gave a very rich presentation on 'Post-war British people...was it ever that good? Working Class Life in England postwar', which tended to confirm my own arguments, coming from a rather different angle, that far from being cosy and complacent, the 1950s were a good deal less stable and about the haven of the stable familial household than the usual narrative suggests. Todd's work (I am now longing to read her forthcoming book on the working classes in C20th Britain) indicates that there was an assumption that the full employment of the post-war era and the advent of the Welfare State meant that poverty was no longer an issue and indeed this tended to drop out of discussion. Todd, however, found that while working class families were tending to be better-off than in the 1930s, and more able to purchase consumer goods, this came with long hours of hard work and overtime for the head of the family, fears of job loss, taking less congenial but better paid jobs, 'housewife' shifts for mothers, and the 'never-never' hire-purchase of newly available luxuries under the threat of repossession if payments could not be kept up. Social mobility through education was still low, though parents were determined to improve the position of their children. There were many questions during the discussion session and quite possibly discussions could have gone on even longer.

Further on Project getting out more

This week I managed to get to the IHR Life-Cycles seminar (which was rather distressingly thinly attended, I wonder why this was?), Ishita Pande, (Queen’s University, Ontario) talking on 'Sorting Boys and Men: Unlawful Intercourse, Boy Protection and the Child Marriage Restraint Act in Late Colonial India', with particular reference to the 1929 Act passed by the Legislative Assembly brought into being ten years earlier by the Government of India Act (and thus not simply a top-down imperialist measure). Whereas the earlier debates on and legislation to do with child marriage had been about the protection of girls and women (and the child-widow problem) this act incorporated the concept of boys as also in need of protection. While Pande indicated that the act was relatively ineffective (because of the importance of child-marriage within the broader joint family system) with fairly few cases brought under it, and these tending to deploy it for other agendas, she suggested that it reflected a shift from concerns specifically to do with the protection of women to the idea of children and childhood in general as a protected zone.

On Friday I managed, for the first time in rather a long while (since these usually take place on working afternoons), to get to the Critical Sexology seminar at Queen Mary University of London, on Sex and Pedagogy.  This included three fascinating presentations on the theme, ranging from the use of erotica to convey advice and safer sex messages, via pedagogical techniques for providing safe spaces for sex positive sex education to young people, to teaching sexually-charged material in the university classroom. (Live-tweeted). This was a thought-provoking afternoon which generated many thoughts and questions, and there was much lively and provocative discussion.

Project getting out more

In the past couple of weeks I managed to get to two excellent seminars at the Institute of Historical Research.

I don't think I've ever been to the Sport and Leisure History seminar before, but was tempted by Michelle Johansen's 'Good Feeling and Brotherliness: Leisure, the Suburbs and the Society of Public Librarians in London, 1895-193', which turned out to be extremely interesting and evoked a lot of fascinating questions. The cultural place of the oft-stigmatised 'suburbs' is surely overdue for historical re-evaluation, and the public librarians discussed by Johansen were pivotal figures in creating vibrant cultures of leisure and recreation both in the areas in which they were librarians and in their professional association. Their class origins were also fascinating: the kind of lower-class self-improvers for whom public libraries were intended, though with what appears to have been a significant degree of status anxiety, such as tweaking their family backgrounds a notch or two higher on the social scale.  A downside to this group, however, was that they had all achieved the pinnacle of their profession (i.e. head of a London or metropolitan borough library service) at relatively young ages (late 20s/30s) and basically had nowhere further to go - it was not a jumping-off point for other areas of librarianship - so they tended to stay there blocking opportunities for more recent incomers to the profession. I also had a slight cavil with the notion that public library users were either recreational readers or earnest self-improvers - I think it probable that those are two reasons for using libraries that could have been combined at different times and in varying proportions in the same individual.

I have more often been to the Life-cycles seminar in which last week there was a riveting paper by Hilary Marland (even though I missed the beginning due to a confusion over rooms in Senate House and nearly ended up at the Latin-American seminar by mistake), 'Managing Health, Managing Behaviour: Health and Girlhood in Britain, 1874-1920', which brought a good deal of nuance and complexity to ideas around girlhood, exercise, and health at a time of rapid social change and new roles for women. She demonstrated that while there was a good deal of concern expressed about the dangers of new forms of sport being indulged in by the adolescent girl there was also a new paradigm of the fit and healthy young female body being contrasted to the fainting wan mid-Victorian specimen and fitting in to the wider fin de siecle anxieties about national fitness. 

I thought that I had, regretfully, due to work commitments, had to miss a paper on Anna Freud's war nurseries and their influence in the Psychoanalysis and History series, but in fact that is not happening until next month.

Trying to get out more

I was thinking the other day of the times back when I had just begun working at what was then the Wellcome Institute, and the huge number of associated seminars and symposia I used to attend, whether or not they related directly to my own academic concerns (the remembrance that brought this to mind was of a seminar on, to the best of my recollection, Biblical views on leprosy). This is something that has rather fallen by the wayside of recent years.

Now that the pressure which did not seem to relent during pretty much the whole of 2012 has let up a bit, and given that there are currently a number of attractive seminar series at the Institute of Historical Research, just down the road, I am trying to schedule in getting to at least some of them.

The Life-Cycles Seminar has some intriguing offerings this term: last week I went to Victoria Bates' '"The Breakers that Separate Childhood from Youth": Medicine and Sexual Development in Late-Nineteenth and Early-Twentieth Century Britain'. Although rather thinly atttended, it generated a vibrant discussion around puberty in history. I'm hoping to get to a couple of the others.

Yesterday evening, at the Psychoanalysis and History seminar, Chris Waters gave a very rich presentation on

'Edward Glover and the Politics of Homosexual Law Reform'. There was a lot in this paper, but one of the take-home reflections was the tension between Glover's belief (he was a strict Freudian and in this he followed Freud) that homosexuality was not a disorder to be cured, and, increasingly, that any problems gay men had were largely to do with societal homophobia, and the requirements of the situation in his day that making a case for psychiatric referrals of men accused of homosexual conduct was a humane expedient to avoid imprisonment on the one hand, and, on the other, the use of chemical castration (as in the case of Alan Turing - Waters made some passing comments on this cause celebre which make one eager to read the book of which this and the Glover material will form part). The condemnation of the psychiatrisation and medicalisation of homosexuality in the post-1967 era demonised figures who had been doing work that fed into the Wolfenden Report recommendations and thus led to decriminalisation. A number of other intriguing seminars are forthcoming in this series. Other IHR seminar series that are tempting me are Modern British History and Sport and Leisure History, although there is nothing much in the current Women's History schedule that speaks to my particular interests. I also draw attention to the Archives and Society series, in particular the seminar on 26th February at which my Wellcome colleagues will be presenting on 'Ethics, Access and Digitisation'.

Forthcoming appearances

18th May giving a brief talk on the diversity of women's lives in the early C20th in the context of the 'Edwardian Evening' event in connection with the HM Bateman exhibition at the Cartoon Museum, Bloomsbury

22nd June keynote speaker at 'Health and Welfare in the Archives': A Symposium at the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast

12th July Exploring the History of Sexualities at the Wellcome Library (event organised as one of the Raphael Samuel History Centre Archive Days, currently focusing on LGBT sources)

7th -9th September Women's History Network 21st  Annual Conference Women, State and Nation: Creating Gendered Identities  (presenting a new piece of work ' Between the Waves: feminism's forgotten decade?' on the 1930s)

10th-12th September Emotions, Health and Wellbeing – Society for the Social History of Medicine Summer Conference (presenting my paper '“Sentimental follies” or ‘instruments of tremendous uplift”? contrasting views of women’s same-sex relationships in interwar Britain')

13th November giving a seminar in the 'Public and Private Traditions of Eugenics' series at Oxford Brookes University, ‘“Send in the Clones”? Naomi Mitchison (née Haldane)’s Musing on Reproduction, Breeding, Feminism, Socialism and Eugenics from the 1920s to the 1970s’

Sir Henry Wellcome's sexual objects

On Wednesday I went to the Classical Archaeology Seminar at the Institute of Classical Studies in London at which Jennifer Grove (Univeristy of Exeter) was speaking on 'Henry Wellcome's Classical Erotica: sexually related antiquities collected for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in the early C20th'.

This was a very interesting seminar on collecting, museums and the display of objects with sexual connotations. There is something of a perception that Wellcome was a rather undiscriminating collector and that he also acquired a good deal of material of non-medical interest through buying up job lots which dealers had carefully salted with one or two medical items. In fact it turned out that he was specifically acquiring in the area of classical sexually-themed objects and the collection (before it was dispersed) had nearly 1000 of these.

At least in the case of the sexual objects of European Classical Antiquity, it appears that he saw these as falling within wider paradigms of medicine and the maintenance of life and health, in particular the (mostly phallic, but some vulval) amulets and votive objects. These were displayed alongside other amulets within the museum context, at a time, intriguingly, when most museums were still segegrating any material of a sexual nature into secret cabinets and closed collections, rather than displaying it alongside related materials of a non-sexual nature with which it might originally have been associated.

This was presumably possible for Wellcome's museum as he very much positioned it as a place of research and study rather than a public show of entertaining curiosities: although it did receive large numbers of visitors, including school-groups, one wonders whether these were carefully escorted and guided around the galleries rather than running around freely with check-sheets like contemporary school groups in museums.

I was also struck, given that Wellcome's intended audience was the medical profession and scholarly disciplines such as anthropology, by the similarity to the ways in which works of sexology were being published during the same period, with titlepage provisos that they were for the medical/legal professions and serious scholars only (which it is clear a number of booksellers took as guidance). There also seems an intriguing shift from erotic/sexual materials being seen as the province of the gentleman connoisseur (who could bribe his way or at least use social capital to get into secret collections, as well as purchase limited editions of pornographic works) to the realm of the medical and scientific.

However, while the classical sexual objects in Wellcome's collections clearly fit into a model of the religious/spiritual/superstitious approach to medicine, and were about the vital powers of fertility and reproduction, some of the other erotic items (for example the box of Japanese tortoiseshell sex toys currently on display in the Medicine Man exhibition in the Wellcome Collection)

raising rather more puzzling questions about how these fit into the wider paradigms of the collection.

Various forthcoming events

International Cultures of Anatomical Collections Conference, Leiden, 15-17 February 2012

The Poynter Lecture at the Wellcome: Shocking Bodies 21 March 2012, 18.00 - 19.00

And also Wellcome related: Classical Archaeology Seminar at the Institute of Classical Studies in London: Jennifer Grove (Exeter) - Henry Wellcome's Classical Erotica: sexually related antiquities collected for the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum in the early 20th C, Feb 22, 5.00 pm in Senate House South Block Room G22/26 (email organiser in advance)

The Queens of Eltham Palace – LGBT History Month | English Heritage

New Histories of Love and Romance, c.1880-1960 25-26 May 2012 University of Glamorgan, Cardiff

  

'Women in Magazines' conference at Kingston University, London, on 22-23 June 2012

Regulating Sex

I managed to get to this event at the British Academy, organised by the Onscenity Research Network, yesterday afternoon. It was a terrific session full of informative stuff and thought-provoking insights that I'm still mulling over.

There were several places where I felt that there were points that could be historicised and generalised - e.g. Laura Agustin's problematising of 'state feminism' in Sweden. This resonated with me on the one hand with some of the rather dubious alliances of the late C19th-early C20th British social purity movement with institutions of the state or 'governmentality', and the problems of feminism in engaging with any state/other institution which has long traditions and practices which are the reverse of feminist, but may see circumstantial benefits in making apparent concessions (dangers of co-optation of agenda). On the other, I was also reminded of my readings appertaining to venereal disease control and the regulation of prostitution in Sweden and my sense that for a very long time it has been highly invested in state regulation of matters which in other countries were managed in rather different ways, from laissez-faire to delegation to other authorities (medical, police, etc). I was additionally reminded of Stella Browne's acerbic comments about certain feminists of her own day and their 'mania for prohibition': in terms of internal differences within feminism, that trend still seems to be depressingly healthy.

Re questions about censorship and prostitution, there seemed to be a couple of issues similar to those I've found around sex education. Not just the whole 'we've got to protect the kiddies' thing which has been pretty much central to the development of the law on censorship in the UK and has been so pernicious a mindset around sex-ed since the 1880s, but also the fact that, even if the bulk of the public takes a relatively liberal line and can be demonstrated by surveys to do so (e.g. Isobel Allen's stats on parents' desire for children to receive sex education in schools) it only takes one person drumming up a disingenuous moral panic in the press to derail liberalising initiatives, get questions asked in parliament, a following of at least a handful of equally vociferous objecters, etc.

Attending the following event

Regulating Sex, a seminar on sex and regulation at the British Academy in London on 1 February 2011 from 1400 to 1700:
The seminar focuses on the regulation of sex in relation to three key areas: media, labour and the internet.
Speakers
* Laura Agustin, author of Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry (2007)
* Yaman Akdeniz, author of Internet Child Pornography and the Law (2008)
* Martin Barker, author of The Video Nasties (1984), Ill Effects: The Media-Violence Debate (2001), and The Crash Controversy (2001)
Julian Petley, author of Censoring the Word (2007) and Censorship: A Beginner’s Guide (2009) will introduce and chair the event.
The seminar is organized by the AHRC funded Onscenity research network. If you would like to attend, let Feona Attwood know before 20 January: f.attwood@shu.ac.uk.