Surely some misapprehension? British women's rights to bank accounts

I was given a considerable jolt when reading this afternoon online that in the UK women were not allowed to open bank accounts until 1975. Since I had been encouraged in the habit of thrift from an early age to save my pennies in a Trustee Savings Bank account, and had transferred the sum thus accumulated to a chequing account with what was then the National Provincial when I went to university in the mid-1960s (I am really not sure how it is supposed women received grants, salaries, etc without a bank account by the 1960s!) I was quite astonished to be informed that I had not been permitted this, which I clearly remembered having.

In fact readers of Mrs Gaskell's charming novel Cranford (1853) will recall that the failure of the bank into which Miss Jenkyns had put the sisters' money forms an important element in such plot as the work has. Indeed the problem of joint-stock banks, and a caution against them, appears in a work published very shortly afterwards by 'A Banker's Daughter' (Emma Sophia Galton), Guide to the Unprotected in Every-day Matters Relating to Property and Income (1864):

A lady should not on any account take any Shares whatever in a Joint-Stock Bank, Mine, Partnership, or any other joint trading concern, unless it be established under the new “Limited Liability” Act, as otherwise she is liable to lose her last penny if the Bank or speculation should fail. Even if “limited,” they should not be invested in without the greatest possible caution, nor until after very careful inquiries have been satisfactorily answered.

The NatWest summary of 'Women in Banking' suggests that there were female customers of banks from their early days in the late seventeenth century while some women, members of banking families, actually became partners in the business.

That might be taken as, oh well, single women and widows, but it was different if women were married femmes couvertes who had no rights to their own money. That was certainly so up to the late nineteenth century, but the Married Women’s Property Act 1882 Clause 6 specifically states:

All deposits in any post office or other savings bank, or in any other bank, all annuities granted by the Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt or by any other person, and all sums forming part of the public stocks or funds, or of any other stocks or funds transferable in the books of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England, or of any other bank, which at the commencement of this Act are standing in the sole name of a married woman, and all shares, stock, debentures, debenture stock, or other interests of or in any corporation, company, or public body, municipal, commercial, or otherwise, or of or in any industrial, provident, friendly, benefit, building, or loan society, which at the commencement of this Act are standing in her name, shall be deemed, unless and until the contrary be shown, to be the separate property of such married woman; and the fact that any such deposit, annuity, sum forming part of the public stocks or funds, or of any other stocks or funds transferable in the books of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England or of any other bank, share, stock, debenture, debenture stock, or other interest as aforesaid, is standing in the sole name of a married woman, shall be sufficient prima facie evidence that she is beneficially entitled thereto for her separate use, so as to authorise and empower her to receive or transfer the same, and to receive the dividends, interest, and profits thereof, without the concurrence of her husband, and to indemnify the Postmaster General, the Commissioners for the Reduction of the National Debt, the Governor and Company of the Bank of England, the Governor and Company of the Bank of Ireland, and all directors, managers, and trustees of every such bank, corporation, company, public body, or society as aforesaid, in respect thereof. 

It is not beyond possibility (alas) that banks - or individual bank managers - may have instituted policies requiring women to get husbands to countersign when they opened accounts or tried to raise loans: but nonetheless women, single or married, in the UK - unlike, it would appear, their sisters in the USA or certain European nations up to the mid-twentieth century - were legally able to open bank accounts and have sole access to them.

 

 

It's not all about you

My attention was drawn to an article by an author about having being solicited to sell his papers (past and future) to a university archive and his musings about the relationship this bears to his existing and future literary reputation, the impact of the prospect of the preservation of his correspondence on his self-expression, etc.

Maybe it's because I'm a historian rather than a literary scholar, or maybe because I'm an archivist, but it's not necessarily the intrinsic value of the work of the individual that makes the papers interesting. It may be what people wrote to them, their circles and connections, what their papers tell us about relatively quotidien details of their life. Sometimes the papers of a relatively minor figure who was well-networked, or who kept scrapbooks or diaries, can be more informative than those of a major figure who didn't bother to keep things.

It's only relatively recently that most people routinely have a copy of outgoing correspondence, because they've saved the word-processed file of the letter, or because it all happens in email anyway. Certainly from at least the early twentieth century one does find some individuals (as well as people who needed to keep copies for business purposes) making carbons of their letters out, but on the whole this remained fairly rare. In the past a letter was despatched to its recipient, to be preserved, torn up, burnt, have shopping lists written on the back, etc and its survival as a record of the sender's thoughts and emotions a haphazard matter.

Embarrassing or revelatory letters or bundles of correspondence still do occasionally turn up.

A further thought about archives in general that was my takeaway from a fascinating workshop discussion on Women and Gender in the Archives at the Berkshire Women's History conference: the great extent to which discussion of archives of [x] all tend to end up with the same issues and problems common to all archives (which are not those of central government) - whether papers, of individuals or organisations, have been kept at all, if they have, how complete are they or has expurgation/damage occurred, the under-resourcing of archives, the importance (and the limitations) of cataloguing and provision of metadata, the digitisation question, the continuing fascination and importance of handling the originals, etc etc.

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

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.

Conference report and other cross-posts

I wrote up my report on the 'Women and Science' conference of the Women's History Network Midlands Region for the Wellcome Library blog.

Alice Copping of the Lister Institute, and friend

Other posts that I don't think I've previously flagged up here: There may be troubles ahead... on surprising connections between dance and reproductive health in the 1930s.

And one that seems quite out-dated, or least past its sell-by date now, now, on Sir Ludwig Guttmann of Paralympics fame.

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’

Women's History Network Conference 2011

This was an excellent conference and all credit to the organisers. Gratifying to report for a conference celebrating 20 years of the WHN annual conference, along with many of the old guard still going strong (indeed if memory serves I was at the 1991 conference in Nottingham) there were large numbers of newer and younger faces, which in view of the suggested decline in women's studies and women's history was an encouraging sign.

One general observation: this year panel presenters seem to have given more attention to the question, 'Is that PowerPoint really necessary?' - while there are many instances in which PowerPoint is indeed a boon (anyone who recollects the hassles involving slides, projectors, overhead transparencies etc realises that it does serve a purpose), last year I felt there was a certain amount of belief that every paper must have its PowerPoint, whether or not there was valuable visual evidence to be conveyed.

All the panels and papers I attended had something of interest about them. The panel I chaired on Sunday worked particularly well - although a couple of the papers were familiar to me from the Berks (Tim Jones on D Sherwin Bailey's theology of marriage and Jacqueline de Vries on Mary Scharlieb and sex education in the early 20th) with Sue Morgan's work on Maude Royden and Sex and Commonsense as well the conjunction went very well indeed and (like other papers I heard) reinforces the importance of taking another look at the role of religion and spirituality in the development of modern sexual discourses in the C19th and C20th.

The ancillary events were also splendid - the conference dinner at Toynbee Hall (and the catering generally), the evening reception for book launches and award presentation in The Women's Library exhibition space.

Conference-ing

Getting my head up from of the arduous and engrossing task of revising Sex, Gender and Social Change (holy cow, but there has been A LOT of relevant historiography happening since 1999) to make my more or less habitual trip to the Women's History Network Annual Conference (this year I'm even able to attend on all 3 days).

Not sure whether I shall be able to make the time to do a conference report, but the programme and abstracts are available here.

Forthcoming conference

Women's History Network Annual Conference
Friday 9th to Sunday 11th September 2011
20 Years of the Women's History Network
Looking Back - Looking Forward
At The Women's Library, London Metropolitan University.

I shall be giving a paper in the 'Sexualities' panel, 9.30-11 am on the Saturday.

UNESCO UK Memory of the World Register 2011

On 23 May 2011 twenty items and collections became the second round of inscriptions to the UK Memory of the World Register
It is extremely gratifying to see important collections relating to women's history in this batch - not only Documentary Heritage of the Women's Suffrage Movement in Britain, 1865-1928 (joint project of the Women's Library and the Parliamentary Archives), but the diaries of Anne Lister (at West Yorkshire Archive Service) - and also the Edinburgh and Lothian HIV/AIDS Collections, 1983-2010 in Lothian Health Services Archives).

Looking back at the Berks, before it all fades entirely

Panels I attended:
Friday:

'The True Sex? cases of gender ambivalence and their impact in Europe'; four papers, one on the various later  redeployments of the tale of Phaethousa the bearded lady in the Hippocratic corpus; two on cases of 'hermaphroditism' in late C19th Denmark (covering some of the same material but with a different slant); the case of Lili Elbe and her (posthumously created) autobiography Man into Woman. This was a tightly run panel that worked well. Papers very much about how society uses stories of gender ambivalence for various purposes.

'Healthy babies, healthy families: generations of health care in South Asia': this also had four papers, but could have done with rather stricter moderation as the session ran out of time - it was already at time when the discussant started to comment. This was a pity, because they were all very interesting pieces in themselves: the politics of milk and infant welfare in early C20th Madras; reconstructing ideas of masculinity and fatherhood in late C19th Bengal; the role of A Pillay and the Bombay-published International Journal of Sexology within mid-C20th sexology; the time and place-specific nature of a post-Partition translation/version of the Kama Sutra

Saturday:

'Love, Desire, Community and Friendship: reconsidering female same-sex relationships in the early to mid C20th': this was the panel I organised and spoke on. I think it went well - the room was encouragingly full, we all kept to time, and there was good discussion. But what would I know.

'Leatherwomen's histories: international perspectives from academic and public historians': 'international' in this context actually meant the USA and Canada (and I think one of the participants had worked on curating materials in Mexico) - however, it was clear that there were distinctive differences in history and that the crisis points were not the same in these two close and fairly culturally similar milieux. Panel also shed some light on the development of communities which seemed of much wider application (from a small group looking outward, or defining itself against that larger world, to a larger but less cohesive, even riven, group). Also, issues of marginalisation of certain categories within already marginalised groups.

'Contesting the boundaries of Christian sexuality': unfortunately one panelist had dropped out (English Catholics, contraception and the response to Humanae Vitae), but the two that were left worked very well together - one on Mary Scharlieb and her emphasis on the importance of sex education in the context of social purity, and  the other on D Sherwin Bailey's elaborate theology of marriage produced at more or less precisely the mid-point of the C20th. V useful.

Sunday:

The Sunday morning sessions were all round-tables with precirculated papers. I hadn't actually managed to read any of the papers, but I went to the excellent and wide-ranging 'Motherhood and the State in the waning age of Empire', which covered a broad geographical range and raised a lot of exciting questions about mothering, invisible labour, the role of the state, NGOs, race, class, colonialism, ambivalence responses to apparently coercive and colonialising practices, the impact of wider global phenomena on policy, etc etc etc.

Some intriguing looking conferences (which I doubt I shall be managing to attend)

Yorkshire Women’s History Network inaugural one-day conference ‘Women on Others/Women as Others’ on Saturday 25^th June 2011 at Leeds Trinity University College.

Our keynote address will be by Professor Alison Oram (Leeds Met), and the schedule for the day is as follows:

8:45 Registration

9:15 Welcome

9:30 Keynote: Prof Alison Oram

10:30 Tea/Coffee break

11:30 Strand A: The Other at the fin-de-siècle

Ann Heilmann, (University of Hull), ‘The New Woman in China’

Grainne Goodwin, (Leeds Metropolitan University), ‘The othering of women writers professional sociability at the fin-de-siècle through the experiences of Flora Annie Steel’

12:30 Lunch

13:30 Meeting to Discuss the formation of the Yorks WHN

14:00 Strand B: Other languages, Other selves

Alison Torn, (LTUC), ‘Women & Madness: pre-Enlightenment and post-enlightenment examples of resisting and using the other

Baptiste Moniez, (Canterbury Christ Church University), ‘Other s among Others: British Single Missionary Women and the Cultural ‘Other’’

Mehdi Damali Amiri, (Bualisina University, Hamedan, Iran), ‘Women and their Hidden Idenity’

15:00 Tea/Coffee Break

15:30 Strand C:

Susan Anderson and Di Drummond, (LTUC), ‘Constructing and Reconstructing ‘The Other’: Changing Representations of Indian Women in British Imperial Discourses of the Sixteenth and Eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’

16:30 Close

Full conference registration, inclusive of lunch	£25
Student/unwaged concession conference registration, inclusive of lunch	£15

For further details and registration forms please contact Julie Wadsworth

j.wadsworth@leedstrinity.ac.uk

Midwifery in Scotland: Past and Present

2 June 2011

An Event to Celebrate the Launch of

Midwifery in Scotland: A History

by

Lindsay Reid

Speakers:

Ruth Honeybone, LHSA Paper Conservator

‘Midwifery Records in Lothian Health Services Archive’

Debbie Nicholson, University of West of Scotland,

‘Womb with a View’: Transforming ultrasound into a consumer technology

Book Discussants:

Cathy Warwick, General Secretary, Royal College of Midwives

Christine Hallett, University of Manchester

Iain Hutchison, University of Glasgow

From: 1.30-4.30

In: G3-4, School of Health in Social Science

The University of Edinburgh

Medical School

Teviot Place

Edinburgh EH8 9AG

If you haven’t already, please book by sending £10 to Margaret Lynch, De Partu Treasurer, University of Manchester, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social Work, University Place, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

SPORT AND GENDER WORKSHOP

Hosted by the International Football Institute, University of Central Lancashire

&

The British Society of Sports History

Friday 10

th June, 2011

Time Location: Greenbank Building, University of Central Lancashire

9:30 – 10:00 Registration and Refreshments

10:00 – 11:30 Panel 1: Women and Sport: Prejudice and Progress

Speakers:

Catherine Budd (De Montfort University)

"Entirely out of Their Sphere, and Calculated to Unsex Them in More Ways

than One!" Women and Sport in Middlesbrough, c.1880-1914

Carlos Caracciolio (National Institute for Geophysics and Volcanology, Italy):

Bicycles and Women (without Forgetting Men): Notes for an Italian History

Michelle Sikes (University of Oxford):

Absence, Emergence, Permanence: Conceptualising Social Change through the

Prism of Women's Running in Kenya

11:30 – 12:00 Break

12:00 – 1:30 Panel 2: Physical Culture, Gender and the Body

Speakers:

Sue Ash (Oxford Brookes University):

'Fit' Women: Aesthetic Movement or Eugenic Exercise in Early Twentieth

Century Britain?

Eilidh Macrae (University of Glasgow):

Conflicts of Fitness and Femininity: The Negotiation of Appropriate

Female Space in the 1937 Scottish Fitness Campaign

Veronique Czaka (University of Geneva/University of Lausanne):

Constructing Gender through Gymnastics at School: Discourse and Practice in

West Switzerland, 1860-1920

1:30 – 2:30 Lunch

2:30 – 4:00 Panel 3: 'Troubled' Masculinities and 'Subversive' Femininities

Speakers:

Sergio Lussana (University of Warwick)

'The Great Wrestler Can Win Laurels': Enslaved Fighting Contests and

Expressions of Masculinity in the Antebellum Southern United States

Dr Jean Williams (De Montfort University)

Speaking Softly: Roberta Cowell's Autobiography, Gender and Identity

Dr Stacey Pope (University of Bedfordshire )

'White Shoes to a Football Match!': Female Experiences of Football's 'Golden

Age' in England

4.00 – 4:30 Break

4:30 – 5:30 Round Table: Sport and Gender: Future Directions

Speakers:

Dr Carol Osborne (University of Cumbria)

Dr Fiona Skillen (University of Central Lancashire)

Dr Jean Williams (De Montfort University)
Dr Joyce Kay (University of Stirling)

Dr Fiona Skillen, FSkillen@UClan.ac.uk
International Football Institute, School of Sport, Tourism and the Outdoors Room 152,

Greenbank Building, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, PR1 2HE. Closing Date 20th May 2011.

Updates, website and other

No major updates of recent weeks - mostly either tidying up entries for events gone by or adding new info about forthcoming conferences etc - but I have added the following links

Women's History Sources to the Women's History Links page under Research Resources

a collaborative blog that serves as a current awareness tool for anyone
who is interested in primary sources at archives, historic sites and
museums, and libraries. Although there is an emphasis on U.S. women's
history, our goal is for the blog to be international in scope.

And the page for Abortion in the The Literature, Arts, & Medicine Database annotated multimedia listing of prose, poetry, film, video and art to my own Literary Abortion page.

Further on the subject of research resources, it may be worth mentioning that my short article on finding female health workers in the archives has come out in the most recent issue (no 65, Spring 2011) of Women's History Magazine.

International Women's History Month Project: A Quote a Day

I'm picking these from the large selection that I've been posting since 1999 weekly on my website, not all of them by women, but a large number of them have been.

To kick off, who other than Stella Browne, who featured very early on after the inception of that enterprise, with the following:

A political system which denies women alike equality of opportunity and adequate special protection; an economic system which is iniquity and waste incarnate; and sexual institutions founded on the needs and preferences of a primitive type of man alone, and now in their debacle, creditable and satisfactory to neither sex - these can have no moral claim on women's bodies as instruments of propagation.

Stella Browne, 'Women and birth control' (1917)

from one of her perhaps lesser-known writings (not that any of it is terribly well-known, but Sexual Variety and Variability in Woman gets an occasional mention, as does the one on female inversion, and the 1935 essay on abortion).

Yet another forthcoming appearance

A Wellcome Library 'Insights' session, for which they have got my title slightly wrong on the website - what I told them was 'Women, health and healing':   what they have put is Women, Healing and Health (I have no idea why, all they had to do was cut and paste the title from my email, though it doesn't, I suppose, make any significant difference to the sense).* Anyway, this is happening on 10 March 2011, 15.00 - 16.00. The event is free but numbers are limited. It consists of an illustrated talk and the opportunity to get up close and personal with a selection of relevant archives, manuscripts, and other Library materials.

It will be reprised on 14th April at 18.00-19.00 hours

*Word is (15/2) that this will be changing next time the site publishes

A great idea, but do I have time to get involved?

WikiProject Women’s History - the actual Wikipedia Project Proposal Page is here.

This is further to recent concerns apropos of the under-representation of women both in Wikipedia articles and in the editorial process.

Given that Wikipedia is often the entry point into a topic for many online searchers, it would indeed be desirable to have more there on women's history, individual women, etc, with, one profoundly hopes, links to the perhaps less immediately obvious material that's out there.

However, do I, personally, at the moment, have time to get involved in this? The next month or so is particularly hairy, but when that flurry dies down, I really need to focus a) on getting my paper for the Berks from the idea to the actuality b) moving forward with the new edition of Sex, Gender and Social Change.

Putting it about

Have just been beefing up my profile, lists of publications and research interests/areas of expertise on the Women's History Network website. Given that there are an increasing number of media enquiries getting forwarded via the WHN mailing list, I might as well have the information on that site to refer people to (or for them to spontaneously find).

There really is more and more extremely useful stuff on the WHN site generally: lists of conferences and events, including the activities of the various regional networks, member publications, forthcoming women's history related programmes on TV and radio, links to related sites. Okay, it's not quite the one-stop shop for everybody's women's history needs (not that anything could be), but it's a very useful point of departure.