Getting hysterical

Talking about the movie and actual medical practice with Lisa Appignanesi on Woman's Hour today

Harder to kill than Dracula?

Impending advent of the movie Hysteria has led to yet another resurgence of uncritical mentions of the Victorian doctors/vibrators factoid. Why historians find this popular assumption problematic. Though possibly the question to be asked is why this caught on so quickly and just keeps on spreading: probably to do with constructions of the Victorians as the epitome of sexual weirdness (concatenating ignorance, repression, and kinkiness), as discussed in my chapter in forthcoming volume edited by Kate Fisher and Rebecca Langlands, Sex, Knowledge and Receptions of the Past (Oxford University Press) .

As Kenneth Williams declaims in what is probably a more amusing faux-historical film 'Infamy, infamy, they've all got it infamy'.

And more about Stella Browne continues to drift in

Learnt from Gill Fildes while at the Women's History Network Annual Conference this weekend (report may follow, or not, as I have the Society for the Social History of Medicine Annual Conference happening from tomorrow), that according to entry in Winifred Holtby's diary, she was visiting her near neighbour in Chelsea,  Cicely Hamilton, and Stella also happened to be there.

This not only confirms my sense that the contacts which existed, but for which evidence is fragmentary, between Stella and Winifred, were probably face to face rather than epistolary, but also brings in further confirmation about her relationship with Cicely Hamilton, for which there is already evidence.

Alas, I don't think I'll be able to get to this

Women in science: Wikipedia workshop Friday 19 October 2012, 14.30-20.00, The Royal Society, London

Group 'Edit-a-thon' to improve Wikipedia articles about women in science, held at the Royal Society's library.*

The event is open to people who are new to Wikipedia and experienced Wikipedia editors. Female editors are particularly encouraged to attend.

At the workshop representatives from Wikimedia UK will explain how Wikipedia works and be on hand to answer questions about editing and improving Wikipedia articles.

The Society's library holds a rich collection of printed works about women in science, including biographies and works authored by scientists. At the event the Society's librarians will explain more about the collections and provide guidance on finding sources.

Before the event the Society will select Wikipedia articles relating to women in science which need improving. Attendees will be encouraged to work together to edit those articles, using the library's resources.

For more information and to register for a place please go to: http://royalsociety.org/events/2012/wikipedia-workshop/

Dorothy Hodgkin FRS, Nobel Laureate,
portrait by Maggie Hambling

*I suppose this begins to make some reparation for not admitting women, however distinguished, as Fellows until after World War II...

Interdisciplinary colloquium, Havelock Ellis and Co

This very enjoyable event took place yesterday, brought together and efficiently organised by Jana Funke. It was an intense experience, covering a range of fields to which the neglected figure* of Havelock Ellis contributed.

Interdisciplinarity was at the heart of Ellis's work, although perhaps what became clear in the course of the day was his lack of interest in conventional boundaries and indeed (resonantly) the theme of fluidity (not only in connection with his particular erotic interest). Maybe the reason for the neglect of Ellis was his insidious omnipresence and refusal to be easily contained?

Eleven papers from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds made for a full, but very stimulating day, covering the various sources and influences for Ellis's own intellectual enterprises in criminology and sexology, his relations with and influence upon various individuals in his circles of friendship, his impact on contemporary writers on sexual matters, his relationship to modernism (through friendship with modernists, in his work as a literary critic emphasising the 'New Spirit' in literature, and in his impact upon modernist writers), his vision of transformed relationships and ways of being. Besides the papers and the lively discussion, conversations continued over coffee, lunch, tea and at the post-conference dinner.

There are moves afoot to consolidate the beginnings of yesterday's event in rescuing Ellis from the condescension of history and assumptions that he is of merely antiquarian interest, a curiosity marooned in historical byways, and recuperating him as a figure of significance the extent of which is only just beginning to be recognised.


*Just looking up Wikipedia links I discovered some significant errors in mentions of Ellis - he was never President of the Eugenics Society (I'm not sure he was even a member, not being a great joiner of associations) and he was certainly aware of his urination fetish well before the age of 60!

Forthcoming Conference: Infertility in History, Science and Culture

The infertile woman is a familiar figure in popular culture. Soap operas dramatise the tragedy of infertility, right-wing tabloids threaten career women with the horrors of involuntary childlessness, and the news media greets each new breakthrough in reproductive technology with a strange combination of celebration and dread at the potential Brave New World we are sleep-walking towards. This portrayal of a realm where science fiction threatens to spill over into fact adds to our sense of infertility as a peculiarly modern condition. Yet there is a longer history of involuntary childlessness – a history which stretches back to the Book of Genesis and beyond – as well as many different potential experiences of infertility according to nation, class, gender, and race.

This symposium will explore the history of infertility, and the place of infertility in science and culture. Our primary focus is historical, but we welcome contributions from scholars in different disciplines and employing a range of approaches – social scientific, literary, feminist, psychological, and legal. We aim to bring together researchers working on this fascinating and under-explored field in order to better understand historical and contemporary representations and experiences of infertility across different cultures and from different perspectives. Potential topics for papers include, but are not limited to:

-          the role of gender, class and race in shaping experiences and representations of infertility;

-          individual, familial, and social contexts of infertility;

-          infertility as a bodily and/or psychological experience;

-          heterosexuality, homosexuality, and involuntary childlessness;

-          reproductive science and access to reproductive technologies;

-          the interplay of medical, scientific, and cultural understandings of infertility;

-          the role of politics, law, and religion in shaping experiences of and attitudes towards infertility;

-          changing experiences of infertility across time and space, including comparative histories;

-          the relation of perceptions of infertility to beliefs about fertility control, the constitution and social role of the family, and sexuality;

-          different disciplinary approaches to infertility.

An edited collection based on the presented papers is planned.

The symposium is co-convened by Gayle Davis (University of Edinburgh) and Tracey Loughran (Cardiff University). It will be held at the University of Edinburgh on 4-5 July 2013. Abstracts of 250 words, for papers of 20-30 minutes, should be sent to LoughranTL@cardiff.ac.uk by 25^th January 2013.

Miscellaneous update

I have sadly neglected this blog of late, what with the copy-editing, proofs, and index for the new edition of Sex, Gender and Social Change, writing a paper for a workshop on Havelock Ellis, being embroiled in a move of offices at work etc distracting my mind.

Other publishing news: my 2007 short study of Naomi Mitchison is being issued in ebook format by Aqueduct Press and there is news of a reissue of the Penguin Book of Erotic Stories by Women (including ebook version) (presumably, ahem, stimulated by the '50 Shades' phenomenon), which includes my short story, 'Harmonising Polarities'.

Among my posts on the Wellcome Library blog over the last several months:
Norway in archives and manuscripts
'I can think of nothing lovelier than owning cattle'
'If not duffers won't drown'
and one not by me, but posted by me on behalf of the project archivist:
National Abortion Campaign archives now available

Added to my forthcoming appearances: I shall be keynoting at the Women’s History Network, Midlands Region, Conference, 'Women and Science', University of Worcester, 10th November 2012

Interesting forthcoming conference

Non-Reproduction: Politics, Ethics, Aesthetics
1 February 2013
Birkbeck College, University of London

Cultural anxieties concerning biological reproduction often pivot around the notion of the non-reproductive body, in which intersecting fears about class, race, sexuality, gender and disability are encoded. Media discussions of abortion rates, teenage use of contraception, and gay marriage all register the perceived threat of sex without procreation. In a broader sense, the imperative to safeguard the future by ‘thinking of the children’ is powerful ideological currency, animating activists on both the left and the right.

A number of writers have responded to this tendency by considering the aesthetics and ethics of the non-reproductive. Recent work in cultural studies has emphasised the radical potential of the subject that refuses reproduction. In Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (1993), Peggy Phelan locates the radicalism of feminist performance art in its status as ‘representation without reproduction’. More recently, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) argues that resisting heternormativity entails refusing to participate in ‘the cult of the child’. According to Judith Halberstam (2008), Edelman’s work is part of an ‘anti-social turn’ in queer studies which ‘always lines up against women, domesticity and reproduction’.

Inspired by Halberstam’s intervention, this one-day interdisciplinary humanities symposium invites critical perspectives on the idea of non-reproduction. How is the assumption that the non-reproductive necessarily resists the dominant order undermined by right-wing strategies that seek to limit reproduction, such as forced sterilisation, 'population bomb' rhetoric, discriminatory welfare policies or the stigmatisation of single parents. Is it helpful to draw a conceptual opposition between the reproductive and the non-reproductive? Are there alternatives to this framework? What are the implications of ‘non-reproduction’ and anti-futurity for approaches to the archive and the preservation of cultural and social documents?

Contributions are welcome from graduate students and early career researchers across the arts and humanities, as well as thinkers, activists, writers and artists working outside academia.

Topics could include, but are not limited to:

• pro-choice politics versus reproductive justice
• global warming and population discourse
• Refusing parenthood in art and literature
• Infertility and IVF
• Contraception and abortion politics
• Queer theory and the family
• Gay marriage in the media
• Feminism and maternity
• Museums and heritage
• Textual repetition and reproduction
• Discourses about the child (e.g. the child as commodity)
• The disabled child and controversial sterilization procedures (eg. The Ashley Treatment)
• The politics of non-reproduction in an age of accumulation
• copyright law
• Gustav Metzger and destruction in art
• Derrida on the archive
• Performance theory

Abstracts of 250-300 words for 20-minute papers should be sent to non.reproduction@gmail.com by Monday 1 October.

Organizing Committee:

Fran Bigman, PhD Researcher, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge

Harriet Cooper, PhD Researcher, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London

Sophie Jones, PhD Researcher, Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London

Wonderful for access, for posterity, not so much

This is an account of a very exciting project to digitise the AIDS Quilt. However, while this demonstrates the exciting possibilities for access and research opened up through digitisation, there is a very problematic statement by a graduate student studying art conservation about its value for long-term preservation for posterity:

One hundred years from now, when the textiles break down, you can still have the digital effort

Textiles are a great deal more robust than digital media. While we may hope that the necessary steps are taken (and the resources made available) to migrate the digitised records through changes in hardware and software over time, digital records are very ephemeral and may become unreadable within a very short period after creation. The Bayeux Tapestry is still in existence after nearly 1000 years, unlike many computer-generated records of far more recent date.

Coming in November, pre-order now!

Just spotted on Amazon: the new revised, updated and expanded second edition of Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880 (Palgrave Macmillan, Gender and History series)

Podcasting Stella

The latest LSE Review of Books podcast - Gender and Feminism - includes an interview I did for them on Stella Browne, feminism, and reproductive rights (though I'm a bit sorry that length considerations have led to my discussion of her relations with the Communist Party being edited out).

Return of a classic foundational work

I observe that a new, expanded edition of Jeff Week's pioneering Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulations of Sexuality Since 1800  is due out at the end of this month. This is very exciting news. Weeks has always been an inspiration to me and historians in the field owe him an enormous debt, though one that is perhaps unacknowledged for the reasons Doris Lessing suggested in Walking in the Shade:

Very often do we see this: people acknowledging every source of their inspiration but the most important one. I think the reason for this is not a reluctance to give acknowledgements where they are due, as much as that the originating impression is so strong it becomes a part of the inspired one.

While I have a similar overview coming out later this year, I think that this demonstrates the extent to which the history of sexuality has developed since the first edition of Sex, Politics and Society in 1981, and I am sure that there will be enough in the way of differences of emphasis and interpretation between our two perspectives to stimulate productive debate and further research.

Bateman exhibition at the Cartoon Museum

Last Friday I participated in an evening event at the Cartoon Museum in Bloomsbury in connection with their current exhibition on the work of H M Bateman. Bateman is probably best known for his series of tableaux of social shame, 'The Man Who...' embarrassingly committed some solecism or faux pas but his long career included numerous other contributions to the cartoonist's art. (His vivid evocations of shame and humiliation resonate with Nash and Kilday's suggestion that shame continued as a compelling cultural force well beyond the period conventionally assigned to the rise of a guilt culture.)

I was asked to speak on women in the Edwardian period - Bateman has a number of rather conventionally hostile cartoons of suffragettes, but he often depicted women as terrifying and/or grotesque, and one feels that pillars of the anti-suffrage forces would not have gained any very flattering treatment either. Conversely, there are some more sympathetic portrayals of women, for example the Woman with Flat Iron and several of music hall performers. I didn't see any works illustrating 'khaki fever' in the early months of the Great War but one is rather surprised that he didn't make something of this.

It occurred to me, in my consideration of the wider changes in women's lives and their increasing move into public spaces for both work and leisure purposes, whether some of the hostility towards the suffrage movement, and the often very nasty ways in which they were portrayed, was because they were in some sense an epitome of, or a scapegoat for, disturbing changes more generally in the relations of the sexes at the period.

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’

Stephen Brooke, Sexual Politics: Sexuality, Family Planning and the British Left from the 1880s to the Present Day (2011)

I read this book several months ago and in something of a rush, in order to be able to include some of its important insights into the final round of revisions to the new edition of Sex, Gender and Social Change, and have been meaning to do a somewhat more extended consideration of it ever since, a project significantly stymied by the arrival of various other commitments and deadlines demanding my time and energy.

This is certainly an extremely useful study. While some of the material in the earlier chapters was fairly familiar from previous work on the birth control and abortion law reform movements, Brooke brings some useful new analyses of the material by placing sexual politics in their long and often conflicted relationship to the more conventional political sphere (a nuanced and detailed working out of some of the issues I briefly delineated in my article in Socialist History, Vol 36, 2010, 'No Sex, Please, We're Socialists': The Labour Party prefers to close its eyes and think of the electorate') . Sexual Politics also provides a particularly valuable account of the rather less explored area of the various shifts taking place in political and social cultures around reproductive control, women, motherhood, and the family from the advent of the NHS to the C21st. Brooke makes some thought-provoking interventions into questions about periodisation and the place of continuities and co-existence of differing paradigms rather than abrupt hiatus and definite changes. The narrative also demonstrates shifts within political culture in response both to activism around sexual issues and to wider social change and new concepts of citizenship and what came to be included within the sphere of political activity.

Sexual Politics additionally constitutes a useful reminder of the tensions and conflicts and different levels of activity over these issues within the Labour Party itself. Although the title invokes 'the Left', the book focuses on the Labour Party, with a nod or two to the Communists, largely at the national level, though with an awareness of the significance of local groups and special interest campaigns. Brooke inscribes the importance of class in both the increasing acceptance of family planning as a licit concern of the left, culminating in the non-controversial permissive National Health Service Amendment (Family Planning) Act of 1967, and in the long reluctance, in spite of such pioneering socialist icons as Edward Carpenter, to consider homosexual law reform. This came about, arguably, more as one element within a smorgasbrod of liberalising reforms which the party, or at least, certain leading powerful figures (Brooke places Roy Jenkins as pivotal), saw as part of its agenda in the 1960s. Although most of these measures originated as private members' bills, governmental allocation of time for debate and help with drafting played an essential role in getting them through.

It would have been interesting (though this book already covers a great deal of territory) to have incorporated more about those causes described at the World League for Sexual Reform Congress in London in 1929 as the 'planks' in its 'platform': these included marriage reforms such as improved facilities for divorce as well as education for marriage, sex education of the young, and the abolition of censorship. Some of these aims were indeed achieved during the 'liberal moment' of the 1960s. But some were not. Sex education, for example, remains a contested and controversial issue. Some attention to these topics, the penumbra of sexual reform issues, might also have overcome the slight cynical feeling that occasionally arises that homosexuality could possibly have been included to extend the potential audience for the book by broadening its appeal beyond those concerned with reproductive politics (Brooke himself points out in the text that much of the territory of gay politics/left politics and their intersections since the 1967 Act has been ably mapped by Lucy Robinson in Gay Men and the Left). These were also issues which for which there is a narrative trajectory, rather than endless reiterations with little to show. There are indeed useful points of comparison and contrast illuminating the differing interests and agendas within Labour to be gained by taking these particular issues, and the choice undoubtedly pays off as the narrative is taken on to the initiatives of the 2000s.

(Many of the questions and points raised above are dealt with in much fuller detail and with greater nuance in the revised and expanded second edition of Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain since 1880, now in press.)

European Social Science History Conference 2012, Glasgow

As always, this was an intense four days of conference activity: 2-hour sessions, four a day, starting at 8.30 am and finishing at 6.30 pm. It's a huge conference, but the breakdown into thematic strands makes it relatively manageable, and the two hour panels do allow for (preferably) 3-4 presentations and adequate discussion time (though some sessions had more than that, which either cuts down on the time allotted to present, or for discussion, neither of which seems ideal).

At least this year I didn't feel obliged to go to every session, which I did a couple of years, when I was History of Sexuality strand chair and we had panels in all available slots. (Don't know how I'd have managed if there had been parallel sessions in the strand.)

My own paper went well, and the panel I chaired was particularly good in terms of the papers all having a good deal of resonance: 'Sexual transgression, transnational travel, and abortion'. This raised a number of intriguing and in the present situation highly relevant issues: that technical legality of abortion doesn't necessarily mean that it's easy to access; that the role of often quite local sexual/social cultures can be quite critical; that it's noticeable the way that certain nations or regions or authorities keep their hands clean by not doing or allowing abortions themselves but with the knowledge that the women they turn down will seek facilities elsewhere beyond their boundaries.

The 'Bodies and Biology' panel (on historical intersex/trans* cases) raised a thought in my mind about the criteria medics were using to establish 'real' sex (preference for sports or needlework, as it might be) - not only deeply gender essentialist but also anachronistic - failing to register temporal changes in ideas of the gender appropriate, e.g. the rise of female athletics - and I wondered if this fits in to a wider generational phenomenon of the older generation thinking that the younger are not doing gender properly, i.e. as they used to.

Papers I was particularly engaged by included Gayle Davies's look at medical attitudes to women seeking conception via artificial insemination in Scotland in the 1950s - they were pathologised as being overly yearning for motherhood and seeking this icky mode of achieving - this seemed to me to fit with the 1950s pathologisation of unmarried mothers and a wider sense of the need for control and to avoid excessiveness at the period (needs more thinking out). 

I really enjoyed Julie Gammon's very lively paper on the prosecution and conviction (and rapid subsequent pardoning) of Colonel Charteris for raping his maidservant (at a time when upper class men could usually get away with this with impunity) and the highly specific reasons why this could even happen when it did.

David Johnson's fascinating piece on gay book clubs in the 1950s and 60s made me think that there is still a lot of work to be done on pre-internet 'virtual communities' around magazines, mailing lists, etc.

Glasgow - at least the area around the University, where the conference was taking place, was far more beautiful than I had expected (the very fine clear weather probably helped) and there were several excellent fish restaurants in Argyle Street.

Slightly off my usual track

I gave the George Hay Memorial Lecture of the Science Fiction Foundation on Monday at Eastercon:
video here:
'Invisible women: The scientists people don't see'

Transforming Pregnancy since 1900, Cambridge 29-30 Mar 2012

I posted about this conference when it was still forthcoming and attended it last week. It was an excellent event, if rather intense - I think by the end everyone just wanted to go away and reflect on all the issues that had come up over the course of the two days. As with the Communicating Reproduction conference at the same venue that I attended in December, it was based on precirculated papers, but this time, each session was introduced by a discussant speaking for 5-10 minutes, with a brief response by the author of the paper in question, and then open discussion for around 45 minutes. This worked very well, though it probably only works with numbers below a certain level and attendees with the commitment to read the papers.

There are apparently plans on hand to publish the papers, possibly as a journal special edition. They were all very good and quite diverse in their approach and methodology, but a significant number of common themes appeared:

• The medicalisation of pregnancy and its move into hospitals
• The increasing separation of concern over the foetus from concern with the mother
• The amount of medical technology that was originally devised for fairly extreme cases but has become much more widely used
• The role of commercial interests 
• The notion of the perfect baby as achievable
• The notion that pregnancy and childbirth are now entirely safe
• The ambiguity of the rise of all the various high-tech developments
• The impact of the 'pro-life' movement (I should like to see, some time, a discussion of the way in which this and its rhetorics arose as a response to legalisation of abortion, rather than being timeless concerns)
• Conceptualisation of the mother as feeling rather than thinking or doing rational decision-making
• The idea that it is possible to make a definite binary yes/no to 'is she pregnant?' (E.g. early positive pregnancy test may in fact turn into an early miscarriage)

Lots of exciting and productive questions and matters for further thought.

Yet more depressing news about the disposition of valuable research resources

I already mentioned the bad news about the uncertain fate of The Women's Library and the TUC Collections (and I do exhort people to go and sign the petition to save TWL.

I've also been distressed at the news that the Birmingham Medical Institute is selling off its historical collections of books and manuscripts and that the Wedgewood Collection continues to be threatened with dispersal.

And now I hear that the New York Public Library at 42nd Street is proposing, if not to get rid of its research materials, to outhouse them so that they will no longer be readily available to the researcher. I once made a flying visit from Boston to consult rare periodicals which could be found nowhere else, and was able to accomplish this within a day, a not inconsiderable advantage given the constraints on my research time and budget.

This is all very distressing and seems like a wide downgrading of the importance of actual primary research materials in a world in which it is (wrongly) assumed that everything is digitally accessible.

Shocking news

The Women’s Library is seeking a new home

On Wednesday 14 March, London Metropolitan University’s Board of Governors announced that they will be seeking a new home, custodian or sponsor of The Women’s Library’s collections.

If a new home is not found by the end of December 2012, the Library will move to opening hours of one day per week for a period of three years, with a further review at the end of that period. We will keep you informed of further developments, and we are in the process of contacting key stakeholders.
If you have any suggestions of potential custodians, or any queries, please email us: moreinfo@thewomenslibrary.ac.uk

and London Met are also looking for a new home for the Trades Union Congress Library Collections (statement by Unison London Met Uni Branch.)