Centre for Gender History

Religion and Masculine Expectations in Medieval Europe

A talk by Professor Ruth Karras

Friday 3 May 2019 at 4pm in the Yudowitz Room, Wolfson Building, University of Glasgow

The lecture will discuss the contradictions of a society in which warfare and reproduction were key determinants of masculine status, but in which an important elite segment excluded itself from those activities.

Ruth Mazo Karras is the Lecky Professor of History at Trinity College Dublin. Previously she was Professor of History at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of books including Unmarriages: Women, Men, and Sexual Unions in the Middle Ages, Sexuality in Medieval Europe: Doing Unto Others, and From Boys to Men: Formations of Masculinity in Later Medieval Europe. Her co-edited volumes include The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe, with Judith Bennett. She is currently President of the Medieval Academy of America, and is a former North American Co-Editor of Gender and History.

Please register to attend

Gender History annual Lecture - Poster 2019

Friday 31 May 2019, 9-5pm

in the Glasgow Club, Kelvin Hall

The workshop is intended to create a forum for exchange and debate among academics, practitioners and policy-makers working at the intersections of social medicine, political campaigning and policy, and reflecting on the local and global contexts within which (legal/political) discourses and (political/medical) practices of reproductive rights and reproductive justice have emerged and been shaped in past decades, and what kinds of present and future challenges exist in terms of ensuring access to reproductive justice for all.

Programme

Please register to attend

Further details

Prof Merry Wiesner-Hanks
Department of History
University of Wisconsin

'“Nevertheless She Persisted”: Plucky Women and Patriarchy in the Early Modern Economy

Friday 18 May 2018 at 4pm in the Kelvin Hall Lecture Theatre.

As part of the 'Invisible Hands: Reassessing the History of Work' conference hosted by the Centre for Gender History, Prof. Wiesner-Hanks will examine the new scholarship on women's economic role that has emerged over the last decade, which tends to argue that although patriarchal expectations and institutions were powerful forces, women successfully resisted, and were important players in economies of consumption, credit, and production.

Plenary lectures from Prof. Jane Humphries (University of Oxford) and Prof. Merry Wiesner-Hanks (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee)

Click here for further details and to register

CGH visit to Oxford for one-day workshop on ‘Gender and Inequalities’ with members of the Centre for Gender, Identity and Subjectivity, University of Oxford, June 2017

The project “Translating Feminism” brings together scholars from three continents wishing to pursue original, interdisciplinary research focused on the global reach of feminist writing and women’s movements. While the transformation of women’s social status is one of the most significant developments of the post-war period, little is known about the precise ways in which women’s rights campaigners across different national and cultural settings communicated with one another, read and translated each other’s texts, and locally re-contextualised them. The first international workshop in Glasgow in November 2016 provided the opportunity to discuss historical findings and new theoretical approaches. These discussions will be pursued further at the second international workshop that will take place in Bern, Switzerland, June 23-24, 2017.

More precisely, the forthcoming workshop will be dedicated to the materiality of feminist texts and to the material culture of feminist literary activities, with a special focus on translation. Following Roger Chartier, the meaning that readers give to a text is never detached from the material conditions in which it is produced and diffused. Chartier reminds us that the printed object is crucial to an understanding of why and how people make sense of what they read. This applies to translations in particular ways, as the physical quality of both the source text and the translation establish an (imagined) relationship between transnational and translingual writers and readers.

Women’s literary activities involved producing, diffusing, reading, translating, and discussing texts from a woman’s point of view. But what was considered to be a “woman’s point of view”, and how do global transfers and translations de-stabilise accepted notions thereof? Instead of studying feminism as a given system of ideas, regardless of the context of its production and reception, we aim to study the variety of material supportive of women-centred ideas, ranging from pamphlets to self-published pirated editions and to printed books, as well as the literary activities by which they are produced and transmitted. This includes the fact that, while practising what social movement theorists call ‘counter-cultural retreat’, when it came to literary activism, feminists did engage with a broader public, both in terms of a (potential) feminist public and the institutions and actors of the publishing market.
Translating Feminism: Transfer, Transgression, Transformation (1945-1990)

We invite papers that deal with different aspects of feminist text and book production, diffusion, and translation, such as:

• The materiality of the printed object and the conditions of (non-) reproducibility
• The economic contexts of book publishing and translation
• The technical conditions of writing, translation and transnational communication transfer
• Aspects of distribution
• Bookshops and reading communities
• The history of translation and a transnational feminist reading market

Practical arrangements:
Presenters will have approx. 15 minutes to discuss their paper, and panels will consist of 3-4 papers. The pre-circulation of papers is intended to foster deep engagement with each other’s work. Presenters may be asked to act as discussant for another paper.

Please include the following in your proposal:

• A 300-word paper abstract
• A 200-word biographical statement with main publications and current affiliation
• State if you are seeking funding, with reference to the following criteria:

Limited funding to cover travel and accommodation is available for researchers working on temporary contracts, and for academics working outside Europe and North America.
Please send your proposals to the organisers by March 15, 2017. You will be notified by mid-April 2017 and will be asked to circulate a draft of your paper by June 1. The programme will be finalised and published in the course of May 2017.

Media contributions to newspaper, radio and television reports on a range of topics, including the following selection:

• Historical Adviser to the Channel 4/Testimony Films production examining the 50 years since the decriminalisation of homosexual offences in England and Wales in 1967 [Meek]
• Production of a mini documentary for BBC Radio Scotland on William Paton and the Whitehats in 1920s Glasgow [Meek]

On-air contribution to Paisley: The Town that Thread Built, BBC Scotland, May 2017 [Wright]

Centre for Gender History Annual Public Lecture
Friday 12 May 2017, 4pm, Yudowitz Room, Wolfson Building
'The Political in Question: Slavery Abolitionism in India's Twentieth Century', Professor Sinha, University of Michigan, USA

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On Monday 22 May 2017, the Centre for Gender History held its annual public engagement workshop in Glasgow Women's Library, a true hidden gem in the outskirts of central Glasgow. The Women's Library is the only accredited museum in the UK dedicated to women's lives, histories and achievements, so made a perfect setting for the workshop. The event was designed to explore the allocation and legal regulation of parental rights and responsibilities, past and present. Gender norms have heavily shaped the processes of entitlement and discrimination associated with fatherhood and motherhood which can be linked to the unequal distribution of resources and opportunities both within the home and in the workplace. The law also plays a crucial role in determining parental status and rights in relation to adoption, child custody and reproductive technology. This workshop brought together historians from a wide range of backgrounds, legal experts and women's rights campaigners, and combined historical and contemporary perspectives on the ways in which the law intersects and reacts with parenting in relation to political, social and economic vicissitudes.

Here is how the day unfolded:

9.15-9.45: Registration

9.45-10.00: Introduction by Professor Alexandra Shepard, Director of Centre for Gender History

10.00-11.15: Panel One: Parenting and the Law
Professor Muriel Robison: Parenting and Employment Law
Project Update: Women Negotiating the Boundaries of Justice, c.1100 c.1750: Parenting and the Law in History

11.15-11.45: Coffee Break

11.45-13:00: Panel Two: Parenting and Culpability

Engender, Emma Trottier: Parenting and Criminal Law: Incarcerating Mothers
Professor Louise Jackson: Juvenile Delinquency in Twentieth- Century Scotland

13.00-14.00: Lunch

14.00-15.15: Panel Three: Parenting at the Margins
Shakti Women's Aid: No Recourse to Public Funds
Dr Frankie McCarthy: LGBT Parenting and the Law

15.15-16.00: Roundtable and Closing Remarks

A central theme running throughout the day involved the discussion of situations when the limitations of legal frameworks are exposed. As such, we explored the restrictions of the law in uniformly regulating the care of children, and the relative rights of parents (or legal guardians) in their contextual frameworks.The morning opened with a broad-based discussion on the legal regulation of parenting in medieval and early modern Europe, with members of our very own project team debunking wide-sweeping narratives perpetuating the notion of the passive medieval parent, the legal regulation and division of care provision in the early modern household, and the law's attempts in safeguarding financial provisions for medieval/early modern children. After setting the historical scene, the rest of the speakers approached parenting and the law from a range of perspectives. Underpinning much of the discussion was a recognition that women have been unfairly prejudiced in narratives discussing legal rights and personal responsibilities towards their children, especially in relation to accessing paid maternity leave, regulating children's delinquent behaviour, and accessing childcare when imprisoned for petty crimes.

There was also much focus on the underprivileged position of BME women within the legal system, who are often faced with tough barriers when attempting to access public funds and resources in relation to the care of their children. The increasing acknowledgement of the fluidity of modern day adult relationships, including the recognition of trans and non-binary gender identities, has also forced the law to rethink who can be legally considered a parent in our modern age, further challenging the historical trope of the nursing mother and disciplinary father in establishing order within a family household. Later in the day, the roundtable session allowed a closer scrutiny of the laws treatment of parenting in historical and contemporary settings. Issues surfaced around the treatment of children upon the irrevocable breakdown of a marriage/co-habiting same-sex partnership, and the ways in which the law has influenced and reshaped parental obligations through obstructive government policies, such as the recent family cap and rape clause.

Overall, what emerged from the workshop was a clear sense of the confluent perspectives on parenting and the law, the historical continuity of gender roles within parenting, and a commitment to further tease out and develop the threads of this discussion in future events.

Rebecca Mason

This article originally appeared on: http://womenhistorylaw.org.uk/en/blog/1/22/parenting-and-the-law-a-public-engagement-workshop-at-glasgow-womens-library

Friday 19 May 2017

Prof. Alex Shepard's Inaugural Lecture: 'Who cares, and why should we? Historical Perspectives on Gender, Family and Economy

Many thanks to Professor Thomas Munck for hosting a “gender history” panel discussion on Monday 30 January 2017 at his EMWIP research seminar series. It was an absolutely fascinating discussion, and it is truly wonderful to have so many academics and PGRs within the Univeristy of Glasgow who are interested in the study of gender within an early modern context. 

There were four lightning papers presented by PhD students, with each commenting on different issues surrounding the research of gender within an early modern framework. 

Jamie Mc Dougall spoke on rioting women, focusing on instances of female rioting before and after the signing of the covenants. His paper showed that before 1638 female rioting was usually led and directed by men, whereas by 1674 it was not uncommon for women to riot, and also petition, without male leadership. The main questions he posited were: was there a culture of religious dissent among Scottish women in early modern Scotland, and if so, what was the role of men? Also, was the change in nature of female dissent a direct result of women swearing (and in some cases subscribing) the covenants?

Laura Doak also spoke on female covenanters in Restoration Scotland. She primarily focused on Marion Harvie and Isabel Alison, two women who were executed in Edinburgh's Grassmarket in 1681 for expressing ideological adherence to the Covenants and for their active involvement with militant conventicles. Throughout their trial and execution, the state attempted to stress the political nature of these their crimes. Although women were ubiquitous within the later covenanting movement, Harvie and Alison would remain the only two women executed publicly at Edinburgh and they also remain the only women whose executions cannot be contested. A brief analysis of their executions demonstrates how they were largely dictated by their gender and how, in turn, the cultural framework provided by the Stuart state for the condemnation of political prisoners all but failed to accommodate their existence.

Mary Jacobs presented on the alternative masculinities of Quaker itinerant preachers during the Interregnum. The early Quaker proselytisers were itinerants, whereby they travelled from town to town gathering new congregations to themselves. This lifestyle sat at odds with dominant seventeenth-century cultural ideas of manhood which were largely defined by Patriarchy and the household. Her paper highlighted some of the issues encountered when studying non-typical male gender identities, those which were defined outside of the household, and provided suggestions on how to deal with them.

Rebecca Mason spoke on the strident disposition of social classifications when researching modes of female agency, namely the practice of categorizing all women as either 'wives', 'widows' or 'singlewomen' within a legal document. Before a court of law in early modern Scotland, and elsewhere on the Continent, a woman could embody two marital status at the same time. The 'remarrying widow' is usually reclassified as a 'wife', with historical narratives failing to recognize that many of these women solely negotiated the terms of their marriage contract without the presence of a male guardian. With special focus on early modern Scotland, she spoke on how many 'remarrying widows' explicitly defined their rights to their property upon entering a new marital union, often asserting that their new husband should have no right to the moveable and landed property from their previous union.‌

International Workshop ‘Translating Feminism: Beyond the Canon (ca. 1945-1990)

First Workshop of the Leverhulme Trust funded International Network ‘Translating Feminism: Transfer, Transgression, Transformation (1945-1990)’
University of Glasgow, United Kingdom, 4-5 November 2016

Screening of ‘The Divide’ and panel discussion with Alex Shepard (CGH), Angela O’Hagan (WiSE), Nicole Busby (University of Strathclyde Law School), and Ann Henderson (STUC).

Further details

Translating Feminism project Launch Lecture

Monday 13 June 2016

with Louise von Flotow (Ottawa, CA). 

On Friday 3 June 2016,  the Centre for Gender History held its annual public engagement workshop. This event was designed to explore the links between gender, care-provision and inequality, past and present. The quality, quantity, and recognition of care-provision remains a pressing contemporary issue, affecting the welfare of both care-providers and recipients of care as well as shaping broader social relations. This workshop brought together academics from a range of disciplines, representatives from the public sector and the voluntary sector with interests in care provision, and women’s rights campaigners, and combined historical and current perspectives on the range of possible arrangements for fulfilling one of society’s basic human needs: care.

A central theme running throughout the day was the relationship between care provision and gender inequality.  The morning opened with a broad-based discussion on the definitions of care including the processes through which the Scottish Government are currently reviewing their National Care Standards.  From here the speakers approached care from a range of perspectives. Underpinning much of the discussion was a recognition that care provision, whether paid or unpaid, is chronically undervalued both as a form of work and a vital social service. Yet research presented at the workshop demonstrated that investment in care as an important element of our social infrastructure produces tangible economic and social results. Alongside this economic perspective, speakers demonstrated the importance of a human rights approach to care and of feminist legal perspectives. These brought gender inequalities sharply into focus and offered the potential to move beyond viewing care as a burden – and one which disproportionately falls on women. Later in the day, the roundtable sessions allowed a closer scrutiny of women’s roles and the practice of care provision in historical and contemporary settings. Issues surfaced around the feasibility of commercialized care and the emotional work involved that so often goes unrecognized.  Overall, what emerged from the workshop was a clear sense of the value interdisciplinary perspectives on care, and a commitment to draw out and develop the threads of this discussion in future follow-on events. 

- Authored by Catriona MacLeod

Last conference of the collaborative research project Travelling Texts, 1790-1914: The Transnational Reception of Women's Writing at the Fringes of Europe (Finland, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Spain). PI for the project at the University of Glasgow is Dr Henriette Partzsch. The conference will be held at Glasgow Women´s Library, 9-11 June 2016.

Registrations are open after 12 May through the website of Glasgow Women's Library: http://womenslibrary.org.uk/.

PROGRAMME 

The 3rd workshop in the AHRC network 'Women, work and value in Europe 1945-2015', organised in collaboration with the Centre for Gender History, was held on 25 April 2016 at the University of Glasgow. 

Throughout the workshops, gender and the care economy emerged as a particularly intriguing theme. Many of the papers presented the centrality of the care economy in wider processes which shape the conditions and perceptions of women’s work and structure the gendered nature of the labour market. This final workshop will be a knowledge exchange centred on this issue.  

The event aims to broaden the academic perspective and will hear from local pressure groups and non-profit organisations Close the Gap, Engender and Work/Care/Share. Attendees will consider the gendered nature of the care economy, its historical developments and experiences across post-WW2 Europe, and its contemporary challenges and paradoxes.

Centre for Gender History annual public engagement workshop, 1 June 2015 at Glasgow Women's Library. Organized by Dr Andrea Hajek.

In the early 1990s, Susan Faludi - in her prize winning Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (1991) - argued for the existence of a media driven, antifeminist backlash against the 1970s women’s liberation movement. A similar backlash seems to be living a revival, as the recent online social campaign #Women against feminism demonstrates. At the same time, a renewed engagement with feminism has manifested itself in recent years, due in part to the 2008 economic crisis. What does feminism mean in the present day, and to what extent is the current attitude towards feminism different from the way feminism has been seen in the past? What are the legacies of second-wave feminism and what can we still learn from it today? Are younger generations of women aware of the persistence of sexism, sexual violence and gender inequality, and can feminism be useful in tackling these issues?

This workshop brings together academics, activists and professionals engaged in battles for women’s rights and against gender discrimination, sexism and sexual violence, as well as women from the local community. It aims to explore current attitudes towards feminism and its legacy in the present, and promote discussions about the role feminism can play in the struggle for a more equal and less sexist society. 

Organized by Dr Andrea Hajek

Sponsored by the University of Glasgow’s Knowledge Exchange Fund, New Initiatives Fund and the Equality and Diversity Unit 

Podcasts:

• Panel 1 (keynote lecture by Prof Fiona Mackay followed by response)
• Panel 2 (paper by Dr Rosemary Elliot followed by response)
• Panel 3 (papers by Dr Akwugo Emejulu and Dr Sarah Browne, followed by response)

To find out how some of the delegates answered the question, Do we still need feminism today?, see below for five brief interviews Dr Valerie Wright conducted during the workshop.

• Interview #1
• Interview #2
• Interview #3
• Interview #4
• Interview #5

Click here for photographs and reports

Programme

10-10.30 Welcome and Introduction

Sue John, Glasgow Women’s Library
Dr Rosemary Elliot, Director of the Centre for Gender History
Dr Andrea Hajek, University of Glasgow

10.30-12.30 Do we need feminism today?

Keynote lecture: Prof Fiona Mackay (University of Edinburgh), Transforming the face of politics? Women politicians and the feminist campaigns that got them there
Respondent: Dr Victoria Browne (Oxford Brookes)
Followed by roundtable discussion with:

• Louise MacKenzie and Judith Hunter, Glasgow City Council Equality Network  
• Kate Reid
• Louise Sheridan
• Valerie Wright 

12.30-13.30 Lunch break

13.30-14.45 Fighting sexual violence

Respondent: Dr Andrea Thomson (University of Glasgow)
Dr Rosemary Elliot & Dr Annmarie Hughes (University of Glasgow), Language, the law and the question of consent: Historical perspectives on sexual violence in 20^thcentury Scotland

Followed by roundtable discussion with:

• Elaine McLaughlin, Hemat Gryffe Women's Aid 
• Kirsti Hay, Glasgow Violence Against Women Partnership

14.45-15.15 Tea & coffee

15.15-17 Learning from feminism

Respondent: Dr Vikki Turbine (University of Glasgow)

• Dr Akwugo Emejulu (University of Edinburgh), Whose feminism? Whose solidarity? Taking black feminism and women of colour seriously in feminist movements
• Dr Sarah Browne (Independent Researcher), Looking back, moving forward: Legacies and lessons from the Women's Liberation Movement in Scotland

Followed by roundtable discussion with:

• Sophie Kromholz and Halina Rifai, TYCI Glasgow
• Hannah Brown, Rape Crisis Lanarkshire and STAMP (Stamp out Media Patriarchy) project leader
• Hannah Houston, STAMP
• Niamh McGeechan, STAMP

17-18 Wine reception

Dr Garthine Walker (University of Cardiff)

Workshop: Gender and the Second World War, part of a day long symposium on gender and war.

Speaker: Karen Adler, University of Nottingham

Non-traditional marriages, partnerships and families in Scotland: Past and Present

Marriage is seldom out of the news, whether in relation to child well-being, same sex marriage, or anxieties around divorce rates and single parenthood. The reality of modern day marriage, cohabitation and separation exercise the minds of policy makers, people working in social welfare roles, and the general public. There is often a tendency to see multiple family forms as a recent development, attributable to the increase in divorce, remarriage, co-habitation and single parenthood since the late 1970s. This contrasts with more traditional understandings of the nuclear family prevalent in the earlier period.

This one day workshop will explore the changing meaning and experiences of marriage and family form from the 19th century onwards in Scotland to provide a historical context for current social developments in Scotland. The workshop will provide a forum for exploring synergies and difference in past and present experience. It will also provoke a useful dialogue between academics, policy-makers and practitioners in terms of the understanding we have about marriage and the family, and the ways in which those understandings shape our daily lives.

The plenary will be given by Professor Lynn Jamieson, Co-Director of Centre for Research on Families and Relationships, University of Edinburgh. Sessions will focus on non-traditional partnerships, including same-sex unions and cohabitation, and the experiences of children growing up in non-traditional families, including with same sex parents and lone parents and in step-families.

Podcasts

For enquiries and information please contact Meagan Butler or check out the project website.

Prof Lynda Coon (University of Arkansas), ‘Gendering Dark Age Jesus’

‌Following on from the success of last year’s event celebrating the 35th anniversary of Scottish Women’s Aid ‘Learning from the past, looking to the future’, the Centre for Gender History is pleased to announce its second workshop taking place at the University of Glasgow on Wednesday 08 May 2013. This year the theme will be Women and the Value of Work: Past and Present.

The value of women’s work is an historical problem that persists today. Despite legislation, women in Scotland still earn 14% less than men, prompting questions about the wider ways in which value is measured and recognised (Dec 2011 Annual Survey of Hours and Earning).  Value can be assigned to work in several, overlapping ways. One of these is through monetary or material goods exchanged for labour. Another is in terms of its perceived importance and usefulness to the wider economy, culture and society. Sometimes it is ascribed value through the extent of training and skills required to fulfill a role. It also has a personal and emotional value, reckoned by individuals based on their wants and needs. Understanding how value has been appraised, and paying attention to the gendered ways in which work has been valued in Scotland historically will be the core focus of this event.

Spanning several centuries from the early modern period to the present day, the workshop will include themed sessions concentrating on women and enforced labour in Scotland, Scottish women in enterprise, and aspects of financial inequality. The event will also include a showcase of current postgraduate research, from a variety of disciplines, providing a platform for students to present their own research. The full programme will be made available shortly.

As with previous workshops, there will be an emphasis on public engagement, with the specific object of bringing together academic research and the work of campaign groups, and other non-academic organisations, that deal with issues of gender equality and work. We are pleased to be able to welcome Women’s Enterprise Scotland, the STUC and Close the Gap to the Centre for Gender History for this workshop.

The day will finish with an open panel discussion with the intention of stimulating dialogue on the ways in which academic research might help to inform practical campaigning and policy, and, inversely, how the latter can help to inform research agendas and methodological approaches. This will also be an opportunity to make links across disciplines, as well as promoting closer understandings between academic researchers and public organisations.

Tea and coffee will be served at morning and afternoon breaks and a light lunch will be provided courtesy of Athena SWAN.

Contacts: Catriona MacLeod, Jonathan Moss or Roslyn Chapman

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Concepts and experiences of the life-course have been critical to making sense of gender difference and women's lives in the past, and have traditionally been a central concern of historians of women. Integral to pioneering work on the history of reproduction and the family, work and leisure, and the body, science and medicine, analysis of the life cycles of women has nonetheless left many questions yet to be explored. This conference encourages comparison of women's life cycle experiences both across the widest possible range of times and places, and with the life cycle experiences of men. The focus will also be on inter-generational relations as an important, yet often neglected, explanatory factor in either continuity or change over time.

Keynote speakers include Professor Lynda Coon, University of Arkansas, Dr. Michael Roper, University of Essex, and Professor Mary Beth Norton, Cornell University.

Sept 2008 Conference programme

The conference was sponsored by the Economic History Society, the Royal Historical Society and the British Academy.