RHN 93/2021 | Event
Organiser: Women’s History Network (WHN)
2–4 September 2021, Online Conference
WHN National Conference 2021:
Homes, Food and Farms
In recent years Women’s History has made a significant contribution to debates and explorations of histories of homes, families and domestic life. Women’s multiple and varied roles in the production, preparation and consumption of food, as farmers, housewives, gardeners and workers in agriculture and other industries have been uncovered. The 2021 Women’s History Network Annual Conference aims to build upon this work and bring together those interested in interrogating and expanding women’s history and the history of homes, food and farms.
To download the conference programme please click here: 2021 WHN Annual Conference Programme (Final)
Booking available from: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/womens-history-network-32350766195
Programme:
Thursday 2 nd September
3:15-3.30 (BST) Introduction and Welcome from the Chair of WHN, Maggie Andrews
3:30-4:30 Keynote Lecture: Laurel Forster (University of Portsmouth) – Self-Sufficiency, Countercultures, and the Dissenting Cookbook.
4:30-6:15 Panel 1: Open Strand - Lightning Talks (Chaired by Anna Muggeridge)
Florence Smith (University of Oxford) - ‘Learning and Living: Women’s Experiences at Coeducational Oxford Colleges’.
Sue Bishop (University of Leicester) - What’s Love got to do with it? Locating female agency and new cultural identities in Leicester, 1960-1991.
Diana Russell (University of Warwick) - Healing Hands: the business of the masseuse in Bath c. 1911-1926.
Johnathan Burton (University of Kent) - ‘The Witchery of Legitimate Sport’: Femininity, Gender and the Female Hunter, 1800-1914.
Matilde Gallardo (Kings College London) - Weaving the past: reminiscences of a weaver’s daughter in Edwardian London.
Rose Debenham (University of Birmingham) - ‘Those woolly-hatted Greenham women were at it again’: Dress and visual presentation at Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp.
Emily Rhodes (University of Cambridge) - Female Petitioning to Monarchs and the Criminal Process in England, 1660-1702.
Clarice Bland (University College Dublin) - Writing the Garden: Women Gardeners and Print Culture in Britain, 1850-1900.
Linda Henderson (University of Exeter) - ‘To improve the moral habits of young women’: Gender and Local Horticultural Shows in the Nineteenth Century.
6:15 AGM, Drinks Reception and Prize Giving
Friday 3 rd September
10:00-11:00 Keynote Lecture: Jane Whittle (University of Exeter) – Women’s work in English agriculture and food processing 1500-1750.
11:15-12:15 Panel 2: Food Preparation, Technology and Training (Chaired by Alexandra Hughes-Johnson)
Lynne Wainwright (Liverpool John Moores University) - Using Domestic Science Training: Teachers, Wives and Mothers.
Tamisan Latherow (University of Reading) - ‘Yes, ma’am’: Instructresses and the role of ‘Rural Domestic Economy’ courses in Berkshire, 1920-1950.
Katie Carpenter (University of Lincoln) - Women and Food Preparation Technology in the English Kitchen, 1870-1914.
Sue Bailey (London Metropolitan University) - The gendering of the blender or the secret life of your kitchen appliances? A review of the role of women in developing and promoting small domestic electric equipment in the UK from the post-war period.
Graeme Gooday and Helen Close (University of Leeds and Women’s Engineering Society) - Rethinking the relationship between the Women’s Engineering Society and the Electrical Association for Women.
12:30-1:30 Panel 3: Farmers, Landowners and Labourers (Chaired by Anna Muggeridge)
Iain Riddell - Grampian female farmers, role models, status and motivation: A sub-regional network analysis of kinswomen.
Cherish Watton (University of Cambridge) - Materialising memories of Home Front farming in Land Girls’ scrapbooks.
Jo Willett - Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Italian Smallholding Experiment.
Paul Merchant (National Life Stories, British Library) - Oral histories of women in British farming, 1950-2000.
2:00-3:15 Panel 4: Experiences, Hierarchies and Power Relations (Chaired by Helen Antrobus)
Isobel Goodman (Cambridge University Library) - Reading between the lines: using mistress/servant book use as a means to understand the relationship dynamics of late medieval households.
Ana Teresa (University of Lisbon) - The Female Domestic Daily Life in the 17th Century Goese Convent.
Eliska Bujokova (University of Glasgow) - Matrons, Housekeepers and Nurses: Food Provision and Power Relations in Glasgow’s Early Nineteenth c. Hospitals.
Alice Krzanich (University of Edinburgh) - Female Domestic Servants and the Law in Early Nineteenth-Century Scotland.
3:30-4:45 Panel 5: Work, Politics and Professionalism in Post-war Britain (Chaired by Beth Jenkins)
Lyndsey Jenkins (Queen Mary University of London) - Housewives and the House: Women Labour MPs and ‘the housewife’ in the 1940s and 1950s.
Büşra Sati (Binghamton University) - Women Workers, Mothers & Labour Unions: Transnational Women's Labour History during the late 1970s.
Charlotte Sendall (University of Gloucestershire) - From Wartime Work to Domesticity: How Prefabricated Houses Persuaded Women Back Home in Post War Britain.
Lisa Cox-Davies (University of Worcester) - Beat work or housework? Female police officers of the West Midlands in the post-war decades.
Saturday 4 th September
10:00-11:00 Panel 6: Housewives, Class and Organisational Capacities (Chaired by Lyndsey Jenkins)
Carrie de Silva (Harper Adams University) - Pollie Hirst Simpson (1871-1947), the first agricultural adviser to the Women's Institute: a life of public service.
Ruth Cohen - ‘I was utterly at my husband’s mercy’: co-operative women, marriage, and divorce.
Anna Muggeridge (University of Worcester) - ‘Work in the Housewives’ Service, just like in the home, seems never to be done’: the home, the neighbourhood, and the housewife in the Second World War.
11:00-12:00 Keynote Lecture: Samita Sen (University of Cambridge) - Women, Work and Domesticity: Eastern India in Historical Perspective
12:15-1:30 Panel 7: Identities, Biographies and Constructed Realities (Chaired by Anna Muggeridge)
Helen Antrobus (The National Trust) - Hill Top and Beyond: Beatrix Potter, her land, and her collection.
Ceryl Evans - Before Miss Jeanie Dicks flicked the switch – the 1930s domestic electrification project which helped a woman win the contract to electrify Winchester Cathedral against international competition.
Clare Wichbold and Elizabeth Semper O'Keefe - Suffrage, social reform and sheep’s head broth: the life and work of Constance Radcliffe Cooke.
Ellen Sharman (University of Oxford) - “woman … is bewitchingly lovely in the very act of eating”: the beauty of greed in Elizabeth Robins Pennell’s The Feasts of Autolycus: The Diary of a Greedy Woman (1896).
2:00-3:15 Panel 8: Authority, Domesticity and Politics in National and International Contexts (Chaired by Laurel Forster)
Francesca Baldwin (University of Reading) - Space, Power and Domesticity: Negotiating Agency and Womanhood in the Ethiopian Coffee Ceremony.
Amy Gower (University of Reading) - Feminist home-economics? The politics of domesticity in secondary school teaching, 1980s London.
Bethany Rebisz (University of Reading) - 'Oh, come and see the merry-go-round': Reconfiguring and Preserving Domestic Craft and Authority, 1950s Kenya.
Michelle Staff (The Australian National University) - Doing Feminist Internationalism at Home: Australia and Britain, 1919–1939.
3:30-4:45
Panel 9: Reform, Revolt and Resistance (Chaired by Alexandra Hughes-Johnson)
Victoria Phillips (London School of Economics) - Nourishing Revolt: Women and Food from the West for East Germany, June 1953.
Oithane Etayo (University of Warwick) - “Obstacles” leading change: women in food reform through network analysis.
Małgorzata Dajnowicz (University of Bialystock) - The Household Committee of the League of Women [Komitet Gospodarstwa Domowego Ligi Kobiet] – as an example of women’s movement activities for modernisation of households in the Polish People’s Republic.
Erin Shearer (University for Reading) - ‘She put arsenic in the bread for the family to eat.’ Enslaved women, poison and revenge in the US antebellum South.
Source: https://womenshistorynetwork.org/homes-food-and-farms/