Research Cluster in Gender History

Astor100: Disrupting the male narrative of parliament

Jacqui Turner works with the British Parliament on the national Vote100 project, a major series of significant exhibitions and events to engage the public with the UK Parliament and enhance the understanding of the struggle for the vote. Her national Astor100 project will begin in 2019. This is a programme of public, community and academic events to coincide with the centenary of the first woman to sit in the House of Commons: Nancy Astor.

Working with diverse partners, Jacqui’s research group will establish a home for a series of events and exhibitions to continue to address gender balance issues and disrupt the male narrative of parliament. They will aim to encourage education policy makers and schools to think beyond suffrage and more broadly about minority access and contributions to politics and power.

Women's experiences of forced resettlement in Kenya

Beth Rebisz's research explores African women’s experiences of their forced resettlement into concentrated ‘villages’ during Britain’s counter-insurgency campaign fought in central Kenya, 1952-1960. In doing so, her project assesses the intersection of humanitarianism and development, two prominent aspects impacting life in the ‘villages’. Beth's project combines the oral testimonies of African women who were forcibly resettled along with archival material from international humanitarian organisations, church missionary records and those of the colonial government. This will also enable an examination of the instrumental roles played by European and African female welfare workers in the wellbeing of those affected by armed conflict and how these women contributed to an improved humanitarian discourse during the decolonisation period.

Photo credit (2nd image): Copyright ICRC Archives (ARR). Reproduced with permission.

The manliness of nationalism in Africa

Heike Schmidt's work concerns nation and nationalism with a special interest in the manliness of nationalism in Zimbabwe. Africanists have observed since the mid-1990s that the oldest and most important debates in the field of African Studies have focused almost exclusively on anti-colonial nationalism – party politics and writings and speeches delivered by party leaders. Because party positions were nearly all occupied by men, research has centred on male voices. This challenge has since led to an emerging Women’s History and Cultural History of nationalism that has so far neglected the maleness and manliness of those nationalist voices that often played pivotal roles in mobilization and party politics but also those of everyday life. As the major outcome of this research, Heike's monograph 'Nation and Nationalism in Zimbabwe: The Life and Times of King Itai David Mutasa' will be published in 2018.

Photo credit (3rd image): United Methodist Archives, Africa University, Zimbabwe

Dr Heike I. Schmidt, gender history research cluster lead: genderhistory@reading.ac.uk

For the latest news, events and updates please visit our blog.

This is a monthly informal meeting for the gender history cluster. Academics from beyond the University of Reading with an interest in gender history are welcome. Unless otherwise announced, the stammtisch convenes every last Wednesday of the month at 5pm. Email us at genderhistory@reading.ac.uk.

Richard Blakemore works on the social history of seafarers during the early modern period, their connections with society ashore, and their role in the development of imperial and commercial networks.

Rachel is interested in gender as it relates to the history of political thought. Her work focuses on the English Revolution of the 1640s and 1650s, and its aftermath. These political events created anxieties about political order which were intertwined with, and sometimes expressed through, anxieties about gender.

Hannah Newton is a social and cultural historian of early modern England, whose research centres on what it was like to be ill, or to witness the illness of a loved one, in the past. Gender is a vital theme in this work: Hannah’s first book, The Sick Child in Early Modern England, explores how ideas about masculinity and femininity shaped parents’ emotional responses to the pains, illnesses, and deaths of their sons and daughters.

Rebecca Rist is interested in male and female piety in the High and Late Middle Ages. Alongside her primary research on the medieval papacy, she writes on various aspects of popular piety including crusader motivation, devotion to saints’ cults and the boundaries between heresy and orthodoxy. 

 

Heike is a historian of nineteenth and twentieth century Southern and East Africa. She is writing a history of nation and nationalism in Zimbabwe that considers the manliness and the role of women in nationalist discourse and activism both in Zimbabwe and its diaspora from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Natalie Thomlinson is a historian of gender and feminism in modern Britain, though her work is fundamentally concerned with how both gender and feminism are mediated through categories of difference such as race and class.

Jacqui Turner is a modern British political historian and her research examines the parliamentary contribution of early female MPs, sex-candidacy and marriage during the interwar period in Britain. She has a special interest in Nancy Astor.

Emily West is an historian of slavery in the antebellum US South. All of her research has focused upon the ways in which gender shaped the everyday experiences of enslaved people, be this in terms of their labour, their family lives and intimate relationships, or physical abuse and sexual exploitation.

My research focuses on transgender identities in Britain from 1870 to the 1940s. Through an analysis of medical literature, legal documentation, press coverage and autobiographical material I aim to discover to what degree there was a cultural and medical awareness of trans identities and how these were expressed and treated. I am interested in the changing medical treatments, from hormonal therapy to the advent of sex reassignment surgery and the influence of Magnus Hirschfeld’s pioneering Institute on British medical practice. 

I explore the work of British sexologists, particularly Havelock Ellis and John Symonds Addington, with regards to gender-crossing behaviours. I compare both the medical and cultural experiences for transmen and transwomen. I engage with debates surrounding terminology and how best to categorise gender fluidity in a period that predates modern terms. I also examine the extent to which a transgender subculture existed in Britain and the outlets for and modes of expressing gender variance before medical procedures were available.

My research focuses on racialised sexual violence in the antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction South. Within this, my primary aim is to analyse continuities from the antebellum period through the Civil War and into Reconstruction. My work also explores the ways in which black women seized upon the opportunities that freedom gave them to challenge and reshape prevailing narratives of gender, race, and sexuality. In particular, I analyse how women’s testimony addressed ideas of rape and consent, and how women used their voices during Reconstruction to redefine their past abusive relationships with white men. In this way, I explore the testimony that women gave as not only stories of abuse, but central facets of Reconstruction battles over social boundaries and relations.

My Wellcome-funded doctoral research investigates the experiences of ageing patients in early modern England, c.1570-1730. Contrary to common assumptions, 20% of the adult population was aged over 60 in this period. My study asks how doctors and laypeople understood and treated the diseases and infirmities of this neglected demographic, and seeks to uncover the impact of these conditions on the lives and emotions of sufferers and their families. Drawing on sources such as published medical texts, diaries, and doctors’ casebooks, my research investigate how contemporary gendered medical theories of the body applied to the older patient, and provides opportunities for testing entrenched ideas about gender norms of this period. For example, how undervalued older women really were in society, given the time and money spent on their treatment, and whether weeping – a culturally 'feminine' emotion gesture – was regarded with greater tolerance in 'ancient' men, as they 'abounded' with excess detrimental ‘humoral moisture’.

Through analysis of mostly original marriage contracts and charters, I ask how powerful a tool marriage could be for the aristocratic family, and how regulated this tool was. The family I am researching passed their comital title through the female line for nearly a century. These women held a special status as landowners, lords of their lands, which held obligations regardless of gender, even if those obligations themselves could be seen to be highly gendered. I question how these heiresses navigated such waters, and to what extent marriage could be utilised as a tool of power for the aristocracy as a whole, for a specific aristocratic family, and for these heiresses themselves. 

My doctoral research project explores gender, feminism and schooling in English comprehensive and grammar schools between 1970 and 2000, by investigating experiences of female students, classroom practices of teachers, and institutional policy. Post-war shifts in women’s lives, such as increasing opportunities for work and education, were complemented by feminist activism from the 1970s onwards. However little historiography engages with how ‘ordinary’ people experienced these changes, how they regarded feminism, and how they negotiated gender in their everyday lives. I engage with the concepts of agency and ideological reproduction in relation to childhood and girlhood, and will be conducting oral history interviews with former school students in order to reveal an alternative narrative of the 1970s onwards, which centres on the experiences of teenage girls. 

My research interest focuses on the religious identity of the first woman to take her seat in British Parliament: Viscountess Nancy Astor. Astor not only entered an exclusively male domain, but adopted Christian Science - an ideology that was somewhat conflicted with the interwar Established Church of England. This devotion was evident for much of her Parliamentary career; she used it to foster friendships with several of her influential male peers and it was simultaneously the source of some hostility. The most conspicuous feature of the early Christian Science movement was its founder, Mary Baker Eddy. In creating the dogma Science and Health, Eddy challenged both the masculine archetype of ‘traditional’ religion and male-centric Biblical readings. Nonetheless, the extent to which these approaches were applied and created female accessibility in the hierarchical structure of the church has been contested.

My research is on Elizabeth, 6th Baroness Craven's public position in society, in terms of the wider historical context of female autobiographical writing  and changing attitudes to women in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The research examines Lady Craven's memoirs, travel-writing and the material culture of her portraits and country house, in order to establish her public position in society, during a period of intense social and political change. In particular it considers the challenges posed by the publication of women's memoirs and travel-writing for consumption in the public sphere, in terms of gender, genre and ideology. 

My doctoral research project explores the dichotomy between the theory and practice of medieval church law in the context of 12th-to-14th-century Livonia (modern Estonia and Latvia). Canon law at that time regulated the lives of individuals from cradle to grave by governing conversion, baptism, marriage, parental obligations, divorce, but also rape, adultery, sterility and other topics of a similarly gendered nature. By comparing and contrasting major canonical works with sources produced ‘on the ground’ that more accurately reflected every-day practices and notions, this project aims to explore theoretical concepts that were commonly used in practice and to consider why some legislation might have been ignored or suppressed at times. Consequently, I hope that my research will help to advance the understanding of the gendered nature of medieval canonical legislation and its implications on the practice of law.

My research explores African women’s experiences of their forced resettlement into concentrated ‘villages’ during Britain’s counter-insurgency campaign fought in central Kenya, 1952-1960. In doing so, my project assesses the intersection of humanitarianism and development, two prominent aspects impacting life in the ‘villages’. My project combines the oral testimonies of African women who were forcibly resettled along with archival material from international humanitarian organisations, church missionary records and those of the colonial government. This will also enable an examination of the instrumental roles played by European and African female welfare workers in the wellbeing of those affected by armed conflict and how these women contributed to an improved humanitarian discourse during the decolonisation period.

Image credit: Copyright ICRC Archives (ARR). Reproduced with permission.

My research investigates the use of violence by enslaved women in the Antebellum South as a form of resistance between 1815-1861. This thesis will address the fundamental questions: Were women deliberately excluded from organised collective violence because of their gender? Should acts of individual violent discord undertaken by women be categorised as ‘everyday resistance?’ Why have scholars associated violence to be inherently masculine in nature? This thesis will examine the extent of  enslaved women's exploitation to determine why women used violence as a strategy of resistance and secondly, by establishing the frequency and different modes of violence deployed by female slaves within North and South Carolina.

My research examines the forced reproduction of enslaved men and women in the antebellum South as a means of sexual exploitation. Forced reproduction was an informal practice where enslavers compelled, either subtly or violently, enslaved men and women to have sexual relationships to produce children for profit. By stereotyping black women as hypersexual, enslavers forced them to procreate with multiple enslaved men, either through marriage or through rape. My research focuses on the methods employed by enslavers to force enslaved couples together, and the impact that this had on concepts of masculinity, parenthood, and marriage. I primarily use sources from formerly enslaved men and women, such as interviews and autobiographies, who witnessed or experienced incidents of forced reproduction. Through this, I highlight how forced reproduction was a prevalent, and often violent, form of sexual labour experienced by most enslaved people.