Women’s Library Under Threat – Campaign and Petition

Many of you will have heard that The Women’s Library in London is facing closure and transfer of its collections, or being reduced to operating a skeleton service. London Metropolitan University have decided to attempt to find a new home, owner or sponsor for its holdings, and will reduce the service to one day per week if such a sponsor cannot be found by the end of 2012.

At the time of writing, nearly 5,000 people have signed a petition - set up by a concerned member of staff at the University – to save The Women’s Library in its present form (thanks go to everyone who have already signed). Its current home, opened in 2002, is purpose-built on the site of an old wash-house in East London, and received a RIBA-award for its design. It was opened due to the huge efforts and commitment of the Library’s Friends and supporters both inside and outside the University, and a £4m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. As well as housing the collections and operating a Reading Room service, the building is a cultural centre hosting exhibitions, talks, education projects and community events.

The Library was originally founded in 1926. The collections, now officially Designated as ‘collections of outstanding national and international importance’, were saved from dispersal by London Met’s forerunner City of London Polytechnic 35 years ago, and this February it should have been celebrating ten years in its new home. In the lead-up to a major suffrage anniversary in 2018, now is the time to be building on the Library’s successes, fundraising for, and celebrating this important asset – not shutting it down or restricting public access.

London Met UNISON have initiated a campaign to save the Library, and are seeking testimony from its users about the Library’s importance. You can find out more on their blog, follow the campaign on Twitter, and add your name to the petition on the Care 2 website. There is also a ‘Save The Women’s Library’ group on Facebook.

The campaign has so far received coverage in The Guardian, Museums Journal, and Islington Tribune.

You can find out more about The Women’s Library on its website, and Wikipedia page. Its supporters scheme is The Friends of The Women’s Library.

Please help spread the word about the threat to this key resource for our subject.

Registration is now open for the Birkbeck Institute for Social Research Colloquium Thinking Through Time and History in Feminism

Full programme: http://www.scribd.com/fullscreen/81810179
Registration and payment Details: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/events/bbk-local?uid=d22d9cc1a32a574ffbf57b323c35b9f6

BISR Colloquium: Thinking Through Time and History in Feminism
Friday 23rd March 9am-7.30pm.

Birkbeck College, 30 Russell Sq, Room 101.

£20 Standard rate/£15 concessionary rate (includes coffee/tea, lunch, and wine reception)

Keynote Speakers: Rebecca Coleman (Sociology, Lancaster University) & Lynne Segal (Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck)

There has been an emergent call within the field of gender and feminist studies to consider themes that might be broadly situated under the umbrella term of “temporality”. Nostalgic and apocalyptic narratives of feminism abound in both popular culture and academic writing, with feminism’s death or out-datedness being the dominant narrative. Countering these narratives is crucially about unravelling the logic that makes them viable as well as interrupting their production. Explorations of alternative narratives have productively emerged from work in the field of collective and personal memory, new technologies as they impact feminist organising, and creative activism and archival practices. There is a continued political need to explore alternative mechanisms of telling feminist time, alternative relationships to be forged with the recent and historical past and alternative means for considering how feminism might forge a future for itself both in and out of the academy.
This colloquium aims to provide the opportunity for an interdisciplinary, creative and exploratory approach to time and history in feminism.

Organisers: Carly Guest and Sam McBean – contact them at bisrcolloquium2012

Ethel Carnie Holdsworth (1886-1962) was a working class writer, socialist and feminist who started in the mills in Lancashire at the age of 11. Her poetry brought her to the attention of the editor of The Clarion, Robert Blatchford, who helped her to get work as a writer . She wrote poetry and novels, edited the Woman Worker as well as anti-fascist magazine the Clear Light. One of her novels, Helen of Four Gates, was filmed in 1920 (and has been shown recently).

On Saturday 10 March at 2pm Dr Nicola Wilson will speak about Ethel at the Working Class Movement Library as part of the library’s celebrration International women’s Day. Nicola has written the introduction to the republication of This Slavery , published in 1925. also speaking on this event will be Karen Bosson, NW Women’s Committee, CWI.

For more information about Ethel, This Slavery and this event, please go to

http://lipsticksocialist.wordpress.com

If you find this blog of interest and wish to receive future posts, simply enter your email in the top right box, where it says Follow by email..

Thanks

B

CALL FOR PAPERS – REMINDER

DEADLINE: THIS FRIDAY, 3 FEBRUARY 2012

Gendering the history of charity and voluntary effort

A workshop for postgraduate and early-career researchers
University of Huddersfield, 9 March 2012

From medieval and early modern elite understandings of charitable
virtue to industrial cultures of mutual aid or contemporary
understandings of community engagement, gender has been critically
implicated in the history of voluntary action whether through the lens
of experience, performance or social systems.

This one day workshop for postgraduates and early career researchers
is the first of the VAHS New Researchers workshops in 2012 and is
supported by funding from the Economic History Society. The workshop
will explore how gender was figured in voluntary activity at the
levels of individual men’s and women’s lives and senses of self, the
social structures and cultural means through which it was sustained,
and its cultural legacies. We welcome papers which address these
themes across all historical periods and places, and in terms of both
men’s and women’s histories. We particularly encourage paper proposals
that consider methodological and conceptual issues.

Possible themes could include, but are no means limited to:

The role of family and social networks in building voluntary projects
and genealogies
Gendered spaces and politics of voluntary action
Strategies of self- and public-framing in voluntary effort
Cultural and gendered legacies of charitable and philanthropic engagement
Gender, the body and charity
Race, class and gender in charitable and voluntary projects
The workshop will end with an open discussion led by Daniel Weinbren
(Open University) and Jo Laycock (University of Manchester) at which
all attendees are invited to share and discuss issues raised
throughout the day and within their own research.

Download the Call for Papers from
http://www.vahs.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/VAHS-CFP-Huddersfield-Final.pdf.

Please email abstracts of 250 words to Tosh Warwick by 3 February 2012
at tosh.warwick

Call for papers: Gender and Irish Society in the 19th and 20th century: new perspectives and new ideas

Gender and Irish society in the 19th and 20th century: New perspectives and new ideas
Two-day conference – 23rd and 24th of March, 2012

Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences, National University of Ireland, Galway
Funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS)

This two-day interdisciplinary conference, funded by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences ‘New Ideas’ Scheme, will examine the theme of gender in Irish society in the 19th and 20th centuries. The conference will take place at the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies at the National University of Ireland Galway and bring together academics, early career researchers and postgraduates working in the fields of history, gender studies, children studies, English literature, sociology, film studies and related areas.

One of the aims of the conference is to produce an edited volume which will include chapters on gender incorporating a wide variety of issues. This collection of essays will represent the most up-to-date research in gender studies in Ireland with authors taking a fresh look at gendered topics.

Potential paper topics may include but are not limited to:

Gender and history
Gender and science, medicine and technology
Gender and education
Gender and human rights
Gender and sociology
Gender and literature
Gender and Irish studies
Gender and legal studies
Gender and religion
Gender and children’s studies
Gender and philanthropy
Representations of masculinity and femininity in 19th and 20th century Ireland.
The future of gendered themes within the humanities: is gender a valuable mode of investigation?

Abstract proposals (approx. 300 words) are to be submitted to Dr. Laura Kelly at genderandirishsociety2012 by 13 February 2012. Invitations to present at the conference will be sent by the end of February 2012. After the conference, selected conference speakers will be invited to submit their papers as chapters of the proposed edited volume. More details will soon be available on the conference website: http://genderandirishsociety2012.com

Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) is one of the world’s great feminist writers and social theorists, with her novels including The Story of an African Farm and her political treatises including Woman and Labour among many other writings. She also wrote c4800+ exceptionally important letters between 1871 and 1920, a period of momentous changes in the world which her letters are concerned with, and which also brought changes regarding letter-writing and literary practices too. Schreiner’s letters – all of them, in full, detailed and easy to read transcriptions – are available world-wide in a fully-searchable electronic edition published in January 2012. The Olive Schreiner Letters Online is hosted at www.oliveschreiner.org and provides a new, detailed, and unique electronic resource for social science, literary, historical, cultural geography, feminist and African studies research.

Schreiner’s letters are exceptionally interesting because containing her unfolding thinking about her writing and publishing activities, and also her developing analysis and social theorising regarding important topics that preoccupied her, including: metropolitan feminism and socialism, prostitution and its analysis, imperialism and the ‘scramble for Africa’, war & peace, changing understandings of ‘race’ and capital, intersectional theorising around women, gender and ‘race’, the South African War (1899-1902) & its concentration camps & women’s relief organisations, governance & federation, international women’s franchise campaigns, labour issues, international feminist networks, the Great War, diplomacy & pacifism, and much more as well.

The Project is funded by the UK’s ESRC (RES-062-23-1286) and the letters are published by the renowned electronic research resources publisher HRIOnline. Further information about the Project is available at: www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk from where many Project publications and also Schreiner’s own are available to download; there is also an informational leaflet attached to this email.

To receive information about activities and events from across the globe concerning letters and other forms of life representation more broadly, please subscribe to our **Lives & Letters mailing list** by emailing oliveschreiner.

Alternatively, you can self-subscribe to the mailing list by sending a blank email to sympa with the following in the subject: sub lives-and-letters.

Postgraduate Conference

The Popular and The Middlebrow: Women’s Writing 1880 -
1940

12 April 2012, Newcastle University

Keynote Speaker:

Professor Nicola Humble (Roehampton)

This event aims to bring together postgraduate researchers from across the UK and beyond
to discuss the growing interest in and importance of the categories of the middlebrow and
the popular as ways of engaging with women’s writing in the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries. Both of these terms have become crucial ways of exploring the work
of more marginalised female writers who were not directly involved in larger intellectual
discourses such as Modernism or social realism, but who enjoyed a great deal of success
during their own time. From the regency romances of Georgette Heyer to the crime fiction
of Agatha Christie, from the muted socialist politics of Winifred Holtby to the witty asides
of Molly Keane, the conference reasserts the importance of these women’s writing as part
of a wider literary tradition. It encourages papers which both work with and interrogate the
terms ‘popular’ and ‘middlebrow’ as well as those which choose to apply them to the work
of a specific woman or group of women in order to challenge or consolidate their usage.
It asks: do the terms still contain inherent value judgements? Are they problematic when
applied to women’s literature? Or do they engender a challenge to preconceptions about
women and literary history, allowing for a reconceptualization of notions of canonicity?

Women writers and the popular
Women
writers
and
the
•
middlebrow
Domesticity and the home
Place and landscape
War and politics
Queer fictions

Proposals of no more than 300 words should be emailed to middlebrow-
conf by 30 November 2011.
For more information: www.pop-
middlebrow.com

In association with the Long Nineteenth Century Research Cluster (School of
English) and the Gender Research Group (Newcastle Institute for the Arts, Social
Sciences and Humanities) and supported by a grant from the Catherine Cookson
Foundation.

Organized by Katherine Cooper and Jodie Laird

**This conference will run in conjunction with another event, ‘Gender,
Travel and Modernity, 1850-1950′ taking place on 13th and 14th April 2011.
Delegates may wish to attend both events. For more information: http://
movingdangerously.wordpress.com/.

Les interventions filmées au colloque "Les féministes de la 2e vague" (mai 2010) sont disponibles sur le site de l’Université d’Angers : http://videouniv.univ-angers.fr/podcasts/les-feministes-de-la-2e-vague/

“Thinking Through Time and History in Feminism”
Birkbeck, University of London, 23 March 2012

Keynote Speakers:
Rebecca Coleman (Sociology, Lancaster University) & Lynne Segal (Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck)

There has been an emergent call within the field of gender and feminist studies to consider themes
that might be broadly situated under the umbrella term of “temporality”. Nostalgic and apocalyptic
narratives of feminism abound in both popular culture and academic writing, with feminism’s death or
out-datedness being the dominant narrative. Countering these narratives is crucially about unravelling
the logic that makes them viable as well as interrupting their production. Explorations of alternative
narratives have productively emerged from work in the field of collective and personal memory, new
technologies as they impact feminist organizing, and creative activism and archival practices. There
is a continued political need to explore alternative mechanisms of telling feminist time, alternative
relationships to be forged with the recent and historical past and alternative means for considering how
feminism might forge a future for itself both in and out of the academy.

This colloquium aims to provide the opportunity for an interdisciplinary, creative and exploratory
approach to time and history in feminism. We welcome contributions from academics, artist and
activists working in the area. Contributions could include but are not limited to, paper presentations,
digital media, photography, film, poetry and performance. Contributions could consider, but are by no
means limited to, some of the following questions:

- How does the personal, social and collective memory of the feminist past create, sustain, or
challenge feminism in the present?

- How might we forge relationships between temporal periods that resist generational affects of
duty or shame?

- How might remembering and forgetting occur not only within the spaces of activism and the
institution, but also between them?

- How can we think critically about how, for example, citing, course building, and curating are
practices of remembering and forgetting?

- How might feminist activists, artists and theorists respond to the narratives of ‘the death of
feminism’ or the ‘post-feminist’ era?

- How does time, and the various ways we think of it, both enable and constrain politics?

- Is the time of activism the same as the time of the institution?

- What are the theoretical and methodological challenges of working within feminist archives?

- How can we account for the multiple and diverse voices that comprise ‘feminism’ and the
relationships between these voices? How can the use of creative methodologies enable the
exploration of these issues?

Please submit a 200 word abstract by 25 November 2011 to Carly Guest and Sam McBean at
bisrcolloquium2012. If you have any questions, please contact us.

Women’s Studies International Forum Volume 34, Issue 6, Pages 479-614, November-December 2011 Modify or Remove My Alerts “You just felt the collective wind being knocked out of us”: The deinstitutionalization of feminism and the survival of women’s organizing in Canada Original Research Article Pages 570-581 Kathleen Rodgers, Melanie Knight