Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, Toronto, Canada, May 22-25, 2014, Website

Call for panelists from Erika Rappaport: Though scholars have long known that men and women do not neatly fit into neat categories of producer and consumer, this trope has meant that much scholarship on the gendered nature of modern consumer society has focused on how various cultural forms and commercial practices that have produced normative understandings of femininity. I am looking for co-panelists who are interested instead in considering the role that women have played in shaping and/or producing consumer society. Along the lines of works such as Continue reading →

Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, Toronto, Canada, May 22-25, 2014, Website

Call for panelists from Beth Salerno: I am putting together a Berks Roundtable (4-6 participants) titled: „Biography as a Conflict Zone: Borders, Encounters and the Meaning of Memory in the Writing of Women’s Lives“. My own work centers on a white, 19th century New England woman, but I would like to craft the panel as broadly as possible to explore the complexities of writing women’s biography across time, geography, race and discipline.

Biography-writing has always had the best potential to cross the academic/public border, though far more for European and American subjects than any other. Biographies of writers often blur the disciplinary line between Continue reading →

Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, Toronto, Canada, May 22-25, 2014, Website

Call for panelists from Lesley Hall: My projected panel would look at how feminism/s have survived and what they were doing in the non-dramatic eras or places in which feminism was considered outdated, irrelevant, a distraction from other struggles, or in which it was about carrying on the struggle in tedious and unflamboyant ways. My own paper, ‚Between the Waves: British feminism’s forgotten decade?‘ will be on British feminism in the 1930s and will examine the writings of several women applying feminist analysis to the problems of the day in the aftermath of the grant of suffrage to women on the same terms as men in 1928, during the economic depression, in the context of the rise of fascism in Europe and a more general backlash against women’s emancipation. I am seeking Continue reading →

Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, Toronto, Canada, May 22-25, 2014, Website

Call for panelists from Caroline Merithew: I am working on a panel proposal for the Berks and am looking for a third paper that would add geographic and/or chronological breadth to the focus.

The panel theme is Alternative Working Class Readings of Home and the Domestic Sphere. (The papers deal with U.S., late 19th-early 20th and Canada mid-20th).

Email me if you’re interested to Continue reading →

Berkshire Conference on Women’s History, Toronto, Canada, May 22-25, 2014, Website

Call for panelists from Karen Dunak: The panel will focus on the experiences and imaginings of widows as they embarked upon their lives after marriage – and how their decisions and actions were infused with meaning, whether due to public efforts to negotiate their late husbands’ on-going legacies or because of their unwillingness to sustain their widow roles and behave as society expected they should (and often as a mixture of both). Having neither rejected marriage nor left a union of their own volition, in their roles as widows, these women lived on the edge of expected social roles and ultimately shaped public views of women – even as they may have never endeavored to do so. Continue reading →