38th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association SSHA (Web), Angélique JANSSENS, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Venue: Chicago
Time: November 21-24 2013
Deadline: 31st January 2013
Session topic: In her 1995 article titled ‚Were women present at the demographic transition?‘ Alison Mackinnon argued that mainstream historical demography did not portray women as decision-makers, as actors in their own right where it concerns marriage, fertility and family formation. The absence of women as historical actors in research on historical demography had also been noted by leading scholars such as Susan Cotts Watkins. The debate on the fertility decline, both scholars claimed, largely ignored the issue of power relations between men and women. Did men and women have common goals or were they often in conflict over some or even most aspects of family life and sexuality? How can we view women as historical agents in the sweeping changes of the first demographic transition? How and under what conditions were women able to bring down the numbers of children they would bear? In this session we will take another look at the role women played in the fertility decline and attempt to gauge women’s agency regarding fertility and family formation.
Submission of paper proposals: Please, submit your paper proposal in the form of a 500 to 800 word abstract, stating clearly the questions that will be examined, the type of empirical material that will be used, and an outline of the main argument that will be developed in the paper. Proposals should be sent to: Angélique Janssens (a.janssens@let.ru.nl).
For further questions, please do not hesitate to contact me by email. For general information on the 38th Annual Meeting of the Social Science History Association, see the SSHA website: www.ssha.org.
Angélique JANSSENS, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands, email: a.janssens@let.ru.nl
Source: H-WOMEN@H-NET.MSU.EDU