war – Women's Studies Group 1558

Reminder: WSG seminar January 2020

The third seminar of the year takes place on Saturday 18 January. Seminars take place at the Foundling Museum, 40 Brunswick Square, WC1N 1AZ, starting promptly at 1pm and finishing at 4pm. Doors open at 12.30. The Foundling is a wheelchair accessible venue, and directions for getting to the Museum can be found here, including those for the visually impaired. All seminars are free and open to the public, though refreshments will cost £2 to those who aren’t WSG members. Those attending the seminars are welcome to look round the museum before or after.

Saturday 18 January, 2020. Chairs Angela Escott and Miriam al Jamil
Charlotte Young: Women’s involvement in Canterbury sequestrations, 1643-1650 [WSG Bursary winner, 2019]
Carol Stewart: Penelope Aubin’s The Noble Slaves and the Politics of Opposition
Anne Stott: Princess Charlotte of Wales: gender and the “reversionary interest”
Katherine Woodhouse: “Madam Smith says, what shou’d the Captain do with such a wife as me who can only sit with a book in her hand”
Anna Jamieson: Madness Exhibited: The Margaret Nicholson Scandal

For further information including abstracts, see our seminars page. To join the WSG, see our membership page.

Charlotte Young and Hannah Jeans awarded WSG bursaries

The WSG is extremely pleased to announce it has awarded bursaries to Dr Charlotte Young, an early career scholar who gained her PhD in History at Royal Holloway, and Hannah Jeans, a PhD candidate in History at the University of York.

Charlotte will use the bursary to research her project on women’s involvement in the Canterbury sequestrations, 1643-50. She tweets as @charlie_l_y. Hannah will use hers to take up a Kanner Fellowship in British Studies at the Willam Andrews Clark Memorial Library, Los Angeles where she will research the Pole family newsletter collection, c.1680-1710, which will inform her thesis ‘Women’s Reading Habits and Gendered Genres, c.1600-1700’. She tweets as @HannahJeans1.

The WSG bursaries are intended to support early career researchers, PhD students and independent scholars research “any aspect of women’s studies in the period 1558-1837”. Previous winners have worked on topics from the experience of early modern female service to friendship, and pregnancy. Bursaries can be awarded for new or continuing, single or multidisciplinary projects. They can be used to subsidise any costs incurred by the project. To be eligible, applicants must be a member of the WSG. The WSG bursary panel wish to thank all of this year’s applicants for their applications, and encourage those who have been unsuccessful to consider re-applying the following year.

Gendering the maritime world

James Gillray, Dido in despair, satirical print, 1801, BM P&D 1868,0808.6927 © The Trustees of the British Museum

Building on last week’s post linking the study of women to broader issues of gender and sex, the Journal for Maritime Research has published a special issue on ‘Gendering the maritime world‘, in which long-time WSG member Margarette Lincoln has an article on ‘Emma Hamilton, war, and the depiction of femininity in the late eighteenth century‘. Emma Hamilton, the artist’s model and creator of her famous ‘attitudes’, is today best remembered for her affair with Admiral Horation Nelson. Margarette’s article explores the caricaturist James Gillray’s depiction of Hamilton as Dido, which hints at her pregnancy, Gillray’s more sympathetic uses of the Dido figure to represent other public women, and the particular restrictions on female conduct in wartime.

Maritime history is an evolving field which in recent years has focused on the broader social, economic, political, and cultural trends which link “ship and shore”. One of the most fertile recent areas of inquiry has been gender, especially during the early modern period and eighteenth century, and some of the articles in this special issue, from sailor’s tears to sodomy, reflect this growing interest.