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Events

History from underneath

20 November 2013

Time: 6:30pm
Venue: Maths Lecture Theatre, Mile End Campus

Did the economic and social changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth century improve or retard the wellbeing and status of women and girls? Professor Jane Humphries sheds new light on a question that has long preoccupied historians and social commentators by presenting new evidence from the autobiographical accounts of working women and men. With the help of these sources she will explore the evolution of inequality. Focusing on childhood and adolescence in particular, Jane Humphries will discuss some unexpected findings, including the unsettling evidence of girls’ vulnerability to sexual predation. Historians of women’s work have long emphasised the social and cultural inhibitions that increased the dependence of girls and women on male kin, but fear of sexual assault and loss of respectability, as a constraint on women’s independence, has been overlooked.

Jane Humphries is Professor of Economic History at Oxford University and is Fellow of All Souls College. She has written widely on the social and economic history of the industrial revolution in Britain, and particularly its effects on the family life of ordinary workers. Her latest book, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution (Cambridge University Press, 2010) reasserts the importance of children in the developing economy while exploring the full impact of work upon their own life experiences. Her lecture will be of the greatest interest to those who reflect through history, economics and law on family life, childhood, work and survival in the past.

Picture courtesy of the Mary Evans Library

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