Women, Reproduction and Agency in the Western World, c.1850-2000
Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, Venice, 20-21 March 2025
Workshop Report
The workshop was the final event of four workshops in connection with our project, ‘The Last Taboo of Motherhood?: Postnatal Mental Disorders in Twentieth-Century Britain’ https://www.ltomhistory.org. The workshop was generously funded by the Wellcome Trust, Warwick’s EUTOPIA alliance and the Centre for the History of Medicine at Warwick. The workshop built on the EUTOPIA network linking the Universities of Warwick and the Vrije Universiteit Brussels, and long-standing collaborations between the three organisers: Hilary Marland (Warwick), Jolien Gijbels (VUB) and Catherine Cox (University College Dublin).
We are very grateful to EUTOPIA for generously funding the conference dinner and room bookings in the Palazzo.
The workshop took a broad and longue durée approach to the issue of agency in relation to reproduction, and the papers covered the late nineteenth to the turn of the twenty-first century. By agency, we referred to women’s own experiences and influence in shaping their own reproductive health, and the role of partners, health care providers, institutions, community, family and advocacy organisations. The workshop explored the how gender, class, race, ethnicity and religion shaped agency, and cast the net wide to include under-explored and new research areas, including the relationship of reproduction to mental hospital admissions and treatments; the push back against the hospitalisation of childbirth in Britain and the Netherlands; ethics and caesarean section; reproduction and perceptions of women’s behaviour and management in prisons; agency and endometriosis; genes, identities and female agency; and minoritised women’s reproductive experiences. Focused on the western world, the contributions explored Britain, Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands and the United States. Participants included several PhD candidates alongside established scholars, with colleagues joining from Warwick, VUB, UCD, University of Oxford, University of Essex, Strathclyde University, University of Glasgow, University of Utrecht, and the Graduate Institute Geneva. We were also delighted to invite Giulia Zanini who is based at Ca' Foscari Universityto attend on day 2 to introduce her ERC project on pregnancy and reproductive time.
Investigating these areas produced new ideas and lines of analysis for all participants, identifying new sources and issues around the ethical use of our research materials. There was scope to include many more participants from what is a large and energetic field of scholarship – which also engages with current and pressing issues around reproductive rights. We are exploring the potential of establishing a network around this theme and hosting future events, with a view to including EUTOPIA partners. This will be dependent of course on locating funding. While we opted not to produce an edited volume based on the presentations, several participants will develop their papers into articles, where the workshop will be acknowledged.
We were delighted to be able to host the workshop at Warwick’s Venice Conference location, Palazzo Giustinian Lolin, with the support of Chiara Croff and Luca Mola. Chiara Croff was a wonderful coordinator, organising hotel bookings, arranging the lunches, conference dinners and refreshments, and enabling us to host a welcome reception on the evening before the workshop on 19 March. We were very fortunate to have her support, which greatly added to the pleasure of being able to organise the workshop in such a wonderful location. We received much positive feedback about the Palazzo and its situation on the Grand Canal (including several comments that this was the best workshop ever attended), and there is no doubt that the Palazzo is an excellent asset and advertisement for the University.
Hilary Marland, 30 April 2025