Workshop held at the Modern Records Centre
21 September 2002
Organised by: Hilary Marland and Sheryl Root

This one-day workshop provided an exciting opportunity to bring together specialist scholars working within this broad area. It explored many facets of the healing and caring functions of women in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries; raising issues such as domesticity, social contact between the classes, morality, and women's place in both professional and alternative medicine as the themes of the workshop. Various groups of women were considered, including mothers, nurses, physiotherapists and spritualists, and relationships and comparisons between these groups investigated. The concept of 'the female touch' was examined in detail - in considering women's effect on the society they lived in, and how they were represented by that society and by the women themselves, thus raising issues of gender indentification, changing class profiles, medical opinion and respectability.

Programme

Sheryl Root (University of Warwick)
'Touching Men: Women Doctors and Masseuses During the First World War'

Corinne Montenon (Birmingham University)
'The Spiritualist Medium: There is No Fear of Death'

Mary Ann Elston (Royal Holloway, University of London)
'Training the Female Touch?: The Bedford College Hygiene Course 1896-1919'

Judith Lockhart (University of Warwick)
'Truly a 'Hospital for Women': Women's Role in the Management of the Birmingham and Midland Hospital for Women, 1871-1901'

Marie-Clare Balaam and Barbara Crowther (Wolverhampton University)
'Women Surveying Women: The Normal Menopause'

Vicky Long (University of Warwick)
'Brutal Attendants or Skilled Female Nurses?: Violence and the Female Touch 1914-1929'

Katie Field (Oxford)
'From Nits to Nerves: Village Nursing in the Inter-war Period'

James Hinton (University of Warwick)
'Home Helps and the 'Duchess Factor': Social Leadership Versus the Professional Society in 1940s Britain'