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History of Medicine Parenting Forum

Parenting Forum

Parenting Forum

As part of the History & Policy network, this Forum seeks to bring together historians with policy-makers, practitioners and researchers into parenting in order to examine ways in which the history of parenting can influence policies and practice today.

Parenting Forum Blog

Latest Entry: Prison, Parenting and the Teaching of Mothercraft in the Mid-Twentieth Century, January 2018

When reflecting upon her experiences as the Governor of Holloway women’s prison between the late 1950s and the early 1960s, Joanna Kelley stated that "our problems were quite different: problems of mothers and babies, problems of family visits impined more on us, and we didn't have the problems of escapes and very violent prisoners." With the creation of female-only prisons, and the more definitive separation of men and women in mixed prisons from the mid-nineteenth century, there were some acknowledgements of the distinct female responses to prison and their specific social, moral and medical needs. A notable distinction in the female prison was the presence of pregnant women and young infants. There were specific spaces that had to be incorporated into the physical structure of the prison such as nurseries and lying-in wards in the prison hospital but also, crucially, their daily needs had to be incorporated into the prison’s routines and regulations.

Events

Bearing Different Risks: Choices in Childbirth through History

Exhibition, 15 June - 15 September 2018

Thackray Medical Museum Leeds, see here for more details

Wisdom from Failure: Learning from Child Protection

POSTPONED - FURTHER DETAILS TO FOLLOW

Workshop Organised by Willis Palmer and History & Policy

King's College London, 18 May 2018

This one-day workshop will bring together legal, medical, social work professionals, with voluntary organisations and academics, in order to consider why, when, and how we can learn from child protection practice, to improve it in the future. We will consider different disciplinary perspectives on this issue, themes and patterns in failure, existing remedies, and questions of why and when we do not learn.

For more information about the event and to sign up please visit Willis Palmer's website here.

See more on our previous events here.

Noticeboard

Events and debate in the history of parenting:

Conference: 'Children and Youth on the Move', Society for the History of Children and Youth, 21-23 June 2018, University of Greenwich, London.
Podcast: Institute of Child and Youth Studies podcast, University of Lethbridge.
Virtual Archive: Collections Archive, Victoria and Albert Museum of Childhood.
Blog: Childhood Vaccination and the NHS, People's History of the NHS.

To register your interest or for more information about the forum please contact: Angela Davis angela dot davis at warwick dot ac dot uk, Laura King l dot king at leeds dot ac dot uk or Jenny Crane j dot crane dot 1 at warwick dot ac dot uk.


All images on this page courtesy of the Wellcome Image Library.