Dame Margaret Drabble and Professor Carolyn Steedman will hold a discussion on the theme ‘Young Women at University in the 1960s and 1970s’ as one of the History Department’s Fiftieth Celebration Events on Wednesday the 14^th of October, 2015. This will take place between 4:30pm and 6:45pm in the Wolfson Research Exchange.

Dame Margaret Drabble is the author of eighteen novels, short stories, and many works of non-fiction, especially literary history and biography. Some of her best-known and earliest novels, including A Summer Birdcage(1963), The Millstone (1965), and Jerusalem the Golden (1967), describe the challenges, emotional conflicts and experiences of young women seeking higher education and intellectual fulfilment, but also sexuality and motherhood during the sixties. Later novels follow women like these into the new century. She has won many literary prizes, and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by Cambridge in 2006. She was awarded a CBE in 1980 and a DBE in 2008.

Professor Carolyn Steedman FBA is Emeritus Professor of History at Warwick. She writes on the social and cultural history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries on concepts of class, selfhood and identity, and on law and labour. One of her best-known books is Landscape for a Good Woman (1986) about a mother and daughter becoming young women against the backdrop of twentieth-century class circumstances. Among current projects is a contribution to Miles Taylor's The Utopian Universities, about the new universities of the 1960s.