Fighting for Women’s Rights in France and the UK Christine Bard, Catherine Robert, Laura Schwartz and Alice Béja (Chair)
Event details
Join us for a Franco-British perspective on the history of feminism.
How has feminism developed on both sides of the Channel? How have historic mobilisations around women’s rights unfolded in France and the United Kingdom, and what bridges can be built between our political and cultural traditions whose universalism is also rooted in varied historical contexts?
Christine Bard of the Université d’Angers and Laura Schwartz of the University of Warwick will discuss the major achievements of the feminist movement and the issues that it faces today. The session will be introduced by Catherine Robert, a former Higher Education Attaché at the French Embassy in London, and will be chaired by Alice Béja, Higher Education and Research Attachée at the French Embassy in the UK.
This event is presented by the French Embassy in the UK.
You may also be interested in the Festival Focus Day, A Date with History: Fashion, Food and Feminism, on Saturday 15 June. and special Festival screenings of the French films The Goddesses of Food on Monday 10 June and Carole Roussopoulos, Une Femme à la Caméra on Tuesday 11 June.
About the speakers
Christine Bard is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Université d’Angers and specialises in gender and feminism. Her work encompasses: feminism, including Les filles de Marianne. Histoire des féminismes. 1914-1940 (Fayard, 1995) and Dictionnaire des féministes: France, 18ème-21ème siècle (co-edited with S. Chaperon, PUF, 2017); clothing and gender, including Une histoire politique du pantalon (Le Seuil, 2010); cross-dressing; and anti-feminist discourse with Un siècle d’antiféminisme (Fayard, 1999). Christine also plays a key role in the preservation of feminist historical sources and founded the association Archives du féminisme.
Dr Alice Béja is Higher Education and Research Attachée with the French Embassy in the UK. She is a former student of the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Lyon and holds a PhD in American Studies from the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle. She joined the Lille Institute of Political Studies in 2015, and is a researcher in the social sciences research center CERAPS (UMR 8026). Her research focuses on anarchism in the United States, the cultural history of the US-American left and the relationship between politics and literature. She has published John Dos Passos, la littérature et la politique (Honoré Champion, 2015). An editor at the French social sciences journal Esprit between 2011 and 2015, she is now a member of the editorial board.
Catherine Robert is Associate Professor at Sorbonne Université (German Studies). She has a particular interest in German foreign policy, colonial and postcolonial history. From 2013 to 2017 she was Higher Education Attaché at the French Embassy in London and initiated A Date with History. She was the Director of the Institut Français in Bonn from 2008 to 2012.
Laura Schwartz is Associate Professor of Modern British History at the University of Warwick. Her new book Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women's Suffrage Movement is coming out with Cambridge University Press in the summer. She has published widely on British feminism and radical politics including Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women's Emancipation, England 1830-1914 (Manchester University Press, 2013) and A Serious Endeavour: Gender, Education and Community at St. Hugh's, 1886-2011 (Profile Books, 2011).
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons
Partners
