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Women's History Association of Ireland

 

‘She said she was in the family way’: pregnancy and infancy in the Irish past

16-17 April, 2010

The 2010 conference of the Women’s History Association of Ireland will focus on the theme of pregnancy and infancy.

Provisional Programme

Registration Form [word doc]

Accommodation in Belfast [word doc]

Call for Papers [download - pdf file] Delegates should register for the conference by emailing Elaine Farrell by 1 April.

For more information please contact Elaine Farrell: efarrell03@qub.ac.uk

 

Organising committee: Elaine Farrell, Professor Mary O’Dowd

 

Update: a volume of essays drawn from this conference has been published as Elaine Farrell (ed.), ‘She said she was in the family way’: pregnancy and infancy in modern Ireland (Institute of Historical Research, 2012). 

VENUE:  Governance Building, 53-67 University Road, Belfast (opposite the main Lanyon Building).  

FRIDAY, 16 APRIL 2010:

5.00-6.00 pm Registration

6.00-7.30

Panel 1: Infanticide in the Irish past

Professor James Kelly (St. Patrick’s College, Dublin City University): Infanticide in eighteenth-century Ireland

Elaine Farrell (Queen’s University Belfast): ‘The fellow said it was not harm and only tricks’: the putative father in suspected cases of infanticide, 1850-1900

Dr Clíona Rattigan (University of Warwick): ‘Practically every girl in that condition is in a state of great mental disturbance’: single women’s responses to pregnancy in Ireland, 1922-1950

Book launch & reception

Judith Harford and Claire Rush (eds), Have women made a difference? Women in Irish universities, 1850-2010 (Peter Lang, Oxford, 2010).

SATURDAY, 17 APRIL 2010
Venue:  Governance Building, 53-67 University Road, Belfast (opposite the main Lanyon Building). 

9.30-11.15 am

Panel 2: Nursery and state care of babies

Professor Maria Luddy (University of Warwick): ‘The price of life: babyfarming in late 19th/early 20th century Ireland

Dr Gillian McIntosh (Queen’s University Belfast): Who’s minding the baby? Nursery care during the Second World War

Dr Sarah-Anne Buckley (University College Cork): ‘Found in a “dying condition”’: nurse children, illegitimacy and desertion in Ireland, 1880-1940

11.15-11.30: Tea/Coffee break

11.30-1.00

Panel 3A: Contraception and abortion in Ireland

Dr Ann Daly (Independent scholar): Contraception and the medical profession in Ireland

Dr Sandra McAvoy (University College Cork): Defining contraception as evil and obscene

Dr Jennifer K. DeWan (Independent scholar): An Irish solution: judicial activism and abortion legislation since 1983

11.30-1.00

Panel 3B: Childbirth

Dr Clodagh Tait (University of Essex): Some sources for the study of infant and maternal mortality in later-seventeenth-century Ireland

Rosemary Raughter (Independent scholar): ‘A time of trial being near at hand’: pregnancy, childbirth and parenting in the spiritual journal of Elizabeth Bennis (1749-79)

Dr Julia Anne Bergin (National University of Ireland, Maynooth): Labour, childbirth and the post natal experience in a nineteenth-century lying-in hospital: safe and secure or not?

1.00-2.00: Lunch

2.00-3.30

Panel 4A: Unmarried mothers and ‘illegitimate’ children

Dr Nathalie Sebbane (Université de Paris 3 Sorbonne Nouvelle): Evolution of the perceptions and representations of unmarried motherhood in Ireland: 1838-1937

Ann Marie Graham (National University of Ireland, Maynooth): Legal illegitimacy – a study of how state and church attitudes towards illegitimacy became enshrined in Irish law

Dr Jennifer Redmond (National University of Ireland, Maynooth): In the family away and away from the family: examining the evidence in Irish unmarried mothers in Britain, 1920s-1940s

2.00-3.30

Panel 4B: Childcare                          

Elaine Murray (Independent scholar): The hand that rocks the cradle

Emma O’Toole (Independent scholar):   Maternal matters: a mother’s role in maintaining the health of her young children in the late modern Irish household

Jutta Kruse (University of Limerick): In the spotlight: portraits of infant survival, Dublin 1919-1926

3.30-3.45: Tea/Coffee break

3.45-5.30

Panel 5: Wanted and unwanted babies

Dr Anne O’Connor (RTE): Cradle and grave: representations of childbirth and child murder in Irish folklore

Dr Leanne McCormick (University of Ulster): ‘To get rid of the baby’: abortion in Northern Ireland, 1922-1992

Colleen Stewart (National University of Ireland, Maynooth): Babies wanted: a study of the public perception of adoption in mid-twentieth century Ireland