Books by Lesley Hall
Now available online, with supplementary material, at the British Library website: see link
Articles and chapters by Lesley Hall
Naomi Mitchison: A Writer in Time, James Purdon (ed),(Edinburgh UP2023) , 2023
Mitchison was positioned centrally within twentieth century debates about reproduction. She was t... more Mitchison was positioned centrally within twentieth century debates about reproduction. She was the sister of Communist geneticist JBS Haldane; the enthusiastic mother of seven children; a birth control activist and a very sceptical member of the Eugenics Society; part of the feminist circle around the journal Time and Tide; and involved in socialist politics. While issues around motherhood were significant in her earlier historical and realist fiction, during the 1960s she turned to science fiction to explore questions of breeding and reproduction further. This essay will incorporate a discussion of her 1930s writings on and activism in birth control and opinions on eugenics into the later developments of these themes in her speculative fictions. In Memoirs of a Spacewoman and Solution Three she addressed intriguing questions about parenthood and reproduction from a possibly unique perspective, elaborating intersections between a wide range of theories, beliefs and ideologies, from Edwardian feminist arguments for free mate choice, via interwar eugenics, to the implications of the discovery of DNA.
The Routledge Handbook of Victorian Scandals in Literature and Culture , 2022
This chapter addresses the repetition in popular accounts of the Victorians and their era of cert... more This chapter addresses the repetition in popular accounts of the Victorians and their era of certain specific “scandals” or “sensations” and the overlooking or neglect of others. Some account will be given of extensively reported events which, if not entirely forgotten and which may have received occasional historiographical attention, have not really become part of more popular perceptions. Suggestions will be made as to why this might be. The scandalous involvement of famous, notorious, aristocratic, and royal individuals has accorded a place in the popular historical imagination. This has also generated the production of persistent conspiracy theories, such as claims of a “hush-up” over the Cleveland Street affair because Prince Eddy was allegedly a habitué. An apparently coherent narrative trajectory also makes for a prolonged shelf life. Such scandals corroborate and/or contradict general assumptions about “the Victorians.” There are also some things which are now scandals, as it were, about the Victorians, produced by the discovery or wider circulation of sources since their day. One example is Isaac Baker Brown who is probably a great deal more notorious now than he was, except in very limited circles, in the 1860s. The retrospective creation of suppositious Victorian scandals is also considered.
Fair and Unfair Trials in the British Isles, 1800-1940: Microhistories of Justice and Injustice, edited by David Nash and Anne-Marie Kilday , 2020
N. Hopwood, R. Flemming and L. Kassell (eds) Reproduction from Antiquity to the Present Day (Cambridge University Press) , 2018
in Andrew Mangham and Daniel Lea (eds), The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (University of L... more in Andrew Mangham and Daniel Lea (eds), The Male Body in Medicine and Literature (University of Liverpool Press, 2018)
H. G. Wells’ correspondence, now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, reveals the w... more H. G. Wells’ correspondence, now at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, reveals the wide-ranging impact of his thought upon individuals in all walks of life throughout several decades, indeed up to his death. The ways in which individuals and organisations, inspired by his visions of a better society, engaged with Wells and his ideas during the interwar period (when it has been suggested that his influence was waning), are explored, along with the extent to which individuals were motivated by his writings to try to become ‘Open Conspirators’ working to bring his utopia into existence,. Several organisations were set up with the intention of bringing together individuals working towards the utopia Wells had delineated. The tensions between these enthusiasts and Wells’s own ambivalence to such projects are considered, and also the tensions between different groups of enthusiasts. While it is almost impossible to trace any direct outcomes from the endeavours of these ‘Open Conspirators’, it need not be assumed, however, that they were entirely ineffectual.
In 1985 Sheila Jeffreys alleged that the rise of sexological discourse concerning female inversio... more In 1985 Sheila Jeffreys alleged that the rise of sexological discourse concerning female inversion in the early twentieth century obliged women of the interwar period in the UK to reject female affection for fear of being labelled lesbian. Several historians have demonstrated that sexological ideas gained very little general currency before Radclyffe Hall's novel The Well of Loneliness (1928). Research on specific women suggests that such fears were less prevalent than surmised. An influential discourse invoking tropes of emotional femininity, rather than inversion, was embodied in Clemence Dane's Regiment of Women (1917), presenting female same-sex relationships as mired in morbid emotions and parasitic manipulation. It had significant cultural resonance for well over a decade. A counter-discourse argued that emotionally healthy, reciprocal female friendship might form a sustaining element for women unable to marry. Stress, however, was laid on the need for self-knowledge and psychological understanding.
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Books by Lesley Hall
Articles and chapters by Lesley Hall
Ruggles Gates, on the grounds of his impotence. It is argued that her success in bringing the latter to a successful conclusion led her to an unrealistic assessment of the degree to which she could control the narrative about herself within the context of the
courtroom in her libel suit. In both cases, factors external to the courtroom had a significant impact.
While the interwar period, and perhaps particularly the 1930s, have been thought of as a period 'between the waves' in terms of feminism, not only did this decade see a number of activist movements fired by a feminist agenda, but during the 1930s a number of interesting works applied a feminist analysis to the particular situation of that time. Besides the generally gloomy political and economic situation, there was a discernable misogynist backlash against feminism and women's rights, even in countries which had not endured the rise to power of Fascism, with its ‘new dream of natural instinctive racial unity… which designed for women a return to their “natural” functions of housekeeping and child-bearing’. While some attention will be given to the relatively well-known works by Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (1928) and Three Guineas (1938), the main focus will be on non-fictional works by two novelists who were part of the circle round the feminist journal Time and Tide: Winifred Holtby's Women and a Changing Civilisation and Naomi Mitchison's The Home and a Changing Civilisation, both published in 1934 in The Twentieth Century Library series. Both women were powerfully aware of the extent to which ideas about women, the home, domesticity, the public and the private, were historically and culturally relativistic. How they thought about women and domesticity from a specifically feminist perspective will be explored, with particular attention given to their arguments that the domestic space itself was a very problematic haven from the harshness of the world.
In 1936, Harley Granville Barker’s controversial play Waste (1906, revised 1927), previously banned from public performance under the theatrical censorship afflicting the English stage because of the (offstage) death from abortion of the married women with whom the politician protagonist had had a brief affair, was finally presented to a general audience. By the 1930s, however, abortion was emerging from the silence of taboo. The desirability of amending the relevant terms of the 1861 Offenses Against the Person Act was increasingly being debated. The subject featured in a number of novels of the decade. This paper argues, however, that the case for abortion was most vividly staged in the context of the courtroom. Edith Thompson’s attempted self-administration of an abortifacient (inadvertently consumed by her husband) could not even be mentioned in her trial for murder in 1923, thus leading to assumptions that the ‘bitter taste’ he had complained of was an attempt to poison him. In 1931, however, Mr Justice McCardie, speaking from the bench, not only expressed sympathy for women exhausted by childbearing who sought abortions but for the backstreet abortionists who helped them out in their predicament. In 1938 Dr Joan Malleson (married to the actor and dramatist Miles Malleson) was presented with a very dramatic request for termination – a girl of fourteen of respectable family who had been gang-raped and become pregnant (a case alluded to in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts). The distinguished gynaecological surgeon Aleck Bourne operated, and then asked the police to arrest him in order to provoke a test case of the Infant Life Preservation Act 1929. Court proceedings were extensively reported in the newspapers, and they were not subject to the limitations upon subject-matter and its presentation that constrained the British stage well into the 1960s.
How do we uncover and interpret traces of sexuality in the historical record, in particular women’s sexuality and non-normative identities,
when the terms have been so often framed within male preconceptions and reproductive imperatives. Certain manifestations of sexuality are only visible in the record because they were criminalised (e.g. male homosexuality) or pathologised. It is tempting to read explicit diaries or letters as windows into a hidden sphere, but how representative were they? How far can we impose present categories on the past?
Women doctors had proved their capacities during the Great War. Yet, after the War, and following the (limited) grant of suffrage, the passing of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act and various other legislation which appeared to improve the position of women, women in medicine still faced difficulties. Informal prejudices against appointing women to hospital posts or in certain specialisms continued. There were also formal constraints militating against women entering medical education in the first place, and pursuing a career once they had qualified. While the Medical Women's Federation undertook collective action to improve women’s status in the profession, individual women endeavoured to negotiate careers for themselves that would use their skills. The battles were very far from won.
Several remarkable works of feminist thought appeared in the UK during the 1930s, responding to the recent achievement of full political citizenship for women with the 'flapper vote', 1928, and the wider context of this troubled time: the Depression, the rise of Fascism, the Spanish Civil War and the looming menace of international conflict. Virginia Woolf's Three Guineas (1938) is still remembered, and works by other feminist writers and intellectuals addressed similar issues of women's place and responsibilities in this uncertain and threatening world.
The women whose writings are considered were involved with and active in a range of issues of national and international significance, but took time to reflect on, as the title of Winifred Holtby's contribution put it, Women and a Changing Civilisation. Feminism found itself facing problems as several of its major goals appeared to have been won and it seemed less relevant in the face of economic and political crisis. Yet their observations showed that there were still battles left to fight and questions to which feminist analysis could contribute understanding, but that they were struggling against ‘atmosphere’ (Woolf), ‘unacknowledged obstructions’ (Holtby); it was ‘like working in a cloud of mosquitos’ (Naomi Mitchison).
They transcended the earlier (and perhaps exaggerated by later historians) distinction between ‘Old’ (equal rights) and ‘New’ (women’s specific interests) Feminisms with a vision seeing both women’s continuing problems in public and working life, and the neglect of issues to do with maternal wellbeing, as equally revelatory of the lack of concern for women’s interests. They also related what might initially seem trivial phenomena to the troubling rise of a nostalgic masculinism not only in the obvious form of Fascism but even among supposed allies on the Left: ‘spitting his poison, small still, curled up like a caterpillar on a leaf’ (Woolf).
In 1915 Stella Browne voiced a plea for ‘abolition of the present savage penalties on the performance of "illegal operations"’, a breach of silence that shocked even readers of the birth control journal The Malthusian. Doctors veiled the matter in clinical confidentiality and professional expertise; women (and men) whispered over kitchen tables and on factory floors about ‘how to bring it away’. The birth control movement acknowledged the prevalence of abortion, but in order to advance their arguments for the extension of knowledge of contraception and facilities for obtaining it. However, by the 1930s attacks on the existing law began to appear and abortion was increasingly explicitly depicted in fiction. Medical bodies set up committees to consider the subject, the Abortion Law Reform Association was founded, a Government committee was appointed, and a high profile trial, Rex v Bourne, established a legal precedent for clinical judgement of risk to a woman’s physical or mental health. Yet the movement somewhat slumped after the War. Why did it take 30 years from the Birkett Committee and the Bourne case to achieve statutory legislation?
The Pioneer Health Centre (1926-1951), also known as the ‘Peckham Experiment’, was the brainchild of two doctors, George Scott Williamson and Innes Pearse, who defined themselves in the title of one of the works on this experiment as ‘Biologists in Search of Material’. Their aim was to find out the conditions that would create health, rather than simply treating illness. This involved setting up a membership club within a local community, in which member families got a very searching annual health examination, and also the facilities of a social club, where the Centre staff could observe behaviour and interactions. Initially located in a house in the south London suburb of Peckham, in 1935 it moved into purpose-built premises designed along modernist lines in which visibility throughout was a significant factor. It became very popular in the local community to the extent that when the building was released from its wartime use in 1946, former members turned to the massive task of making it habitable once more so that it could re-open.
While Mass Observation f. 1935, is sometimes conceived of as a group that went around prying into other peoples’ behaviour, it also had a volunteer panel who would respond on the various topics it interrogated, and also volunteer diarists who recorded the minutiae of their daily lives.
This paper therefore asks the question of why, and in what circumstances, did individuals collaborate with what appear to be projects of surveillance, and whether this relates to a modernist ideology of letting in both literal and metaphorical light and air.
Dr Hall’s talk will examine the stories of women who loved and were loved by other women in 19th-century Britain, which reveal a more varied account than the stereotypes allow.
A single object can tell fascinating stories. Join us as we hear from a specially selected speaker as she unveils a mystery object in Wellcome Collection that sheds light on the history of health and medicine.
Dr Lesley Hall, archivist and historian of gender and sexuality, will unveil a mystery object from the Wellcome Library
Somewhat revised and expanded version prepared for publication that did not happen, now on my website: http://www.lesleyahall.net/eugender.pdf