2017 Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Genders and Sexualities

June 01 - 04, 2017

            In the globalizing cities of belle époque Britain and the United States, women’s organizations provided legal services, counseled abuse victims, and organized humanitarian relief abroad. Excluded from the legal profession and emerging public international institutions, the work these women performed receded from popular and academic memory, or became part of a narrative of Western women as carriers of class, race, and imperial domination. Today, women still perform these services, but as attorneys, judges, and international civil servants.  The same issues of poverty, sexual violence, human trafficking, and global inequality that mobilized their late Victorian predecessors continue to dominate their work in municipal and international justice.

This session will bring together activists and historians for a conversation about contemporary legal aid and activism, both municipal and international, and the gendered history of that work.  Moderated by an activist scholar in domestic violence, legal professionals committed to providing counsel, shelter, and justice to women, in Africa as well as in New York City, will talk with legal historians about the women who did this work in the past. The participants will reflect upon the intersections, divergences, and strategies of legal activists then and now, and in so doing will broaden their own work as practitioners and as scholars. They will also talk about the historiography that casts these women as “imperial feminists” and “bourgeois philanthropists” and ponder whether it relates in any way to the challenges women face in the legal and international law professions today.