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

June 01 - 04, 2017

The myriad of ways our personal lives influence our scholarship is profound yet difficult to articulate. In recent years, the academy has come under fire for being an inhospitable place for women in general and for mothers in particular. This inhospitable environment applies to graduate students as well. STEM fields, where this problem is particularly acute, have taken steps to correct their gender imbalance though change is slow. Within the humanities the problem is perhaps less urgent but much more tricky because humanities scholars have long prided themselves as forward-thinking champions of sub-altern populations. At the same time family, childhood, and private life remain popular subjects for academic historians. Almost daily, they expose the ways that historical families operated within patriarchal frameworks, offering constantly changing interpretations of resistance and solidarity. Yet the academy remains conservative in its attitude toward reproductive justice within its ranks. It goes without saying that not all historians of motherhood are indeed mothers, or even parents, and that not all mother/scholars choose to work on the history of motherhood. Can this varied grouping of scholars learn from each other nonetheless? How do their personal lives influence their choice of topic and how might their personal experiences, as mothers, or non-mothers, color their interpretations? It may be that their philosophies about life and work are at odds. Or, instead, do their varied relationships to the concept of motherhood foster a sense of understanding and solidarity?