Hi all,
Please see below details of this afternoon’s online IPHS seminar.
Institute of Population Health Sciences (IPHS) Online Seminar
Wednesday 16th December 2020, 2:00pm to 3:00pm
Title: Gender and sexual health in twentieth century Britain
Discussants: Caroline Rusterholz
Summary: This seminar will provide an overview of Caroline Rusterholz’s research. The first part of the seminar will centre on her book Women’s medicine. Her book explores the key role played by British female doctors in the production and circulation of contraceptive knowledge and the handling of sexual disorders between the 1920s and 1970s at the transnational level, taking France as a point of comparison. It illuminates women doctors’ agency in the male-dominated field of medicine and reveals their significant role in the medicalization process. The transnational perspective allows her to reassess old issues around birth control from a new perspective that emphasizes the circulation of scientific knowledge between Britain and France. This book contributes to recovering a female medical understanding of changing notions of marital sexuality. It argues that women doctors were pivotal in developing a more holistic approach to family planning, playing a more prominent role in shaping scientific and medical knowledge than previously acknowledged.
The second part of the seminar will focus on her current Wellcome Trust research project on the history of youth sexuality in postwar Britain through the case study of the Brook Advisory Centre (1964-2000). Drawing on archival materials, medical articles published by Brook members and oral history interviews with former counsellors, she will look at the content of sexual health counselling and its evolution over time. She will determine the values that BAC spread and show that BAC member tried to impose a model of ‘good’ sexual behaviours.
Dr Caroline Rusterholz is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellow at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. She holds a Phd in Historical demography from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. Between 2015-2018, she was a SNSF Post-Doc Research Fellow at Cambridge University and later Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research interests include the fields of comparative gender history, historical demography and social history of medicine and sexuality.
This seminar will be held on MSTeams, please join using the link below.
Best wishes,
IPHS Seminar Committee (Borislava Mihaylova, Anna De Simoni, Anna Dowrick, Stamatina Iliodromiti, Nikolina Jovanovic, Heather McMullen, Charlotte Edwards Roscamp (administrator))
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