CFP: Women and Material Culture, 1660-1830

Plenary Speakers Susan Staves (Brandeis) and Marcia Pointon (Manchester)

This event, jointly organised by Chawton House Library and the University of Southampton English Department, will take place between the 14 and 15 July 2004. The two-day interdisciplinary conference will explore the relationship between gender and the object world across the long eighteenth century.

Over the last two decades woman's role as producer and consumer of goods has become a leading issue in the cultural and social history of the period, as well as in studies of literature, art and fashion. This body of work has collectively pointed not only to woman's increasingly central role to the burgeoning consumer revolution, but to the complex ways in which the material world mediated the construction of gender in the period.

The conference organisers invite proposals for papers or panels that examine the intersection of gender and material production/ consumption in the lives of real or fictional women during the period 1660-1830. Possible themes include, but are by no means confined to, fashion; cosmetics; art; needlework;gardening; furniture and furnishing; woman's work; the book as material object; the domestic household; shopping; advertising; women and collecting.