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Deborah Lavin on Annie Besant and Birth Control

Annie Besant and the Liberal, Radical, Socialist and Feminist Opposition to Birth Control in the 19th Century

Wednesday 28th November @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pmConway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, WC1R 4RL

A talk by Deborah Lavin

This talk by Deborah Lavin is fifth in the series Writing Wrongs, curated by Deborah Lavin,

Free but Registration essential…

The story of birth control is usually told as one of almost linear progress against blinkered bigotry. Opposition to contraception may have been blinkered and bigoted, but it was also often liberal, radical, socialist and feminist. Some very surprising figures, including Charles Darwin, Millicent Fawcett and Karl Marx, opposed the early birth controllers. With a brief look at the debates for and against birth control among early 19th century radicals and Utopians and the hounding of John Stuart Mill and Lord Amberley for their support of birth control, the talk goes on to consider the working of the 1857 Obscenity Act in relation to contraception. It will also look at Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh’s challenge to the law by republishing the birth control pamphlet Fruits of Philosophy and making themselves a test case; the ambiguous outcome of the trial and the foundation of the Malthusian Society, which supported birth control as the only cure for poverty; and the strong opposition of many Liberals, radicals, socialists and feminists to contraception. It’s a tale which reveals some very unexpected bedfellows and has relevance to today’s sexual debate.

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Deborah Lavin is an independent historian, interested in the interface of radicalism, socialism and feminism in the 19th century. She has curated several talks series for Conway Hall and often gives talks herself. Upcoming in January at the Camden Local History, she will give a talk on on the radical Edward Truelove, who unluckier than his friends, Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, ended up in prison for selling and publishing birth control pamphlets. Deborah’s short book Charles Bradlaugh contra Karl Marx, Radicalism vs Socialism in the First International was published by the Socialist History Society and she is currently finishing an enormous tome on a later 19th century figure most contemporaries thought ”best buried in oblivion”, Dr Edward Aveling.

Siobhán Hearne on Prostitution in Tsarist and Soviet Russia

From “Yellow Ticket” to “Bourgeois Evil”: Prostitution in Tsarist and Soviet Russia 1900-1930

Wednesday 3rd October 2018 19:00 
Conway Hall, 25 Red Lion Square, London, WC1R 4RL

This talk by Dr Siobhán Hearne is fifth in the series Prostitution, Pimping and Trafficking, curated by Deborah Lavin.
Book your ticket for From “Yellow Ticket” to “Bourgeois Evil”, here…

Prostitution flourished in Russia amidst the social, political and economic turbulence of the early twentieth century. Thousands of women sold sex in the Russian Empire’s rapidly expanding towns and cities in the early 1900s. Many registered their details with the police and attended regular gynaecological examinations in line with the Tsarist system for the regulation of prostitution, which remained in place from 1843 until the collapse of the autocracy in 1917. After their seizure of power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks made it their mission to eradicate prostitution. Early Soviet politicians categorised prostitution as a product of the undervaluation of female labour and the sexual double standard of the old capitalist regime. They claimed that socialism would bring about women’s equality and subsequently spell an end to commercial sex. However, the stigmatisation of women who sold sex continued across the revolutionary divide, which served to justify the repression of prostitutes as antisocial elements in the late 1920s. This talk examines the place of prostitution in Russian society both before and after the revolutions of 1917. In tracing continuity and change in the pre- and post-revolutionary periods, it will map state approaches to prostitution onto the turbulent landscape of revolutionary Russia.

Dr Siobhán Hearne is a historian currently based at the University of Latvia in Riga. She received her PhD in History from the University of Nottingham in 2017 for a thesis about the state regulation of prostitution in the late Russian Empire, which involved archival research in Russia, Ukraine, Latvia and Estonia. She is currently drafting her thesis as a monograph entitled Policing Prostitution: The Regulation of Lower-Class People in Late Imperial Russia. She has published several articles on gender and sexuality in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. She tweets from @siobhanhearne

Socialist History Society events

“The Labour Party in Historical Perspective”

Launch of a Socialist History Society Occasional Publication

Speakers: Graham Taylor, David Morgan and Duncan Bowie

Housmans Bookshop, King’s Cross
On Tuesday 7th August, 6.30pm

Entry fee £3 redeemable against purchase.

Seminars.....

2pm September 22nd 2018

The Political Victims of the Nazis

with Merilyn Moos

2pm November 17th 2018

Reflections on the Legacy of 1968

with Mike Makin­Waite and David Parker

MARX MEMORIAL LIBRARY

37a Clerkenwell Green EC1R 0DU

nearest tube Farringdon

FREE TO ATTEND –ALL WELCOME

http://www.socialisthistorysociety.co.uk/?p=620