Vital Signs: Plenary session - Carolyn Steedman
Wednesday 10th September 2008, 2pm, Cordingley Theatre
< Back to programme overview | < Back to biography
Carolyn Steedman is professor of History at the University of Warwick.
‘On the law, poetry and a pair of stays: How to write the history of everyday life’
Drawing on the findings of my recent project on service, society, and the state in eighteenth-century England, I will suggest ways in which individual interactions with the law and with material objects allowed many eighteenth-century workers (female domestic servants for the main part) to frame and interpret social life, as they lived that life.
Personal identity and subjectivity developed out of these interactions with the material and immaterial stuff of everyday life. Strangely to modern eyes, identity and social analysis were expressed in poetry, by a significant number of domestic workers. My talk will include a brief discussion of poetry as social text, by focussing on the published verse of Warwickshire maidservant Elizabeth Hands (pub. 1789).
