CALL FOR PAPERS
Women's Experiences Matter: Women & Loss from the Medieval through the Ages
Women's History Association Ireland 35th Annual Conference
23-24 May 2025
The concept of loss itself is contentious and individualised. Depending on the time period and circumstance, loss has a fluid interpretation and can be understood differently from contemporary viewpoints.
Loss was not always negative. Whilst women’s choices could be curtailed by circumstance, changes in political regimes and policies, as well as status, meant women could gain bodily autonomy or self-reliance. Widowhood could offer a second chance, for example, and reproductive rights over time, have been given and taken away.
This conference theme explores women’s experiences of loss, and also seeks papers on what or how women gained, even when they may have lost. The conference committee are seeking papers which cover topics, for example, as listed below:
- Death, suicide, infanticide & reproductive loss
- Loss of children through death, adoption, fostering, emigration
- Losing & Gaining Reproductive Rights
- Loss of Family through Emigration
- Women lost from the archives
- Lost Loves
- Loss of Identity
- Memorialising & Commemorating Loss
- Loss of Independence through marriage/widowhood/old age
- Loss of physical or mental capacity, loss of sanity
- Loss of freedom through marriage, prison, institutionalisation, hospitalisation
- Loss of Income
- Loss of social self in institutions
Other papers which focus on aspects of loss in the context of women’s experiences are also welcome.
ABSTRACT SUBMISSIONS BY 30 JANUARY 2025
PLEASE SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACTS VIA THIS FORM
Conference Email: whai2025conf@gmail.com
