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The University of Southampton
Lifelong Learning

Man Up: Women who stepped into a man’s world Study Day - Event Postponed Event

Exhibition cover
Date:
2 May 2020
Venue:
Avenue Campus, Highfield Rd, Southampton SO17 1BF. Chawton, Alton GU34 1SJ

For more information regarding this event, please email Lifelong Learning at lifelonglearning@soton.ac.uk .

Event details

A Study Day in collaboration with Chawton House to explore the theme of their 2020 exhibition: Man Up! Women who stepped into a Man’s World.

Chawton House’s 2020 exhibition highlights stories of women who stepped into male roles. By picking up a pen, pistol or sword, they broke with convention to survive and thrive. In this morning of talks, our speakers introduce you to some of these remarkable women.

Study Day Programme

09:00 - Registration and refreshments

09:30 - Talk by Clio O’Sullivan: Making Man Up!: An Introduction to Chawton House.

In this talk, doctoral student Clio O’Sullivan gives a behind-the-scenes account of putting together the current exhibition at Chawton House, sharing some of the stories of fame, fake names, and freedom fighting that inspired her.

10:30 - Second talk by Alison Daniell: Elizabeth Knight: A Woman to be Reckoned With.

Former lawyer, novelist and now doctoral candidate Alison Daniell introduces you to a woman to be reckoned with. Elizabeth Knight (1674-1737) inherited a number of large estates in the south of England – including Chawton House. Wealthy, powerful and very much in the mould of Jane Austen’s great landowning women like Lady Catherine de Bourgh and Mrs Ferrars, Knight made sure that she was in charge of her land, refusing to hand over control to either of her husbands in an age when wives had little legal or economic identity of their own.

11:30 - Refreshment break

12:00- Third talk by Dr Kim Simpson: The Pen in Their Hands: Grub Street Girls.

The eighteenth-century literary marketplace was a chaotic, cut-throat world of hacks, pirates, and satirists, but also a newly democratic space that made some women writers famous, and some infamous. Lecturer in eighteenth-century literature Kim Simpson traces the stories of some of these women, exploring the inventive ways that they wrote, published and advertised their work.

13:00 - Event ends

13:15 – Bus departs to Chawton House

14:15 – Tour of Chawton House

15:15 - Free time to explore Chawton House

16:15 – Minibus departs

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