We are delighted to announce that Professor Laura Gowing will be giving this year's Hayes-Robinson Lecture on the 5th March: 'Shee-citizens' in early modern London.

Hayes-Robinson Lecture
'Shee-citizens' in early modern London
Professor Laura Gowing
Tuesday March 5th 18.00
Windsor Auditorium

The ‘shee-citizens’ who featured in 1640s tracts were parodic mockeries of London politics turned upside-down by crisis. But behind these fantasies of female demands was a set of overlapping questions about women’s civic identity, clustered around concepts such as ‘free’, ‘citizen’ , ‘trade’,  and ‘rights’. This lecture will examine the ways that London women belonged and did not belong to the city, looking at their negotiations with freedom, law, and custom from the city to the suburbs; and it will suggest that in those journeys between freedom and exclusion, belonging and expulsion, a particular kind of metropolitan female experience was forged, one which helped create a practice of female citizenship just as the idea of women as citizens was foreclosed.

Laura Gowing started her career at Royal Holloway and is now Professor of Early Modern History at King’s College London. She has published extensively on women, the body, language, and power in early modern England. Her most recent books are Ingenious Trade: Women and Work in Seventeenth-Century London (CUP, 2021) and the introductory Gender in Early Modern England (Routledge, 2022).

Please do join us on Tuesday March 5th and sign up using the Eventbrite link to attend: https://www.royalholloway.ac.uk/about-us/events/hayes-robinson-lecture/