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SUMMARY:A mould discarded: abortion and class in 1930s rhetoric and fictio
 n - Fran Bigman (Faculty of English)
DTSTART:20111115T130000Z
DTEND:20111115T143000Z
UID:TALK33309@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Leon Rocha
DESCRIPTION:In this paper I discuss how although 1930s campaigners for the
  legalisation of abortion\, a middle-class group\, based their argument on
  the \nfigure of the overburdened working-class mother\, these working-cla
 ss mothers\, when they appear at all\, are only part of the backdrop in 19
 30s novels that discuss abortion. Instead\, novels like Rosamond Lehmann's
  _The Weather in the Streets_ (1936) and George Orwell's _Keep the Aspidis
 tra Flying_ (1936) position abortion as a threat to middle-class survival\
 , reflecting the resurgence of a eugenic discourse from earlier in the cen
 tury. While middle-class families are imperilled by the failure of their p
 rotagonists to reproduce\, their class is itself in danger\, as these prot
 agonists find themselves slipping down the class ladder.\n\n*Speaker biogr
 aphy:* Fran Bigman is in the second year of a PhD in English at Peterhouse
 \, Cambridge. In 2009\, she completed the MPhil in Criticism and \nCulture
  in Cambridge's English Faculty\, writing a dissertation that carves out a
  new sub-genre of 1940s-50s Hollywood cinema\, the 'dangerous-husband \nfi
 lm'\, which mounts a sophisticated critique of contemporary films that pat
 hologise femininity and idealise suburbia. Fran did her undergraduate \nwo
 rk in the History Department of Brown University.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 1\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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