Pudding Seminar: Prof Maroula Joannou, '"A Summer School of their Own': The Newnham College Summer Schools for Working Women. An Illustrated Talk'

Please note that this talk will take place in the Cynthia Beerbower Room

Abstract: Between 1922 and 1950 Newnham College, Cambridge  and the Workers’ Educational Association ran a pioneering series of summer schools specifically for working women. These schools were inclusive, inter-generational, and non-hierarchical.  Drawing on the voices, reports, letters and personal testimonies of factory workers, domestic servants and seamstresses, many of whom came from the ‘distressed areas’ between the wars, as well as the recollections of their teachers, Mary Joannou’s richly illustrated presentation pieces together a fascinating story of women’s creativity, aspirations and achievements using little-known materials from the college archives by kind permission of the Principal and Fellows.

Biography: Mary Joannou is an Emerita Professor at Anglia Ruskin University attached to the Labour History Research Unit and author of a new biography, The Life and Turbulent Times of Clara Dorothea Rackham, Suffragist, Socialist and Social Reformer published by Routledge in 2022.

All staff, students, senior members and alumnae are very warmly invited to attend the Pudding Seminars. Talks usually last between 20-25 minutes, followed by time for questions, comments and discussion before we finish at 1.50pm, to allow people to get to 2pm appointments. Please note that coffee and cake will be available from 1 o’clock with the seminar starting promptly at 1.15pm. Details of all our seminars can be found at: https://newn.cam.ac.uk/research/pudding-seminars