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- 7 avril 2026 14:00 – 17:30
- Bâtiment Olympe de Gouge
Julie Gotlieb (U. of Sheffield, professeure invitée à Paris Cité): “The Life and Death Story of ‘Mrs’ Evelyn Fuller: Gendering Mental Illness, the Asylum, and Deaths of Despair in 1930s Britain”
The birth control pioneer ‘Mrs’ Eveline Fuller came to national prominence in 1938 due to her dramatic escape from a London asylum, followed weeks later by her sad death by suicide. At the time of her death, she was still on the run, a ‘lunatic at large,’ after having escaped her incarceration in the Camberwell House Mental Institution. It appears that she took her life due to despair as she had been dismissed from her work (her life’s work) for the Society for the Provision of Birth Control Clinics (later the Family Planning Association), apparently because she has been certified insane and for absconding from the asylum. Her tragic story had sensation value on many registers, and it was widely reported in the newspapers. Equally interesting are the competing narrations, the contradictory explanations, and the attempts at rationalising her suicide, as well as many factual inconsistencies in the reporting. Fuller’s death will be assessed in the nexus of the construction mental illness, nervous disorder (personal and collective) and suicide in this period. The responses to her case offer a vivid illustration of the growing sense of compassion and of support for the liberalisation of the laws governing mental illness and suicide.
Darcy Roake (Tulane U., doctorante en séjour à ECHELLES),: «Two Laws, Two Countries, Two Blocks & Two Pills: Legislation, Access and Discourse in Contemporary French and U.S. Abortion History »
Darcy Roake présentera ses recherches sur l’histoire de l’avortement médicamenteux entre la France et les États-Unis
Cette séance aura lieu en salle M 019, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges, campus des Grands Moulins
Séance en anglais.