This year's annual lecture 'Making Better Relationships: Rethinking Marital Conflict and Interpersonal Abuse in Late 20th Century Britain' will be given by Teri Chettiar on Thursday 9th of May at 5pm BST hosted by Stanford University, California.
This talk examines the history of relationship conflict in emerging discussions of interpersonal abuse in late-20th-century Britain. It looks at how the boundaries separating acceptable and unacceptable conflict – with the former presented as an inescapable part of many marriages – became the subject of inquiry and heated debate in the 1970s and 80s. Focusing on the contributions of feminists, advocates for “battered women’s” refuges, marriage therapists, and queer activists, it looks at how recent insights into trauma and family conflict shaped rising attention to new kinds of violent and non-violent subjects. This lecture is sponsored by the journal Gender and History.
Teri Chettiar is a historian of the human sciences. Her research focuses on how changing understandings of mental and emotional health in the 20th century have interacted with and shaped marginalized identities and movements for social and sexual reform. Her first book, The Intimate State: How Emotional Life Became Political in Welfare-State Britain (Oxford University Press, 2022), examines how British state-supported mental health initiatives made emotional intimacy and lifelong monogamy both politically valued and personally desired in the second half of the twentieth century. She is currently working on two projects: one focuses on the history of intergenerational trauma and the other examines ongoing race, gender, and class-based disparities related to the diagnosis and treatment of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in the US, Canada, and the UK.