The Fallen Woman: Then and Now

Join Lynda Nead, curator of the Museum’s recent exhibition The Fallen Woman, and Jenny Earle, Programme Director at the Prison Reform Trust, for a discussion on the hidden stories of vulnerable women in the nineteenth century and today.

Professor Lynda Nead is the Pevsner Professor of History of Art at Birkbeck, University of London. In 2015 she curated The Fallen Woman at the Foundling Museum, a major exhibition exploring the myth and reality of the ‘fallen woman’ in Victorian Britain. This exhibition drew together the work of artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Richard Redgrave, George Frederic Watts and Thomas Faed, with the written petitions of Victorian women applying to give up their babies to the Foundling Hospital.

Jenny Earle is Programme Director at the Prison Reform Trust, leading a three-year programme to reduce women’s imprisonment, funded by the Big Lottery Fund. She joined the Prison Reform Trust in September 2012, having previously worked as a senior legal policy analyst at the Equality and Human Rights Commission, where she specialised in gender equality.