Founder's Lecture 2025

The annual Founder's Lecture was created in 2005 as part of the 450th anniversary celebrations in College. The 2025 Founder's Lecture will be given by Professor Sarah Knott DPhil FRHistD (Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women's History, Professorial Fellow of St John's College and Senior Research Fellow, Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction).

'Care in the Fifties: A Story of Women and Psychoanalysis'

Today, ‘care’ is a subject of political debate and private discussion. Political leaders, policy makers, feminists and ordinary people navigate what is sometimes called a ‘care crisis’ in which everyday life feels overstretched. There is too much work and not enough care to go around. But debating and worrying over care is not new. This lecture draws back the veil on care for the Fifties generation, when psychoanalysis turned the dynamics of the family into the hottest of topics.

The celebrity couple Erik and Joan Erikson - Freud’s most famous American protégé and his charming therapist wife – generated fresh ideas about who did the caregiving, when, and what were the consequences. The story of the Eriksons, and their daughter (and eloquent memoirist) Sue, highlights the strangeness of the mid-century nuclear family as well as the fierce but incomplete rejection of its care legacy in the heyday of women’s liberation. What can we learn from these histories for debates about women, men and care in our own day?

Register to attend

The Founder's Lecture will take place at 5pm in the College Auditorium, and will be followed by a drinks reception in the Garden Quad Reception Room. 

Register to attend here. If you have any questions please email alumni@sjc.ox.ac.uk.