DOING WOMEN’S LEGAL HISTORY: CALL FOR PAPERS
A one-day interdisciplinary conference
Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, 17 Russell Square London WC1B 5DR
Wednesday 26 October 2016, 10.00-17.30

Contributions are invited for a one-day conference on DOING WOMEN’S LEGAL HISTORY. Papers can be on any area of women’s legal history and should, in addition to (or instead of) presenting substantive findings, give consideration to methodological issues, research questions, sources and/or challenges – the process of doing women’s legal history.

Conference focus
As we approach the centenary in 2019 of women’s admission to the legal profession in the UK and Ireland, lawyers and legal scholars have initiated several projects to mark this achievement which aim to uncover and recover the history of women’s experiences of law. These include the Women’s Legal Landmarks project, the First 100 Years project and the First Women Lawyers in Great Britain and the Empire Symposium series. This is a golden age for legal scholars undertaking historical work on women and law and for historians working on legal issues. At the same time, many scholars involved in these and other projects face challenges of methodological insecurity, if not ignorance, because they are working outside their own discipline and sources. Women’s legal history, while well-developed in North America, is still in its infancy in the UK and Ireland. The aim of this conference is to bring together scholars working in the field to share experiences of doing women’s legal history, to learn from each other, and to build and develop the discipline of feminist legal history (that is, women’s legal history from a feminist perspective) in the UK and Ireland.

Plenary speakers
There will be two plenary speakers at the conference:
June Purvis, feminist historian, editor of the Women’s History Review and convenor of the Women’s History Network, who will talk about researching the suffragette movement from a feminist perspective and how the suffragettes have so often been represented by traditional (usually male) historians as mad, irrational, and damaging to the cause of votes for women; and
Gillian Murphy from the Women’s Library at the LSE, who will discuss the holdings of the Women’s Library including both primary and secondary sources relevant to scholars working on women’s legal history.

Abstracts
If you are interested in presenting a paper at the conference, please submit a title and abstract of 250 words to the organiser, Rosemary Auchmuty, to whom enquiries on the academic content of the conference should also be addressed.
Email: r.auchmuty@reading.ac.uk
The deadline for receipt of abstracts is 31 July 2016 and you will hear whether your paper has been accepted or not by 31 August 2016. Those whose papers are accepted should prepare a presentation of 20 minutes with 10 minutes for questions and discussion.

Outcomes
The aim of the conference is to draw together a range of scholarship and work on women’s legal history and the process of doing it. It is hoped that a selection of some of the contributions will be published in a special issue of a leading UK journal or as an open-access online edited collection.

Registration
Please note that registration fees will apply to the conference to cover administration, rooms and catering. The precise rate will depend on how much funding we receive but it should not be expensive and there will be a lower rate for students.
If you are interested in attending the conference, but do not wish to give a paper, please contact Belinda Crothers (details below) and she will ensure that you receive registration details nearer the time.

Belinda Crothers,
Academic Programmes Manager
Institute of Advanced Legal Studies,
17 Russell Square, London WC1B 5DR.
Email: Belinda.Crothers@sas.ac.uk
Conference Website: http://bit.ly/1Wja3PK