We are thrilled to welcome Dr Ellen Hope Durban on Tuesday, 24 March 2026 at 4pm UK time to talk about ‘Activism for Married Lesbian Mothers in Britain in the 1970s and 1980s’.
Married to men in seemingly conventional marriages, women who were in fact lesbians were a significant minority of wives. In the 1970s, women raised the alarm that lesbian mothers “lost” custody of their children to their husbands in divorce court. Through the 1980s, despite widespread dissemination of these tragedies, activism to help married lesbian mothers contest custody did not gain traction in the women’s movement. This paper explores the extent of activism to support married lesbian mothers fight for custody upon divorce, including the complex politics behind the reluctance of heterosexual and lesbian feminists to advocate for married lesbian mothers.
The session will be chaired by Dr Sarah Wingrove of the University of Surrey. If you are interested in hearing Ellen speak about her research, you can sign-up now for the session which will run as an online-only zoom webinar.
About the Speaker
Dr Ellen Hope Durban is a cultural and legal historian of gender and sexuality. Her research interests include the formation of sexual identity, activism to support victims of domestic violence, and women’s experiences of marriage. Her recent PhD from UCL examined women overlooked by historians: lesbians who married men, bore children, and divorced in the latter half of twentieth-century Britain.