Kathlyn Oliver is best known for her suffrage activism and advocacy for the rights of domestic workers. Oliver originally came from a middle-class background, with a father in the civil service.[1] However, after his death Oliver entered employment as a…
In my work on non-heterosexual Jewish women’s lived experiences and practices in contemporary England and Israel, I have been struck by the many stories that have referenced involvement with NGOs and activism (especially feminist, LGBTQ+, and climate change groups). To…
Twitter and Instagram are laden with sharp-tongued memes poking fun at historians for failing to acknowledge the existence of LGBT+ people in the past. The memes usually follow a similar format – a painting of two historic women intimately wrapped…
There is, as E. Ann Matter put it in her article “My Sister, My Spouse”, a real “difficulty of speaking about women’s lives in a society which was solidly patriarchal […] and of speaking about sexual mores in a culture…
Image: Joan Eardley, by Kirsten MacQuarrie. In 2021, Scotland celebrated the centenary of one of our boldest, bravest and most innovative artists: Joan Eardley (1921–1963). Whether literally risking life and limb to capture the fearsome storms that ravaged the remote…
My project delves into the political strategies and concepts that have powered the trans rights movement in the United Kingdom over the past half-century, particularly the concept of ‘recognition.’ The aim of my research is to understand what ‘recognition’ has…
In 1979 when the radio announced the First Strike, American Cruise Nuclear missiles were to be based at Greenham Common USAF Airbase, Sheila Standard ‘was gripped with fear and a sense of inevitable disaster, and felt powerless to do anything. The worst bit was her mum lived near Greenham, and would “get it first!” However … [quickly], all over the country, people started to organise into anti-missile groups, and she joined Withington Against the Missiles, a local group in Manchester, and accidentally got involved in an NVDA (Non-Violent Direct Action) protest becoming one of the “Bunker 4”.Then something truly epic happened … Greenham … thousands of women discovering the power of working together, singing, being silly, the wit and repartee, fear and bravery, that goes with bringing fences crashing down, to the mockery of militarism …