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Sisterhood and after: an oral history of the UK women’s liberation movement, 1968-present

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posted on 2023-06-09, 09:21 authored by Margaretta JollyMargaretta Jolly
This ground-breaking history of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement explores the individual and collective memories of women at its heart. Spanning at least two generations and four nations, and moving through the tumultuous decades from the 1970s to the present, the narrative is powered by feminist oral history, notably the British Library’s Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project. The book mines these precious archives to bring fresh insight into the lives of activists and the campaigns and ideas they mobilised. It navigates still-contested questions of class, race, violence, and upbringing—as well as the intimacies, sexualities and passions that helped fire women’s liberation—and shows why many feminists still regard notions of ‘equality’ or even ‘equal rights’ as insufficient. It casts new light on iconic campaigns and actions in what is sometimes simplified as feminism’s ‘second wave’, and enlivens a narrative too easily framed by ideological abstraction with candid, insightful, sometimes painful personal accounts of national and less well-known women activists. They describe lives shaped not only by structures of race, class, gender, sexuality and physical ability, but by education, age, love and cultural taste. At the same time, they offer extraordinary insights into feminist lifestyles and domestic pleasures, and the crossovers and conflicts between feminists. The work draws on oral history’s strength as creative method, as seen with its conclusion, where readers are urged to enter the archives of feminist memory and use what they find there to shape their own political futures.

Funding

Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project; G0449; LEVERHULME TRUST; F/00230/AK

History

Publication status

  • Published

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Pages

344.0

Place of publication

New York

ISBN

9780190658847

Series

Oxford Oral History Series

Department affiliated with

  • Media and Film Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-12-13

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