Sisterhood and After
An Oral History of the UK Women's Liberation Movement, 1968-present
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Oxford University Press Inc
Published:21st Nov '19
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
This hardback is available in another edition too:
- Paperback£20.99(9780197601280)
The book offers a detailed history of the UK Women's Liberation Movement, exploring its impact on social and gender transformation. Sisterhood and After combines personal narratives with significant historical events.
This insightful exploration of the UK Women's Liberation Movement delves into the motivations and actions that fueled feminism's 'second wave.' Sisterhood and After highlights the importance of oral history, utilizing personal testimonies to trace the journey of women from their girlhood in the 1950s to their activism in later life. Through these narratives, the book sheds light on the experiences of both prominent figures and grassroots activists, offering a nuanced understanding of the movement's evolution over the decades.
Margaretta Jolly employs oral history as a creative method, drawing heavily from the Women's Liberation Oral History Project. This approach allows her to address complex issues such as race, class, sexuality, disability, and feminist identity. The voices of women activists reveal the challenges posed by a divisive education system, the uneven progress of sexual liberation, and the impact of political climates like Thatcherism and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. These personal stories not only illuminate key campaigns but also reflect the organizational skills that activists developed as they ventured into local government and various sectors.
In Sisterhood and After, Jolly provides fresh insights into iconic actions, including the Miss World Protest and the fight for abortion rights. She discusses the ongoing struggles against men’s violence and the contemporary demands for trans-liberation, emphasizing that the fight for equality is far from over. By encouraging readers to engage with the archives of feminist memory, she invites them to consider their own political futures, making her work relevant to scholars, practitioners, and general readers alike.
Whose fault is it that there's so much so horribly wrong with the world? 'The tension over womanhood as something to defend or transcend, prioritise of contextualise, remains central,' as Jolly cautiously puts it. 'The ongoing appeal of radical feminism is that it addresses primal fears of sexual violence, alongside equally primal pleasures in women's community, desire and love'. * Jenny Turner, London Review of Books *
Jolly's approach is engagingly readable as well as theoretically lodged, drawing on voices that question and celebrate and highlighting issues that continue to challenge today. * Joanna Bornat, The Oral History Review *
a highly readable and successful portrayal of the people at the heart of the Women's Liberation Movement as complex individuals whose work was life-changing for many people in the UK ... The preservation of the memories in this book, and in the archive, will be an invaluable resource for generations of future historians. * Charlotte James Robertson, Twentieth Century British History *
Among oral historians of twentieth century women's history and some feminists of a certain age, Margaretta Jolly's Sisterhood and After has been much awaited....Jolly moves from the collective voices of a project to the individual voice of a book author. She confronts issues of choice, diversity, difference, and inequality inside and outside the movement, ambitiously covering the history of a movement that changed the culture, politics, and language of sex and gender as well as discussing the lives of the women who were activists - through all the debates and divisions - with recollections of landmark events, the invasion of the Miss World beauty pageant in 1970, and the founding conference at Ruskin College, Oxford, that same year. * Joanna Bornat, Open University, Emeritus, The Oral History Review *
A challenging call not just for those pioneering women of the later twentieth century but also poignant as we all deal with the silencing of a world adjusting to living with a subjugating virus. * Oral History Review *
ISBN: 9780190658847
Dimensions: 160mm x 236mm x 31mm
Weight: 635g
352 pages