Gender, feminism and unsung workers: the early years of the Law Centres movement 1970–1980

Book section : Chapter

This chapter examines the early history of the Law Centres movement in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. More specifically, it considers the role that women played in shaping the way that Law Centres worked and the work they did. The discussion draws on a four-year project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council which is being conducted by the authors in partnership with the British Library, the Law Centres Network and Queen’s University Belfast. The Enhancing Democratic Habits project aims to produce an in-depth account of activist lawyering in Law Centres from the 1970s to the present day. It has two key goals: to produce an oral history sound archive and a national collection of Law Centre reports, both of which will be deposited at the British Library on an open access basis. In this contribution to the celebration of Rosemary Auchmuty’s life and work we use data collected during the first phase of the research to ask a series of questions that are relevant to her body of work on feminist legal history. We address three main questions. How can uncelebrated women be found? What roles did women play in Law Centres? And what impact did they have?...

Authors: Burton, M; Mulcahy, L

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Host title: Women, Their Lives, and the Law: Essays in Honour of Rosemary Auchmuty
• Pages: 79-100
• Chapter number: 5
• Place of publication: Oxford
• Publication date: 2023-12-18
• Edition: 1
• DOI: 10.5040/9781509962112.ch-005
• EISBN: 9781509962112
• ISBN: 9781509962082
• Language: English
• Subtype: Chapter