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Events

EXHIBITION CANCELLED: Social Revolution: women's liberation and gay liberation in the 1970s and 80s

Hosted by the LSE Library

LSE Library Gallery, United Kingdom

This exhibition has been cancelled. LSE apologises for any inconvenience caused.

Our spring exhibition marks 50 years since the beginnings of two significant social movements in the UK: the first women’s liberation conference in Oxford and the first UK meeting of the Gay Liberation Front at LSE.

Handwritten list of demands by the Gay Liberation Front.

This exhibition explores how both movements mobilised thousands of people to believe that they could change the world through speaking out and challenging the status quo.

An event flyer.

The exhibition displays material from the Hall-Carpenter Archives and the Women’s Library and, in particular, it shows how activists used and transformed publishing, performance and visual imagery around gender. 

An event programme.

Events

Podcast of talk Storying Feminist History on the 30 January 2020

Professor Margaretta Jolly (University of Sussex), talked on her new book Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968-present, and wove together personal stories of feminists across the regions, nations, classes and ethnicities of the UK.

Interrogating the politics of experience, she invited us to consider how to narrate a major period in women’s rights’ struggle, drawing on Clare Hemmings’ challenge to ‘tell feminist histories’ without nostalgia, teleology or identity politics. She considered a similar challenge in her co-editing, with Dr Polly Russell, the book associated with the British Library’s groundbreaking exhibition Unfinished Business: The Struggle for Women’s Rights, opening in April 2020. Debbie Challis joined as a contributor to the book.

Listen to the Storying Feminist History podcast

Explore these collections

Learn more through our LGBT and Women's Liberation Movement pages or explore further through other collection highlights

About us

The British Library of Political and Economic Science (@LSELibrary) was founded in 1896, a year after the London School of Economics and Political Science. It has been based in the Lionel Robbins Building since 1978 and houses many world class collections, including The Women's Library. Email us.

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