This blog is part of a wider project showcasing a selection of the assessed work done by students of Gender and the Law at Birmingham Law School in 2017-2018. The purpose of the project is to prompt students, staff and visitors at the Law School to explore women’s local legal history. The project is inspired by the Women’s Legal Landmarks project. Women’s Legal Landmarks is a scholarly intervention into the recovery of women’s lost history which employs the methodology of feminist legal history to provide accounts which are accurate as to both law and historical context and which, taken together, demonstrate women’s agency and activism in the achievement of law reform and justice. However, this project takes a distinctively local approach. All of the people, events, and campaigns in this project have some connection to Birmingham and the wider West Midlands.
This blog will publish new posts during Women’s History Month, beginning on International Women’s Day (March 8).
This project asks visitors to the Law School and members of the Law School community (and the university more broadly) to think critically about how law works and how it changes. It draws attention to histories of law that are not often remembered or celebrated, focusing especially on the histories of minority ethnic groups and LGBTQI communities in the local region. By dwelling on women’s ‘private’ and intimate experiences of law, it challenges prevailing assumptions of what ‘counts’ as legal or political. By highlighting resonances between past and present campaigns for law reform – past and present experiences of compromise, backlash and unexpected consequences – it challenges our expectations of legal progress.
Although many of the people celebrated in this project were well known nationally and internationally, this is not only a project about the ‘great women’ of Birmingham and its hinterland. It is a project about grassroots movements, protests, transgressions and direct action. The project does not idealise its subjects. It pays attention to the ways in which radically conservative women have engaged with law, and shows how feminists in the past have subjugated some women even as they secured great gains for others.
The project is funded by the College of Arts and Law Teaching and Development Fund. Research assistants on the project were law students Daminee Budhi, Latoya Farrell, Oluwatamilore Makinde and Natasha Price. Lecturers on the Gender and the Law module in 2017-2018 were Mairead Enright, Emma Oakley, Theresa Lynch and Carol Jones. Ben Atkins provided invaluable administrative and design assistance.