What are the key legal landmarks for women? What role did women and feminists play in bringing them about? What impact have they had on the lived experience of women? How might feminist legal history advance and transform legal scholarship?

The Women’s Legal Landmarks Project is a unique interdisciplinary collaboration involving feminist legal and history scholars engaging in the process of ‘landmarking’ key legal events, cases and statutes for women in the UK and Ireland.

Beginning in 2014, participants have worked together to identify key ‘legal landmarks’, significant achievements marking an important stage or turning point in women’s engagement with law and law reform. Together the landmarks demonstrate, in a sustained and disciplined way, women’s agency and activism in the achievement of law reform and justice.

• Our collection – Women’s Legal Landmarks: Celebrating the History of Women and Law in the UK and Ireland – was published in 2018. It was the first comprehensive scholarly anthology of legal landmarks for women (c.940-2015).
• Our second collection – Women’s Legal Landmarks in the Interwar Years: Not for Want of Trying – published in 2024 challenges assumptions that the interwar period was a ‘fallow’ time for feminist activism in the UK.
• Our podcast – Not for Want of Trying – launches in Autumn 2024.

The Women’s Legal Landmarks Project is led by Rosemary Auchmuty and Erika Rackley.

• Listen to a Pod Academy podcast about the project.
• Watch Rosemary Auchmuty talk about the project and ‘doing women’s legal history’.
• Read more about the project.