The Women’s Legal Landmarks Project has both academic and political ambitions.

Academically, it seeks to provide a way into an under-explored research methodology – feminist legal history – in the UK and Ireland. It aims to provide fresh perspectives and expertise on archival materials both for legal scholars, who may not ordinarily access such material, and historians, who may see such material with fresh eyes informed by a critical legal perspective. To this end, the project has harnessed the subject-specific expertise and disciplinary knowledge of both historians and lawyers, to ensure the accurate interpretation of complex legal provisions in their correct historical context.

The project challenges the continued marginalisation of women in law, public policy and social justice.

At the same time it offers a direct challenge to the tendency of legal historians (that is, those trained and identifying primarily as lawyers) to focus on specifically legal sources which (given that women were excluded from public office and practical involvement in law until the twentieth century and continue to this day to be in a substantial minority in the law-making process) typically have a partial (masculine) outlook or bias. By exposing legal doctrine to historiography – the idea that history is not simply a collection of established facts assembled in an unchallengeable narrative but can be, and has been, written from a range of perspectives and viewpoints – the project aims to foster a broader study of law reform and legal change across academic disciplines. In particular, it seeks to challenge the traditional ‘top-down’ gender-neutral understanding of law, which all too often emphasises legal actors (mainly judges) rather than the politics and/or activism that influenced court or Parliament and which (mis)presents law reform as a tale of steady progress from injustice and inequality toward justice and equality, as enlightened institutions gradually reform themselves.

Politically, through the recognition of hitherto overlooked or suppressed histories, the project challenges the continued marginalisation of women in law, public policy and social justice. It seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the impact of law on the lived experience of women and the impact of women on law, offering historical insights as potential avenues for contemporary strategies for feminists and others engaging with and effecting legal, social, policy and political change.

Methodology

Feminist legal history is characterised as that which (1) locates women at the centre, rather than the margin, of events, (2) demonstrates the different impact of law on women and men, (3) integrates women’s stories into received versions of history (from which they have generally been omitted) and (4) seeks to reconstruct the ‘assumed contours’ of the past (TA Thomas and TJ Boisseau (eds), Feminist Legal History: Essays on Women and Law. New York: New York University Press 2011, p 1). It challenges the traditional understandings of both historians and lawyers of ‘women’s linear progress from oppression under the law to equal opportunity in modern times’ (ibid, p 2).

From the outset, we realized that the Project’s scope and ambition would require a large number of participants with a range of expertise. We therefore issued a call for expressions of interest, and received an outstanding response, enabling us to select a large number of landmarks. We also ‘commissioned’ a number of landmarks directly to ensure the comprehensive and reflective coverage of topics, historical periods and jurisdictions. Our authors represent a wide range of legal, history, and criminology scholars, independent historians, parliamentary archivists, activists and practising lawyers, from leading experts in their field to postgraduate and early career researchers. They attended a number themed and/or methodology workshops at which they presented their landmarks and received feedback from the other participants.