"Equal pay for women and Tories Out!": The Women's Movement in Merseyside, c.1968-1990

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My PhD is an important recovery project that focuses on the Merseyside Women's Liberation Movement from its conception in the late 1960s to its demise in the 1990s, combining neglected archival material, local feminist print cultures, and original oral history interviews as its primary source base. The project aims to explore the complex dynamic between the local and national within the British Women's Liberation Movement, making a significant contribution to our understanding of feminist and socialist movements as well as women's wider radical and community activism in Liverpool and Britain during this period. My research aims to demonstrate the importance of local and regional context in shaping feminist identities and priorities, highlighting a more complex and diverse narrative of women's activism in the regions than was previously recorded. Challenging ideas about the development and supposed decline of the wider WLM after 1978, my research also questions how feminist activism adapted to changing political climates and flourished in many different forms into the 1980s, adding to new research on activist 'afterlives'. Charting the development and adaptation of the Merseyside women's movement into this later period also allows my research to speak to wider histories of the British Left, considering Liverpool's unique political landscape and the strong relationship between socialist, feminist and anti-racist politics during this time. This also seeks to make a significant contribution to new research on the long-ignored issues of class and race in the WLM.