'Are you a Lesbian?' Challenges in Recording and Analysing the Women's Liberation Movement in England

Abstract

The English Women's Liberation Movement has increasingly become the subject of study by historians who are exploring the social and cultural impact of feminism on the twentieth century. However, the fact that many women who were involved in the WLM are still available to make active contributions to such histories – through oral history interviews, and/or through their involvement in cataloguing local archives – presents challenges to younger researchers. Who controls the narrative, who has access to the sources, and who benefits from the feminist stories being told, are all immediate and complex problems. Unless they can be overcome by fruitful dialogue between feminist generations and across feminist divides, such challenges threaten to undermine new scholarly work on the WLM and its place in recent history.