We are delighted to announce that our next event will take place on the afternoon of Saturday 24 September in the Birmingham and Midland Institute when we will be joined by Professor Catherine Hall.

Catherine has a long track record as one of the UK’s leading historians of women, class and gender, and of Britain’s relationship with its empire. Her groundbreaking work with Leonore Davidoff Family fortunes: men and women of the English middle class, 1780-1850 (Routledge, 1987, new edn. 2002) in which she focused on Birmingham middle class men and women, and her White, Male and Middle-Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Polity, 1992) set the agenda for studies of gender, history and identity. Civilising Subjects; metropole and colony in the English imagination 1830-1867 (University of Chicago Press, 2002) which also features Birmingham, was one of the first feminist histories to look at questions of race as central to the formation of modern Britain. Most recently Catherine has been leading the projects Legacies of British Slave Ownership (2004-12), and ‘The Structure and Significance of British-Caribbean Slave-Ownership, 1763-1833’ (2013-16).

Catherine withdrew from her first doctorate at the University of Birmingham to participate in second-wave feminism in Birmingham, including teaching women’s history classes at the Birmingham and Midland Institute which makes it a particularly appropriate venue for our event. Our current project was inspired in part by Birmingham Women: Past & Present, a feminist history trail of the city which she produced to raise money for the journal Feminist Review in about 1980. For our event Catherine will look back to her time as part of the women’s liberation movement in Birmingham in the 1970s, and will talk about putting together the original trail, and what life was like as a feminist in Birmingham in this period. Anyone who can’t wait for the event can learn more about Catherine’s work here which includes a discussion of a Birmingham-based consciousness-raising group.

For the second part of the afternoon we want to look to the future of women’s history in Birmingham and our current project so please come along with ideas for particular women, organisations or particular sites and places in the city which you would like to see featured in our re-working of the original trail, or which you could contribute to our website. We are also very keen to identify women who were active in Birmingham’s feminist politics in the 1960s-80s who could contribute their personal stories and experiences of activism in the city in this period.

To book your free place to find out more about our project and how you could be involved please visit Eventbrite