An Archive of The Women’s Liberation Movement: a Document of Social & Legislative Change

This paper offers introduction to the material available to researchers in the recently launched ‘Sisterhood & After: an Oral History of the Women’s Liberation Movement’ archive at the British Library. Drawing from the archive’s oral history recordings, I demonstrate how they can be used to examine the ways that legislative changes are experienced and raise questions about the relation between legislative change, cultural change and the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM). The paper argues that these oral history recordings provide a unique opportunity to reflect on the ways that legislative and structural change were experienced by WLM activists in their everyday lives. Dr Polly Russell works as a Curator at The British Library where, among other things, she manages collections relating to women’s history. Polly was the British Library’s project lead for the 2010 - 2013 ‘Sisterhood & After: the Women’s Liberation Oral History Project’. Polly is currently managing a project to digitize and make freely available all issues of the feminist magazine ‘Spare Rib.’