Book: Celebrating Women in Legal History
Celebrating Women in Legal History: Making and Shaping a Discipline (Hart), edited by Lorren Eldridge Emily Ireland and Caroline Derry will be out soon!
As Celebrating Women in Legal History goes to press, we want to tell you about this exciting upcoming book from the Selden’s Sister project.
This book collects chapters from a symposium hosted in September 2023 by Selden’s Sister. We invited papers which celebrated the work of women in legal history, highlighted under-appreciated people, and evaluated and engaged with their scholarship. We then planned to meet at the University of Liverpool to hear the papers, with help from the SLS Events Fund and the Feminist Legal Action and Research Network. Unfortunately, nationwide train strikes interfered with that plan! We swiftly moved the conference to an online event, and participants did a great job of keeping the debate engaging and lively despite being many miles apart.
The papers for the conference, and the collection, were varied: with an open call, we didn’t know exactly what we were going to get! Eventually, we sorted them into three themes for the book: (1) Methodology; (2) Women in the Academy; and (3) Women on the Periphery. These themes are not exclusive, and some wider themes emerged from the chapters across the text.
One of the really striking things is just how hard it is to produce scholarship on women whose lives have not been studied before. Archives may lack material; their lives might have been overshadowed by husbands whose work got more credit; or the women themselves might remain anonymous. Sometimes scraps of paper and the backs of utility bills were the material on which our contributors relied for information about the women and work they were writing about. We were amazed at how much could be pieced together by the hard-working scholars who contributed to the book.
Another thing that presented a challenge for us as editors, and for our contributors, is the noticeable ways in which women producing academic work today face gendered challenges. From feedback we received to planning the collection which sometimes dismissed the importance or value of the project; to the childcare responsibilities many of those involved in the project have to juggle alongside work; and the correspondingly greater impact any illness had on the completion of this project, we can say with confidence that being a woman trying to write about legal history in 2025 is still very hard work. Some of these challenges, of course, are true across academia and affect everyone, regardless of gender or seniority. But in producing a volume where all contributors were women - many of them early career women, we saw up close how challenging it can be.
But we did finish it! And we are excited to show it to you when the printing process is complete. Hart have produced a beautiful cover in the Selden’s Sister colours - because we are nothing if not on-brand, and the book is going to look amazing on our shelves as well as filling a gap labelled ‘what about the women?’ in our literature.
Stay tuned for news about the release date and book launch.
If you would like to contribute to this blog, please email seldenssister@gmail.com. We welcome discussions of work, events, or ideas on the broad theme of women in legal history.
