Dr Lyndsey Jenkins

I am a historian of women, politics and activism in Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I'm interested in the relationship between gender and class, and particularly feminism and socialism, across this period. I earned my doctorate from Wolfson College, Oxford, and held posts at several Oxford colleges, before taking up a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Queen Mary University of London. My work has been supported by the Royal Historical Society, the Leverhulme Trust, the Churchill Fellowship and Churchill College, Cambridge, the British Federation of Women Graduates, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

Research Interests

My recent work is on women’s activism within the Labour Party, particularly between 1945 and 1979. The existing scholarship has usually seen this as a period in which women in the Labour party did not necessarily pursue women’s interests, especially in comparison with the earlier and later decades of the twentieth century. In contrast, my research suggests that Labour women continued to champion women’s causes, broadly defined; that in Parliament, they often did so in partnership with Conservative women; and that they were far more interested in, and receptive to, the emergence of the women’s liberation movement than has been acknowledged. As such, my work contributes to the scholarship which is challenging the periodisation of women’s activism into ‘first’ and ‘second’ waves by focusing on the neglected activism of the mid-twentieth century within political parties. I'm currently working on a book developing these ideas, and am also working in partnership with Bruce Castle Museum and Archive in Haringey, London, to showcase the life and work of the pioneering MP Joyce Butler (1910-1992).

With Ruth Davidson (QMUL), Anna Muggeridge (Worcester) and Farah Hussain (QMUL), I am producing two collections examining the different forms of women’s politics in the twentieth century. These include a special issue on women’s grassroots politics since 1945 for Women’s History Review (forthcoming in 2024) and an edited collection for Oxford University Press entitled Women, Power and Politics in Britain, 1945-1997 which examines their participation in more formal politics. I am also working on a Royal Historical Society funded project on motherhood and the Labour Party with Charlotte Lydia Riley (Southampton).

My previous research focused on working-class women in the suffrage movement. In contrast to the dominant historiographical narrative, I examined the reasons why working-class women might be attracted to militancy. I've written about many different aspects of suffrage, including religious protest as a militant tactic, the relationship between the individual and the collective in suffragette autobiography, working-class women's activism in East London, and cross-class relationships in the suffrage movement.