Dr Lyndsey Jenkins

Lyndsey Jenkins is a Departmental Lecturer at St Hilda's College, Oxford and was previously Deputy Director of the Mile End Institute. 

Lyndsey’s recent research 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, her work 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, her 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.

Lyndsey is working on a partnership with Bruce Castle Museum and Archive in Haringey, London, to showcase the life and work of the pioneering MP Joyce Butler (1910-1992) and, with Ruth Davidson, Anna Muggeridge and Farah Hussain, is 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 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.