Margaretta Jolly – författare

This ground-breaking history of the UK Women's Liberation Movement shows why and how feminism's 'second wave' mobilized to demand not just equality but social and gender transformation.Oral history testimonies power the work, tracing the arc of a feminist life from 1950s girlhoods to late life activism today. Peppered with personal stories, the book casts new light on feminist critiques of society and on the lives of prominent and grassroots activists.Margaretta Jolly uses oral history as creative method, making significant use of Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project to animate still-unresolved controversies of race, class, sexuality, disability, and feminist identity.Women activists vividly recall a divisive education system, the unevenness of sexual liberation and the challenges of Thatcherism, Northern Ireland's Troubles and the policing of minority ethnic communities. They illuminate key campaigns in these wider contexts, and talk of the organizational and collaborative skills they struggled to acquire as they moved into local government, NGOs and even the business sector.Jolly provides fresh insight into iconic actions including the Miss World Protest, the fight to protect abortion rights, and the peace protest at Greenham Common. Her accounts of workplace struggles, from Ford and Grunwick to Women Against Pit Closures and Women and Manual Trades, show how socialist ideals permeated feminism. She explores men's violence and today's demands for trans-liberation as areas of continuing feminist concern.Jolly offers a refreshingly jargon-free exploration of key debates and theoretical trends, alongside an appreciation of the joyfully personal aspects of feminism, from families, homes, shopping and music to relationships, health, aging, death and faith. She concludes by urging readers to enter the archives of feminist memory to help map their own political futures. Her work will appeal to general readers, scholars and practitioners alike.

This ground-breaking history of the UK Women's Liberation Movement shows why and how feminism's 'second wave' mobilized to demand not just equality but social and gender transformation.Oral history testimonies power the work, tracing the arc of a feminist life from 1950s girlhoods to late life activism today. Peppered with personal stories, the book casts new light on feminist critiques of society and on the lives of prominent and grassroots activists.Margaretta Jolly uses oral history as creative method, making significant use of Sisterhood and After: The Women's Liberation Oral History Project to animate still-unresolved controversies of race, class, sexuality, disability, and feminist identity.Women activists vividly recall a divisive education system, the unevenness of sexual liberation and the challenges of Thatcherism, Northern Ireland's Troubles and the policing of minority ethnic communities. They illuminate key campaigns in these wider contexts, and talk of the organizational and collaborative skills they struggled to acquire as they moved into local government, NGOs and even the business sector.Jolly provides fresh insight into iconic actions including the Miss World Protest, the fight to protect abortion rights, and the peace protest at Greenham Common. Her accounts of workplace struggles, from Ford and Grunwick to Women Against Pit Closures and Women and Manual Trades, show how socialist ideals permeated feminism. She explores men's violence and today's demands for trans-liberation as areas of continuing feminist concern.Jolly offers a refreshingly jargon-free exploration of key debates and theoretical trends, alongside an appreciation of the joyfully personal aspects of feminism, from families, homes, shopping and music to relationships, health, aging, death and faith. She concludes by urging readers to enter the archives of feminist memory to help map their own political futures. Her work will appeal to general readers, scholars and practitioners alike.

Winner of the 2009 Feminist and Women's Studies Association Book Prize Do you think I can be a feminist mother? Did I make you and your kisses up in my mind? Will you join our military protest at the gate? Will you feed the kids when I'm in prison? Are you able to forgive me for breaking off this correspondence because you are a man? During the women's movement of the 1970s and 1980s, feminists in the United States and Britain reinvented the image of the woman letter writer. Symbolically tearing up the love letter to an absent man, they wrote passionate letters to one another, exploring questions of sexuality, separatism, and strategy. These texts speak of the new interest women began to feel in one another and the new demands--and disappointments--these relationships would create. Margaretta Jolly provides the first cultural study of these letters, charting the evolution of feminist political consciousness from the height of the women's movement to today's e-mail networks. Jolly uncovers the passionate, contradictory emotions of both politics and letter writing and sets out the theory behind them as a fragile yet persistent ideal of care ethics, women's love, and epistolary art.She follows several compelling feminist relationships sustained through writing and confronts the mixed messages of the "open letter," which complicated political relations between women (such as Audre Lorde's "Open Letter to Mary Daly," which called out white feminists for their implicit racism). Jolly recovers the unsung literature of lesbianism and feminist romance, examines the ambivalent feelings within mother-daughter correspondences, and considers letter-writing campaigns during the peace movement. She concludes with a discussion of the ethical dilemma surrounding care versus autonomy and the meaning behind the burning or saving of letters. Letters that chart love stories, letters stowed away in attics, letters burnt at the end of romances, bittersweet letters written but never sent...this fascinating glimpse into women's intimate archives illuminates one of feminism's central concerns--that all relationships are political--and uniquely recasts a social movement in very emotional terms.

Winner of the 2009 Feminist and Women's Studies Association Book Prize Do you think I can be a feminist mother? Did I make you and your kisses up in my mind? Will you join our military protest at the gate? Will you feed the kids when I'm in prison? Are you able to forgive me for breaking off this correspondence because you are a man? During the women's movement of the 1970s and 1980s, feminists in the United States and Britain reinvented the image of the woman letter writer. Symbolically tearing up the love letter to an absent man, they wrote passionate letters to one another, exploring questions of sexuality, separatism, and strategy. These texts speak of the new interest women began to feel in one another and the new demands--and disappointments--these relationships would create. Margaretta Jolly provides the first cultural study of these letters, charting the evolution of feminist political consciousness from the height of the women's movement to today's e-mail networks. Jolly uncovers the passionate, contradictory emotions of both politics and letter writing and sets out the theory behind them as a fragile yet persistent ideal of care ethics, women's love, and epistolary art.She follows several compelling feminist relationships sustained through writing and confronts the mixed messages of the "open letter," which complicated political relations between women (such as Audre Lorde's "Open Letter to Mary Daly," which called out white feminists for their implicit racism). Jolly recovers the unsung literature of lesbianism and feminist romance, examines the ambivalent feelings within mother-daughter correspondences, and considers letter-writing campaigns during the peace movement. She concludes with a discussion of the ethical dilemma surrounding care versus autonomy and the meaning behind the burning or saving of letters. Letters that chart love stories, letters stowed away in attics, letters burnt at the end of romances, bittersweet letters written but never sent...this fascinating glimpse into women's intimate archives illuminates one of feminism's central concerns--that all relationships are political--and uniquely recasts a social movement in very emotional terms.

Personal testimonies are the life force of human rights work, and rights claims have brought profound power to the practice of life writing. This volume explores the connections and conversations between human rights and life writing through a dazzling, international collection of essays by survivor-writers, scholars, and human rights advocates.In We Shall Bear Witness, editors Meg Jensen and Margaretta Jolly assemble moving personal accounts from those who have endured persecution, imprisonment, and torture; meditations on experiences of injustice and protest by creative writers and filmmakers; and innovative research on ways that digital media, commodification, and geopolitics are shaping what is possible to hear and say. The book’s primary sections—testimony, recognition, representation, and justice—evoke the key stages in turning experience into a human rights life story and attend to such diverse and varied arts as autobiography, documentary film, report, oral history, blog, and verbatim theater. The result is a groundbreaking book that sensitively examines how life and rights narratives have become so powerfully entwined. Also included is an innovative guide to teaching human rights and life narrative in the classroom.

In the midst of today's highly politicised debates on gender equality, one thing is clear: the fight for women's rights is unfinished business. This book, which accompanies a bold and forward-facing British Library exhibition, presents the history of women's rights in sixteen diverse and timely essays. Among the topics explored are biology, including the first female anatomical skeleton; women's right to sexual pleasure; women's Suffrage; the fight for equal education and employment through the Women's Liberation movement; and how this rich history works today as an engine to power future change.From personal diaries, banners and protest fashion to subversive literature, film, music and art, no topic is too taboo: Unfinished Business presents how women and their allies have fought for equality with passion, imagination, humour and tenacity.

Engaging Donna Haraway: Lives in the Natureculture Web explores the impact of major theorist, Donna Haraway, in such diverse areas as feminisms, Marxism, new materialism, science studies, posthumanism, animal studies, ecocriticism, digital media, and life narrative. The book shows how Haraway’s decades-long career as a major theoretical voice and provocateur of thinking about new and complex connections across technology, species, and disciplines has generated bold experiments in writing from the perspective and senses of non-human species, in photographic self-portraiture of bodily life, in animating the lives of scientists, in radical genealogy, in playful teaching methods and much more. Focusing on the ways in which Haraway’s oeuvre have affected and will continue to challenge life narrative theory and practice, the chapters in this book present cross-disciplinary perspectives which are both personal and critical. As scholars, students and activists inspired by Haraway’s work, these essays together ask all of us to think about where we place ourselves in an age of environmental crisis and how to live in a ‘natureculture web’ which is as fragile as it is beautiful. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.

Engaging Donna Haraway: Lives in the Natureculture Web explores the impact of major theorist, Donna Haraway, in such diverse areas as feminisms, Marxism, new materialism, science studies, posthumanism, animal studies, ecocriticism, digital media, and life narrative. The book shows how Haraway’s decades-long career as a major theoretical voice and provocateur of thinking about new and complex connections across technology, species, and disciplines has generated bold experiments in writing from the perspective and senses of non-human species, in photographic self-portraiture of bodily life, in animating the lives of scientists, in radical genealogy, in playful teaching methods and much more. Focusing on the ways in which Haraway’s oeuvre have affected and will continue to challenge life narrative theory and practice, the chapters in this book present cross-disciplinary perspectives which are both personal and critical. As scholars, students and activists inspired by Haraway’s work, these essays together ask all of us to think about where we place ourselves in an age of environmental crisis and how to live in a ‘natureculture web’ which is as fragile as it is beautiful. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of a/b: Auto/Biography Studies.