Housmans has very kindly been donated a couple of hundred+ books by one of Britain’s most prominent feminist activists and academics, Sally Alexander. While studying Sally worked on The Black Dwarf, a radical newspaper. She helped to organise the United Kingdom’s first National Women’s Liberation Conference in 1970 at Ruskin College, as an activist with the Women’s Liberation Movement. She was also an organiser of the 1970 Miss World protest. She was involved in several London Women’s Liberation Workshops as well as the Night Cleaners Campaign (1970–72).
Alexander was a founding editor of the History Workshop Journal, which was established in 1976, and was involved with Red Rag, a socialist feminist magazine. She taught in the extramural department of the University of London in the 1970s. She also taught history at the WEA and at Birkbeck College. She was a principal lecturer at the University of East London in history and cultural theory from 1992. She was also part of the advisory group for Virago Press. As of 2018, Alexander is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Goldsmiths, University of London. Aside from feminist history, her academic interests include the history of other social movements, of memory, and of psychoanalysis in Britain.Sally Alexander was recently portrayed by Keira Kinghtly in the 2020 British comedy-drama ‘Misbehaviour’ about the 1970 Miss World competition that Alexander and other members of the Women’s Liberation movement disrupted with flour bombs.
The books Sally has donated are primarily titles with a feminist or social history angle. The books will be priced as cheaply as possible, at £1, £3 and £5. The sale begins on Saturday morning,. Saturday 28th October from 11am and will go on while stocks last.
