The British Library celebrates International Women's Day with a panel conversation on the power and potential of archiving stories of sexism, sisterhood and struggle. Jill Liddington, Abi Morgan, Heidi Safia Mirza and Deborah Withers will discuss their engagement with archives of activism. Margaretta Jolly, project director of Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the Women’s Liberation Movement, chairs this panel of influential feminists as they debate questions of politics, representation and preservation. 

Jill Liddington is a writer, historian and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of Leeds. Her latest book Vanishing for the Vote: Suffrage, Citizenship and The Battle for the Census (2014) tells how suffragette organisations urged women, all still voteless, to boycott the census on 2 April 1911.

Abi Morgan is a BAFTA and Emmy Award winning writer and producer. Her film Suffragette (2015) is the first feature film to tell the story of the ordinary British women at the turn of the last century who risked everything in the fight for equality and the right to vote.

Heidi Safia Mirza is Professor of Race, Faith and Culture. She advises English Heritage on diversity and has established the Runnymede Collection, a race-relations archive, at the Black Cultural Archives. Her books include Young Female and Black (1992), Black British Feminism (1997) and Black and Postcolonial Feminism in New Times: Researching Educational Inequalities (2012).

Deborah Withers is a writer, curator, researcher and publisher. Their new book Feminism, Digital Culture and the Politics of Transmission: Theory, Practice and Cultural Heritage (2015), asks: what does it mean to say that feminism has cultural heritage?  The book was awarded the 2016 Feminist and Women’s Studies Association Book Prize.

Margaretta Jolly is a Reader in Cultural Studies and director of the Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research, University of Sussex. Her current book-in-progress is Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement.