Research interests

My main research interest lies with women’s history, and with the complex interplay between gender and class in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain.

I began initially as a suffrage historian; One Hand Tied Behind Us (1978) examined the radical suffragists who sprang from industrial communities in the north.

Recently, I returned once more to Votes for Women campaigns, and my newest study re-examines the regional suffrage theme. Rebel Girls: their fight for the vote (2006) explores the lives of a cadre of Edwardian girls aged 16-25 who took their passionate suffrage message out to the remotest Yorkshire dales and fishing harbours.

My research methods are primarily source-based: identifying and critically reading primary evidence - archival, printed and oral testimony – that is little known or unknown to historians. Thus in the 1990s, I looked at the four-million-word journals of Anne Lister of Shibden Hall (1791-1840) with their underlying gender-class tensions.

My second interest examines how historians communicate - in particular, how they may address wider audiences than often reached by academic publications. Public History, long established in the United States, took root in Britain only in the 1990s. Its concern with historians and their wider publics often entails collaborative projects; and recently I have worked in partnership with museum curators and radio documentarists, with community groups and website designers.

These two themes are closely intertwined: my own historical research brings with it the challenge of how to combine the highest standards of scholarship with clarity of explanatory and narrative structure, to engage with broader readerships.

In Rebel Girls, I have attempted to ensure original suffrage research reaches new generations of readers. This has included working with reader-development librarians who support library-based readers’ groups - with their new patterns of discussing books with writers.

I taught in the School of Continuing Education at the University of Leeds from 1982, where I became Reader in Gender History. Since 2006, I have been based in the university's Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (CIGS) where I am Honorary Research Fellow. Click here for Leeds University Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies

Research publications

History, Feminism and Gender Studies