• 15 October – 15 November 2021, Open daily 10am – 4pm
• Cohen Quad, Exeter College, Oxford OX1 2HG

Meet the curators and some participants in the 1970 Women’s Liberation Conference on Friday 15 October, 2-4pm

Striking images from photographer-on-the-ground Sally Fraser capture the fiery beginnings of second wave feminism in Britain. On show as part of Photo Oxford, ‘Images of Liberation’ reveals a hitherto unseen portrait of the first Women’s Liberation Conference and landmark equal rights demonstration that followed. Exhibited at Cohen Quad, part of Exeter (formerly Ruskin) College – the site of this groundbreaking historical moment – the photographs return to the place they were taken, over 50 years ago.

28 October: Online discussion event – details on Festival Events page soon. https://www.photooxford.org/whats-on/events

Never before-seen images capture the fiery beginnings of the UK women’s liberation movement in a new exhibition of work by activist photographer Sally Fraser.

On a snowy International Women’s Day in 1971, 4,000 people marched through central London. Inspired by the founding Women’s Liberation Conference held in Oxford the previous year, this was the first-ever national demonstration for equal rights and pay for women.

The early history of this movement is celebrated in a fascinating exhibition of photographs by Sally Fraser, who both documented and participated in the protests. Images of Liberation: Sally Fraser’s photography of women’s protest runs as part of Photo Oxford 2021. It will be shown at the site of Ruskin (now Exeter) College, where the founding conference took place in February 1970.

Sally Fraser’s images capture the genesis of second wave feminism in Britain, at a landmark conference in Oxford and on the capital’s streets, a half-century ago. The conference attendees include, among others, leading feminist thinkers and activists Sally Alexander, Sue Crockford, Anna Davin, Annie Freud, Selma James, Juliet Mitchell, Sheila Rowbotham, Michelene Wandor and Audrey Wise, later MP for Coventry South West. The conference creche, run by fathers, shows a youthful Stuart Hall holding a baby. Busts of ‘great men’ in the Oxford Union are humorously covered by scarves, paper bags and banana skins. This subversive creativity is further seen on the Women’s March, where women are dressed for a satirical beauty pageant, and a crucified shop dummy is held aloft, draped with articles of women’s oppression.

The exhibition provides an invaluable record of a key moment in 20^th century British radical social history, the launch pad of what Sheila Rowbotham envisaged as ‘an entirely new kind of politics’.

For full details scroll down https://www.photooxford.org/whats-on/exhibitions

• See also: https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/taking-photos-of-the-first-womens-liberation-conference/

October 13, 2021