Prof Lucy Delap - Exploring the History of Feminism and Men’s Engagement with It

What can a historical and global perspective teach us about feminism and gender relations? How have men engaged with women's movements over the course of their history in the UK and beyond? And how have anti-sexist men dealt with the challenging questions feminists raise about our emotional and sexual lives within patriarchy? These are some of the questions Professor Lucy Delap has explored in her fascinating research.

Please note that this conversation features some discussion of sexual violence, in particular between minutes 32 and 39.

Lucy is a Professor in Modern British and Gender History at the University of Cambridge, where she is a Fellow of Murray Edwards College. Her research has principally focused on the history of feminism, and in 2020 she published the book ‘Feminisms: A Global History’. Lucy has also worked extensively in labour history, with a focus on the intersections of gender, class and disability. She helped create the ‘Unbecoming Men’ and ‘The Business of Women’s Words’ oral history collections at the British Library. She and colleagues were awarded the Royal Historical Society Public History Prize in 2018 for their work on child sexual abuse. Find out more about her work here: https://www.hist.cam.ac.uk/people/prof-lucy-delap, and follow her on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/suff66.

In this episode we explore the following topics: 

• What a historical perspective brings to our understanding of feminism, gender, and masculinities (00:42 - 02:47)
• How we can study the history of people’s intimate lives and the ‘private sphere’ (02:47 - 04:21)
• What led Lucy to become involved in studying gender, feminist history, and men’s responses to it (04:21 - 09:11)
• Lucy’s research on men who became involved in anti-sexist activism in the UK in the wake of the Women’s Liberation Movement of the 1970s/80s (09:11 - 14:21)
• Why the nature of men’s pro-feminist political organising has changed over time (14:21 - 18:02)
• How and why the ‘men’s movement’ splintered off into different directions (e.g. mythopoetic and ‘men’s rights’ activism) (18:02 - 23:52)
• Why issues of emotion, such as guilt and shame, are so important in understanding men’s engagements with feminism (23:52 - 33:45)
• Men reflecting on and reconfiguring their ‘sex lives’ and the male gaze in response to feminist activism against sexual violence (33:45 - 43:48)
• The value of adopting a global perspective on feminist movements (43:48 - 49:25)
• Lucy reads from her book ‘Feminisms’ about the work of Nigerian feminist activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti (49:25 - 55:07)

Further reading:

• Lucy’s book, ‘Feminisms: A Global History’ (Penguin, 2020) - https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/305361/feminisms-by-delap-lucy/9780141985985
• Information about Lucy’s ‘Unbecoming Men’ British Library project - https://www.bl.uk/womens-rights/articles/male-allies and https://www.bl.uk/sisterhood/articles/mens-reponses-to-womens-liberation
• Lucy’s article, ‘Rethinking rapes: Men’s sex lives and feminist critiques’ in Contemporary British History (2022) - https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2022.2051489
• Lucy’s article ‘Feminism, masculinities and emotional politics in the late twentieth century’ in Cultural and Social History (2018) - https://doi.org/10.1080/14780038.2018.1518560
• ‘30 years of the Child Support Act’ (UK Parliament, 2021) - https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/30-years-of-the-child-support-act/
• Berger, J. (1972) Ways of Seeing. London: BBC and Penguin Books.
• Butler, J. (2006) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge.
• Roper, M. (2005) Slipping out of View: Subjectivity and Emotion in Gender History (in History Workshop Journal).
• Roper, M. and Tosh, J. (1991) Manful Assertions: Masculinities in Britain since 1800. London: Routledge. 
• Segal, L. (1990) Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men, London: Virago.
• Smith, H. (2015) Masculinity, Class and Same-Sex Desire in Industrial England, 1895-1957. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Tosh, J. (1999) A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England. London: Yale University Press.

If you have been affected by sexual violence, information and support is available from Rape Crisis: https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-help/