Biography
Lyndsey is a historian of women, politics and activism in nineteenth and twentieth century Britain. She joined St Hilda's in 2023 after a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at Queen Mary University, London. After earning her doctorate from Wolfson College, Oxford, she held stipendiary lectureships at several Oxford colleges. Her work has been supported by the Royal Historical Society, the Leverhulme Trust, the Churchill Fellowship and Churchill College, Cambridge, the British Federation of Women Graduates, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
For the Prelim, Lyndsey teaches History of the British Isles 1830-1951, The New Woman in Britain in Ireland, 1880-1920, and Approaches to History: Gender and Sociology.
For the Final Honour School, Lyndsey convenes the special subject on Britain from the Bomb to the Beatles; and teaches British History 1815-1924, and 1900 to the present, as well as the Disciplines of History. She is happy to supervise dissertations on nineteenth and twentieth century political, social and gender history.
Lyndsey’s recent research is on women’s activism within the Labour Party, particularly between 1945 and 1979. The existing scholarship has usually seen this as a period in which women in the Labour party did not necessarily pursue women’s interests, especially in comparison with the earlier and later decades of the twentieth century. In contrast, her work suggests that Labour women continued to champion women’s causes, broadly defined; that in Parliament, they often did so in partnership with Conservative women; and that they were far more interested in, and receptive to, the emergence of the women’s liberation movement than has been acknowledged. As such, her work contributes to the scholarship which is challenging the periodisation of women’s activism into ‘first’ and ‘second’ waves by focusing on the neglected activism of the mid-twentieth century within political parties.
Lyndsey began to explore these themes while working on an Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship, entitled A Woman’s Place is in the House? Labour Women MPs 1945-1979 at Queen Mary University of London. As well as working on a book developing these themes, she is working on a partnership with Bruce Castle Museum and Archive in Haringey, London, to showcase the life and work of the pioneering MP Joyce Butler (1910-1992).
With Ruth Davidson, Anna Muggeridge and Farah Hussain, Lyndsey is producing two collections examining the different forms of women’s politics in the twentieth century. These include a special issue on women’s grassroots politics since 1945 for Women’s History Review (forthcoming in 2024) and an edited collection for Oxford University Press entitled Women, Power and Politics in Britain, 1945-1997 which examines their participation in more formal politics. She is also working on a project on motherhood and the Labour Party with Charlotte Lydia Riley.
Her previous research focused on working-class women in the suffrage movement, and, in contrast to the dominant historiographical narrative, examined the reasons why working-class women might be attracted to militancy.
Books
Sisters and Sisterhood: The Kenney Sisters, Class and Suffrage, c.1890-1965
(Oxford Historical Monographs Series, Oxford University Press, 2021)
The Politics of Women’s Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions, ed. Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins (University of London Press, 2021)
Lady Constance Lytton, Aristocrat, Suffragette, Martyr (London, 2015)
Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed/Biographers Club Best First Biography Prize and a Sunday Times Biography of the Year
Special Issue
With Colm Murphy and Robert Saunders, ‘The Future of British Political History’, Political Quarterly, 9/2 (2023)
Articles
With Stephanie Ward, ‘Women, gender, and the history of the Labour Party’, Political Quarterly, 94/2 (2023)
‘Where the Church had refused to perform its duty the women themselves came forward’: the prayer campaign of the Women’s Social and Political Union, 1913-1914, Cultural and Social History, 19/2 (2022)
‘It wasn’t like that at all’: memory, identity and legacy in Jessie Kenney’s The Flame and The Flood, Women’s History Review, 29/6 (2020)
Annie Kenney and the politics of class in the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), Twentieth Century British History, 30/4 (2019)
Chapters
‘Singing The Red Flag for suffrage: gender, class and feminism in the Canning Town Branch of the Women’s Social and Political Union’, in Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins, eds., The Politics of Women’s Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions (University of London Press, 2021)
‘Introduction’, in Alexandra Hughes-Johnson and Lyndsey Jenkins, eds., The Politics of Women’s Suffrage: Local, National and International Dimensions (University of London Press, 2021)
Positions
- Lecturer in History
Subjects
- History
