Silenced by Law: the Cautionary Tale of Women on the Line

This chapter reflects on a very particular silencing of the research process: legally imposed restrictions on publication. It takes the form of a cautionary tale and is based on my personal experience of attempting to publish a book on women’s work at the height of the Women’s Movement in Britain. Various forms of silencing affect feminist research, emanating from diverse and differing sources, as demonstrated by other contributions to this volume. Some silences arise internally from with the research process itself while others impinge on it from the outside. Some are self-imposed by researchers, others are not. While some of these restrictions are gendered, or affect feminist more than other kinds of research, others are not gendered. My story is one of an explicitly feminist investigation, silenced by the externally imposed power of law as refracted through the world of publishing. Although the constraints were not in themselves gendered, they nevertheless have implications for particular forms of feminist research.