Sally Alexander

Alexander completed a diploma in history at Ruskin College, Oxford, before earning a Bachelor of Arts degree in the subject at University College London. She helped to organise the United Kingdom's first national Women's Liberation Movement conference at Ruskin College in 1970, and was involved in several London Women's Liberation Workshops as well as the Night Cleaners Campaign (1970–72). A founding editor of the History Workshop Journal (established in 1976), she taught in the Extra-Mural Department of the University of London in the 1970s; as of 2018 is Emeritus Professor of Modern History at Goldsmiths, University of London. Aside from feminist history, her academic interests include the history of other social movements, of memory, and of psychoanalysis in Britain.[1][2]

Alexander has a daughter, Abigail Thaw, with former husband John Thaw.[3] Her granddaughter Molly Whitmey made a cameo in the Endeavour episode Oracle (series 7, episode 1, broadcast 1 February 2020) as the younger version of her.[4]

Alexander is portrayed by Keira Knightley in the 2020 British comedy-drama Misbehaviour about the 1970 Miss World competition that Alexander and other members of the Women's Liberation movement disrupted with flour bombs.[5]

• Becoming a Woman: And Other Essays in 19th and 20th Century Feminist History (London: Virago, 1994).
• (Co-edited with Barbara Taylor) History and Psyche: Culture, Psychoanalysis, and the Past (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).

• Sally Alexander talking about her role in the feminist disruption of the 1970 Miss World contest