Shami Chakrabarti, Director of Liberty and Honorary Professor in the School of Law at The University of Manchester, will deliver the inaugural Pankhurst Lecture this Thursday 26 February.

Christobel Pankhurst was a first class law graduate of the University of Manchester but was barred from the legal profession on account of her sex. Instead she was left with using her learning in her own defence and that of her suffragette sisters in their many legendary struggles against an unfair law.

In instituting an annual lecture in her name three years before the centenary of the Representation of the People Act and the votes for women so hard won, the School of Law seeks to remember and rekindle that radical and feminist heritage at a moment when Baroness Brenda Hale, who spent many years teaching at the University, remains the first and only woman in Britain’s highest court.

Much has been achieved in women’s struggles for their basic human rights the world over. Yet there is so much still to do.

In this inaugural lecture, Shami Chakrabarti, the director of Liberty reflects on what Pankhurst’s generation of law students and freedom fighters might think‎ of the mixed performance in gaining equal rights for women of her own.

The opening address at the lecture will be provided by Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, President and Vice-Chancellor of The University of Manchester – the first female V-C of a Russell Group university.

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