This symposium presentation for International Women’s Day asks who counts as a scholar and what counts as scholarly work by exploring some of the relations between education, political activism, political networking, and genres of writing in the work of Noreen Branson (1910-2003) whose Guardian Obituary (10 November 2003) describes her as “a social historian whose books benefited from her experience as a participant in many of the events she described.” Amongst Noreen’s “experience as a participant” was work for the Communist Party and for the Labour Research Department, campaigning for improvements in working class conditions, and membership of the Communist Party Historians Group and of the Socialist History Society across a period of historiographical shifts in labour, socialist and communist history, all of which worked together to situate her as a communist “insider” and “chronicler” of political events and social conditions whose writing was cited by academics and reviewed in scholarly journals whilst simultaneously being marginalised.
Joyce Goodman, Noreen Branson (1910-2003): inside/outside social history and histories of the Communist Party of Great Britain, DOMUS seminar Birmingham University, International Women’s Day, 8 March 2021
Image: courtesy of Rosa Branson
