Laura Kelly

Contributor

Laura Kelly is lecturer in the history of health and medicine at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. She is the author of Irish women in medicine, c.1880s-1920s: origins, education and careers (Manchester University Press, 2012) and Irish medical education and student culture, c.1850-1950 (Liverpool University Press, 2017). Her current project, funded by a Wellcome Trust research fellowship (2016-19), explores the history of contraception in modern Ireland.

Feminism, History

“A Basic Issue of Women’s Liberation”: The Feminist Campaign to Legalize Contraception in 1970s Ireland

By Laura Kelly • August 31, 2017

On May 22, 1971, forty-seven members of the Irish Women’s Liberation Movement (IWLM) boarded the 8am train from Dublin to Belfast. Their aim was to purchase contraceptives in the north, where contraception was legal under UK law, and to travel back to Dublin with them in order to highlight the hypocrisy of Irish law, which… Read more →