Jill Liddington

Jill Liddington (born in Manchester, 1946) is a British writer and academic who specialises in women's history.

She joined the Department of External Studies at Leeds University in 1982 and became a Reader in Gender History, School of Continuing Education, until her transfer to the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, where she is currently Honorary Research Fellow.

Liddington stood as a Labour Party candidate in the Sowerby Bridge ward in the Calderdale Council election, 2004 - largely to prevent more BNP councillors being elected.

Liddington's book Female Fortune: Land, Gender and Authority was chosen by feminist and TV writer Sally Wainwright as the book she would want with her to read if she was ever trapped on a desert island. Wainwright subsequently developed a historical TV drama series, Gentleman Jack, as a BBC-HBO production which aired in spring 2019 and depicts the life of Victorian landowner Anne Lister, as “the first modern lesbian”. The end credits acknowledge that the drama was “inspired by the books Female Fortune and Nature’s Domain by Jill Liddington”, whose own website declares: “Ever since her death in 1840, Anne Lister of Shibden Hall has exerted a magnetic attraction... The most powerful magnet remains her daily diaries. These run to no fewer than four million words, much of it written in her own secret code. Anne Lister’s code was not cracked till fifty years after her death. I remained hooked by Anne’s extraordinary life: dazzling worldly achievements plus unbuttoned lesbian affairs.”

• Liddington, J. (2014) Vanishing for the Vote: suffrage, citizenship and the battle for the censusManchester University Press.
• Liddington, J. (2006) Rebel Girls: their fight for the vote, Virago Press.
• Liddington, J. (1998) Female Fortune: Land, Gender and Authority: the Anne Lister diaries 1833-36, Rivers Oram Press.
• Liddington, J. (1989) The Long Road to Greenham: feminism and anti-militarism in Britain since 1820, Virago Press.
• Liddington, J. (1984) Respectable Rebel: the life and times of Selina Cooper 1864-1946, Virago Press.
• Liddington, J.; Norris, J. (1978) One Hand Tied Behind Us: the rise of the women's suffrage movement, Virago Press.