Jalna Hanmer

WILPF UK is honoured that leading feminist women have chosen to join and support our international peace organisation. Jalna Hanmer was one of those members. She was a leading feminist campaigner and scholar who campaigned against male violence and was determined to improve the approach of the police to domestic abuse. She was able to initiate specialist training for officers (the start of domestic violence units).

As early as 1977 she founded the MA programme in women’s studies at the University of Bradford, an influential course that helped establish feminist studies as an academic field within sociology, both in the UK and internationally.

In 1974 she helped found the National Women’s Aid Federation, later known as Women’s Aid, which grew into a national network of refuges for women escaping domestic abuse.

In 1976, she took a number of women from Women’s Aid refuges to the international tribunal on crimes against women in Brussels, attended by 2,000 women from 40 nations, where they spoke about the realities of living with domestic violence.

Her publications include Well Founded Fear (1984), written with her long-time partner, Sheila Saunders. In the early 80s, Jalna Hanmer set up Feminist Archive North (FAN), to record the history of women’s activism in the north of England, a resource that is currently based at the University of Leeds.

Jalna was involved in the anti-Vietnam war movement, chairing what became known as the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign before all her energy was taken up by campaigning to end male violence.

As recently as 2018 she founded the Campaign to Eliminate the Leeds Sex Trade (CELST) to protest against the “managed zone” – the UK’s first designated legal prostitution area.

Thank you, Jalna, for a lifetime dedicated to women.