This article reflects on methodological and ethical issues that have shaped a collaborative project which aims to chart social, legal and political responses to child sexual abuse in England and Wales across the twentieth century. The etymological problem of searching for child sexual abuse in the historical archive is discussed, given that the term itself is a relatively recent one. Acknowledging that research tools will always be partial, it then focuses on the gaps and silences in the archive, most problematically in relation to the voices and experiences of victims and survivors themselves. Finally it discusses ethical issues relating to the naming or anonymising of those accused and convicted (as well as victims and survivors) in the writing up of research findings. The discussion focuses on two key periods -the 1920s and 1950s -and on education policy, including regulatory procedures for teachers in state and fee-paying schools.

Historians of the Women's Liberation Movement have long stressed its decentralised form, with a deliberate refusal of the infrastructure of leaders and formal institutions. Instead, like other social movements of the 1970s and 80s, periodicals, networks of friends, and informal meeting places tended to provide the impetus for the development and diffusion of feminist ideas and strategies of protest. This article examines the significant role that bookshops played in this process, as politicised and commercial spaces. Feminist bookselling is situated within a longer tradition of bookselling, and understood as part of a wider process of attempting to bring social justice concerns to bear within capitalist settings. The feasibility and effect of women-only principles in bookshop settings is explored; bookshops emerge as contentious sites of activism in their own right. Reading has long been a central activity for feminists. Beatrix Campbell, a women's liberation movement and communist activist, described the intensity of the relationship between women, reading and writing in the 1970s: 'We ate the literature that was pouring out of the Women's Liberation Movement, we ate it [...] it was an extraordinary relationship to the written word, [...] all of these tracts and texts and books, we consumed as soon as they came out. And, whether you were an intellectual or not, you just read everything, and it impacted massively on your life.' Her violent reaction to Anna Coedt's The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm, which she threw across the room on first reading, was testament to how challenging these texts could be, bringing up painful sentiments when they 'detonated' in women's lives. 2 Print culture could also generate solidarities, both through the ideas it conveyed, and also through its comforting material presence. Stella Dadzie, a key Black British feminist activist, recalled the way in which Black American feminist novels and plays by writers such as Audre Lorde and Alice Walker were familiar to her from visits to other activist households; the books cemented her sense of community with women in the Organisation for Women of African and Asian Descent (OWAAD): 'when I go into their houses, our bookshelves are all the same, y'know, you'll always see the same books on them.' 3 The relationship to books, pamphlets and periodicals was based not only on their provocative ideas, but also on their physical presence, conveyed sensorially through the deep green covers of Virago Classics or the smell of book bindings. As feminist bookseller Philippa Harrison described it, 'there was a mutual female pleasure in seeing those spinners of green books in a bookshop.' 4

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