Dr. Jane Grant has had a very varied, if not eccentric, career. She started, after Bristol University, as a teacher of English in London, Dar-es-Salaam and at the University of Lagos, Nigeria. This led to research on exiled writers from South Africa and the Caribbean and to helping to run an educational project with African musicians and artists in schools throughout London and beyond. She then went into policy development at the National Council for Voluntary Organisations and in 1989 helped to set up the National Alliance of Women’s Organisations (NAWO).

The women’s movement has really dominated Jane’s life ever since. She was Director of NAWO for five years (and remains closely involved with it as an adviser), then for the next six combined consultancy with women’s organisations with research for a doctorate at the University of Kent on Governance, Continuity and Change in the Organised Women’s Movement. She is now continuing with research specifically on the history of the Fawcett Society, which has been campaigning for equality between men and women since 1866 and with which she has been personally involved for many years. She does this mainly in the splendid new Women’s Library (which started as the Fawcett Library) and is also involved in many other women’s organisation, notably those working for peace like the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom She is an adviser to the Global Fund for Women and also very involved in aid and development organisations like the United Nations Association and Action Aid. More recently she has taken on a new role in mental health as a non-executive director on the Oxleas Mental Health Trust in South London – and is very embedded in her local community

Jane feels passionately about the transformative power of the women’s movement and the women within it (the strapline to her thesis was ‘We walk in the footsteps of some exceptional women’ and amongst such women she certainly numbered the renowned feminist Mary Stott, her friend and neighbour). Jane is married to a writer, has three children and a growing number of small grandchildren.