Join us for a lively event exploring women’s rights and history. A pay bar provided by the award winning Wanstead Tap will be available on the night.

Shami Chakrabarti’s new work, Of Women, makes the case for radical positive action to promote the vindication of the rights of women, worldwide. Chakrabarti details how global gender injustice continues to impact health, wealth, education, representation, opportunity and security in the 21st century. Of Women outlines what needs fixing and makes, clear, inspiring proposals about what we do next, putting gender justice at the centre of the progressive political agenda.

Shami Chakrabati is Britain’s leading human rights campaigner. Labour’s Shadow Attorney General and a member of the House of Lords, Chakrabarti is an Honorary Professor of Law at the University of Bristol and the University of Manchester. She is the author of On Liberty, an impassioned defence of human rights, published in 2014.

Rachel Holmes has gone back to original sources to tell the story of a woman who did more than any other to transform British politics in the nineteenth century. Unrestrained by convention, lion-hearted and free, Eleanor Marx (1855-98) was an exceptional force. She was the first woman to lead the British dock workers’ and gas workers’ trades unions and for years worked tirelessly for her father, Karl Marx, as personal secretary and researcher. Foremost among her achievements was her pioneering feminism. For her, sexual equality was a necessary precondition for a just society. She set out into the world to make a difference ceaselessly campaigning and organising until her untimely end, which – with its letters, legacies, secrets and hidden paternity – reads in part like a novel and in part like the modern tragedy it was.

Rachel Holmes is the author of Sylvia Pankhurst: Natural born rebel, the Secret Life of Dr James Barry, The Hottentot Venus: The Life and Death of Saartjie Baartman. She is co-editor, with Lisa Appignanensi and Susie Orbach, of Fifty Shades of Feminism and co-commissioning editor, with Josie Rourke and Chris Haydon, of Sixty-Six Books: Twenty-First Century Writers Speak to the King James Bible.

Price: £5

Booking essential at www.redbridge.gov.uk/events