This paper is an exploration of methodological and ethical issues in historical geography research. Drawing on the experience of researching the historical geographies of abortion in late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century Lancashire, the paper discusses some of the ethical and methodological questions that historical research on sensitive topics raises. This paper investigates the politics of the archive and the forms of censorship researchers may encounter. It also explores the possibility of a conflict of interest between researcher and participant, including the dilemmas researchers face when research participants are dead, but remain important figures in the community. Moreover, the paper argues that the recent burgeoning interest in family and local history makes questions of method and ethics far more urgent for the geographer. In conclusion, the paper calls for more dialogue within geography about researching sensitive subjects, and also between geography and other disciplines.

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It is thirty years since the first call to engage with gender as an analytical category was made in the sub‐discipline of Historical Geography. Significant advances in scholarship have been made in this time, particularly the re‐situation of women in the history of Geography as a subject. This paper looks to the next thirty years in Historical Geography and asks how the sub‐discipline can retain and develop its critical political edge. In the 2017 Women's Marches protestors dressed as suffragettes from the early twentieth century and proclaimed that little had changed in the fight for women's rights. Taking this ‘Victorian present’ as a starting point, this paper explores ways to connect Historical Geography to the gender politics of the present. The paper argues that the sub‐discipline has the methodological tools to use the past as a form of female power to engage with the inequalities that women still face. A sketch of a feminist historical geography of the present is provided using emancipatory and participatory research tools.

Recent proposals to establish a ‘managed zone’ for female street sex workers in Liverpool are placed in this paper in historical and geographical context. Liverpool is shown to be an exemplar of a late Victorian municipal management of prostitution that was just as firmly committed to the containment and ‘localisation’ of sex work. This model is contrasted with alternative municipal strategies, and set within a national legislative agenda increasingly hostile to tolerance and regulation. The contours of this governmental regulation of commercial sexuality are explored in some detail here, but this historical geography is also offered as a way of informing contemporary concerns, cautioning as it does against averring either the novelty or the progressiveness of contemporary policies on the zoning of sex work.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, despite the cultural ideal of private and public as separate spheres and a lack of formal voting rights, many middle-class women engaged in philanthropic and social work outside the home. Taking as its focus a group of middle-class women in Bolton, Lancashire, this paper conducts a prosopography, or group biography, in order to shed light on female citizenship and make a historical contribution to literature on citizenship beyond voting rights. The paper uses archive traces to reconstruct the experience of the female philanthropist and understand her motivations. The focus of the paper is a new theoretical approach to women's citizenship in the early 20th century. Using Michel Foucault's concept of biopolitics, or life politics, the paper reconceptualises women's social work as a form of biopolitical patriotism that was the basis of a scalar claim to citizenship. This historical evidence from Bolton reveals that biopolitical action was not solely the preserve of the state. Women claimed fitness for citizenship and the vote by nation-building, carrying out work that shaped children into the citizens of the future and safeguarded the moral and physical health of the nation.

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Abortion has historically been ignored in geography. Although bodies and pregnancy have been increasingly studied since the 1990s, a reticence around abortion remains. In recent years, however, this has begun to change. This article critically reviews how geographers and other scholars are now considering abortion and uses three conceptual lenses of discourse, spatiality and mobility to argue that abortion should be a mainstream topic of critical concern for geographers. Through these themes we show that geographical attention to abortion makes questions of space, power, and citizenship visible in new ways and, furthermore, in ways that are only recently possible.

Contested spaces: abortion clinics, women's shelters and hospitals, by Lori A. Brown, Farnham, Ashgate, 2013, 254 pp., £55.00 (hardback), Lori Brown's book Contested Spaces is a highly original spatial approach to the topic of abortion. At the heart of the project is an attempt to remedy what Brown, an architect by profession, sees as the discipline of architecture's lack of political engagement. Brown's rethinking of abortion and abortion law draws on feminist theory and cultural geography to uncover the relationships of power that can be read in the built environment and other spaces related to abortion. This political approach references several different scales: the built environment of hospitals, clinics and their immediate vicinity, but also the way in which law operates at the scales of state and country. Although the main focus of the project is the USA, analysis of abortion law in Canada and Mexico is usefully offered by way of context.Brown's research is an avowedly feminist project and, as such, the book prioritizes the experience of women. This spatial -experiential analysis of abortion legislation arguably provides the volume's biggest contribution to existing geographical literature on abortion and women's healthcare. For instance, in Chapter 3, 'Legal frameworks understood spatially', Brown undertakes a micro-political analysis of the so-called bubble laws in the USA. A bubble law legislates a safe distance between protestors, facilities and patients. Three states in the USA currently employ zones of protection ranging from 8 to 35 feet around a person and the buildings they are entering. This zone of safety is used by Brown to examine how space is defined in abortion access. She finds that the bubble zone is easily compromised since the patient has no real way of invoking the law and, moreover, an exclusion zone of 8 feet can still allow protestors to successfully harass those entering and leaving clinics. The chapter convincingly establishes both through the text and innovative diagrams that the complex dynamics of the bubble are often outside the control of the law and fascinatingly, which the architecture sometimes aids one side over another.In contrast, another of Brown's case studies, in Chapter 4, 'Contested spaces', reveals the way in which the spatial politics of abortion law can work in favour of those seeking abortion. Brown shows that international waters can be used as a place of legal exception to provide abortions to women outside their own countries where the procedure is illegal. The Women on Waves non-profit organization is a mobile reproductive health unit on board a ship. Brown analyses how the ship's Dutch legal status and its docking 12 miles into international waters interrupts the spatial jurisdiction of a nation's abortion law. In the same chapter, Brown carefully excavates the spatial meanings of the tactics used by the 'Jane' organization in Chicago between 1969 and 1973 as a provider of safe yet illegal abortion procedures. Brown's explication of the importance of spac...