The Society has made four outstanding contributions to legal scholarship. First, it was one of the earliest organisations to welcome women scholars on an equal footing, take them seriously, and give them leadership positions and the prominence that they deserved. Second, it helped to establish family law as an academic subject. It may be hard to believe for our younger members, but there was a time when family law was not on any university syllabuses, and practitioners were expected to learn it as they went along. Third, the Society has been a force for progressive reform of family law, with an influence on international organisations, governments and scholars outside family law. Fourth, it was, and still is, a superb network for people from across all continents to share their insights into family law, and to forge strong friendships. I shall always be grateful for the intellectual and personal incentives that it afforded me.

Times have changed so much, but the older members will recall that there were very few top women law professors in the 1970s. Dr Claire Palley OBE (coincidentally my predecessor as Principal of St Anne’s College Oxford University, which she headed from 1984 to 1991) was a human rights specialist, and the first woman to hold a chair in law in the UK. Ivy Williams was the first woman to teach law in the UK – again, at my college. Her speciality was the Swiss Civil Code, although I surmise that she must have had to teach a wide range of legal subjects to the women of Oxford, at a time when family law was not on the syllabus. It is thought that the first professor of family law, and certainly the first author of a textbook on the subject, was Professor Peter Bromley. In the same year as the publication of his book, 1957, which was the centenary of the Act permitting civil divorce in England and Wales for the first time (Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, UK), a book appeared commemorating this. Also published in 1957 was Oliver McGregor’s Divorce in England, one of the earliest books to view family law from a social science perspective. The history of fledgling family law is covered by Frances Burton in Family Law (Routledge, 2012).