Back in the 1970s Women’s Lib was a well-worn if not hackneyed phrase.

While feminists have largely won that war, the battle for Chickens’ Lib is rather less well-known.

But it is a fascinating tale nonetheless.

And now the story of the fight for chicken rights, highlighting the often appalling way in which hens were treated in the UK’s factory farms, is set to be told by campaigner Clare Druce.

Mrs Druce, of Holmfirth, and her mother Violet Spalding have spent years highlighting what they claim are the intolerable and cruel conditions on these farms.

They staged demonstrations inside the Ministry of Agriculture, caged humans in Parliament Square, and were memorably thrown out of Wakefield Cathedral by the Provost and pursued by the police.

Battery hens were their first concern but later Chickens’ Lib campaigned on a much wider front – from quail to ostriches, and for other, non-feathered, farmed animals. Farmers, it is claimed, were, and still are, routinely administering antibiotics to their animals to keep them alive in squalid and stressful conditions while multi-national drug companies continue to profit.

Hebden Bridge publisher Bluemoose Books is publishing Chickens’ Lib by Clare on September 28.

It tells how four women changed the law on battery farmed chickens in the UK beginning in 1973.

It is, by turns, disturbing, poignant and amusing.

Celebrities joined the cause with the late humorist Spike Milligan, and actor Joanna Lumley signing petitions.

It is also a social and political history over three decades of our approach to animal welfare within the food industry in this country.

It is not the first book Clare has published.

In 1989 Chickens’ Lib co-founder Clare published the first book exposing the horrors of the UK chicken industry, titled Chicken & Egg: Who Pays the Price?

And in 2004, she followed that up with Minny’s Dream, a book for children in which a young girl befriends and rescues a hen from a battery facility.