Difficult Women by Helen Lewis

Author:Helen Lewis [Lewis, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473562257
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2020-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

7. Love

If feminism was reduced to one word, it would be this: no.

Lierre Keith

When Erin Pizzey rejected feminism, she was tidied away, turned into an obscure footnote to the history of the refuge movement. But even those who keep the faith can be written out if they prove too difficult.

On 11 August 2018, the Times columnist Matthew Parris wrote an article defending the right to make offensive jokes. In passing, he mentioned a lesbian pioneer: Maureen Colquhoun. The Labour MP had lost her seat in the 1979 election, at the same time as Parris (a Conservative) first gained his. ‘A fierce firebrand of a feminist, her sometimes zany, always brave campaigns raised eyebrows, but Labour could live with individualists,’ he wrote. ‘Not lesbians, though. When she came out she was sunk, and deselected, and finished.’ Colquhoun celebrated her ninetieth birthday the next day, he said: ‘Maureen remembers when you couldn’t be gay. Is the day coming when you cannot laugh at gays or mock our sometimes-silly excesses, or tell us to stop whingeing?’

Huh, I thought, reading the column. Somehow, I had imagined that the first ‘openly’ gay MP – a phrase that will probably soon sound hopelessly quaint – was Chris Smith, a member of the New Labour government which took office in 1997.fn1 Who was this Maureen Colquhoun?

My mental Rolodex of British lesbian pioneers had relatively few entries. There were the Ladies of Llangollen, two eighteenth-century Welsh women whose diaries describe them in bed nursing each other’s headaches with suspicious frequency. There was Anne Lister – ‘Gentleman Jack’ – the Georgian landowner whose diaries give an extraordinarily frank account of her life seducing heiresses. And there was Radclyffe Hall, author of 1928’s The Well of Loneliness. But no Maureen Colquhoun. If women get written out of history, then that goes double for women who identify with other women, who socialise with other women, and who love other women. And that matters to all women. We are not worthy of notice only when our lives intersect with those of men.

Maureen Colquhoun deserves better. She arrived in Parliament as a forty-five-year-old mother, married to the journalist Keith Colquhoun, and quickly gained a reputation as a troublemaker. It was 1974 – three years after Erin Pizzey founded her first refuge, and four years after the Equal Pay Act. The Second Wave was in full swing, and Maureen was at the vanguard. She wanted to abolish women’s prisons, decriminalise prostitution and further liberalise the abortion law. She asked to be called ‘Ms’ in the Commons chamber. She demanded crèche facilities at Labour Party conference. She joined the left-wing Tribune group, and found an unlikely ally in Dennis Skinner, already a thorn in the side of the Labour leadership. Skinner regarded homosexuality as ‘strictly for the upper classes and most definitely public school’, according to Colquhoun’s memoir A Woman in the House. But he was kind to his new colleague, showing her round the vast warren of Westminster and demystifying its strange and pointless rituals.

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