My partner, Jackie West, who has died aged 74, was a prominent second-wave feminist, whose four decades of scholarship and activism made a notable contribution to local, national and international women’s rights.
Her research, which culminated in a PhD by publication, consisted of three main areas: gender and employment; sexuality and sexual health; and prostitution and gambling. It was the last that garnered the most attention from academic peers and NGOs, resulting in a memorable 2014 BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour debate on sex workers’ rights, with Sheila Jeffreys. That same year, Jackie contributed a chapter discussing the mobility of sex workers for a book, Globalization in Practice, edited by Nigel Thrift.
Jackie was born in London, the first of three children of Peter West, the BBC sports and entertainment presenter, and Pauline (nee Pike), a secretary and later homemaker. After attending Ashford school in Kent, where she finished as head girl, Jackie read for a bachelor’s and a master’s in sociology at the University of Exeter and was then hired as a lecturer, aged just 23, by the department of sociology at the University of Bristol. Jackie was the first woman appointed to a tenure-track position there, remaining in post for 38 years and eventually rising to head of department in 2003, before becoming graduate dean of the faculty of social sciences and law in 2007.
Jackie supervised 18 doctoral students, alongside serving as a visiting lecturer, external examiner and conference organiser. In many ways, however, it was her grassroots activism that was most radical. She helped establish six feminist action and research groups through the 1970s alone, one of which resulted in an innovative reader on women’s studies, published by Virago in 1979. Just as this book made seamless connections between the worlds of employment and domesticity, so too was Jackie’s agitation for women’s rights holistic and bold. The Working Women’s Charter of 1974, which she helped form, was an example. This 10-point rallying cry demanded equal pay, free state-run nurseries and free contraception and abortion.
This last focus was Jackie’s most distinctive legacy. As an executive committee member — and vice chair from 1993 to 2001 — of the Brook Advisory Centre in Bristol, she liaised with everyone from GPs to teenage mothers. Moreover, she spearheaded protests and legislative pressure via the pro-choice Women’s Abortion and Contraception Campaign, which politicised and mobilised thousands of young women for marches and petitions.
I met Jackie while studying for my own PhD in sociology at the University of Bristol, and she is survived by me and our two children, four grandchildren and her two siblings.
