My mother, Rosalind Delmar, who has died aged 82, was a feminist writer, educator and activist, prominent in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the women’s movement of the 1960s and 70s.
She attended the inaugural Women’s Liberation conference in Oxford in 1970, organised women’s groups throughout London and conferences nationally, edited radical magazines, and helped set up the women’s publisher Virago. She contributed to the first women’s studies course for the Open University, launched in 1983, after teaching a similar course at City University in the mid-70s – without institutional imprimatur – in the students’ union. She also taught at the University of Sussex Centre for Continuing Education, and was a guest lecturer in women’s studies at Cambridge and Brunel universities.
Her 1986 essay What is Feminism? (published in the collection of the same name edited by Ann Oakley and Juliet Mitchell) responded to “the fragmentation of contemporary feminism”, arguing that “it now makes more sense to speak of a plurality of feminisms than of one,” shaped by differing experiences of class, sexuality and race. For Ros, the “lack of cohesiveness” of the concept of “woman” was not a threat, but reflected “the tremendous diversity of the meaning of womanhood, across cultures and over time”.
Rosalind was born in Dormanstown, Redcar, a town built by the Dorman Long steelworks to house their workers. Her parents, Rose Ellen (nee McSorley) and James Delmar, of Irish Catholic heritage, had both previously been widowed, and Ros grew up with her sister and nine half-siblings in a three-bedroom house, with the rhythms of family life set by shifts at the steelworks. She got into St Mary’s Convent grammar school in Middlesbrough, then went to Manchester University to study politics and history: at the time, only 0.3% of daughters of unskilled manual labourers entered higher education.
At Manchester, Ros threw herself into radical university politics, becoming national chair of student CND in 1963-64. Around this time she met Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, a junior lecturer in the Italian department: she needed help transporting materials to a demonstration, and had heard he owned a car. They married in 1966 and moved to Italy, where Geoffrey translated the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci into English, and Rosalind made friends in Italian feminist groups (she later translated Sibilla Aleramo’s novel Una Donna). Returning to Britain in the late 1960s, she became active in the women’s movement, and she continued to write and translate after the birth of her children – first myself, then my sister Cecily.
Her political and intellectual experiences led her to an interest in psychoanalysis, and in the 1990s she retrained as a psychodynamic counsellor. Her passion for adult education had not left her, and after qualifying she worked for many years as head of training at the Herts and Beds Pastoral Foundation (now The Counselling Foundation) until her retirement in 2006.
In recent years, as a new generation of feminists became interested in the history of the women’s movement, Ros contributed to oral histories about Women’s Liberation, such as the Sisterhood and After project at the British Library, and wrote introductions for digitised archives of two of the radical magazines she had worked on, 7 Days and Red Rag. These pieces allowed her to reflect on the practical and political work that went into maintaining the women’s movement.
She is survived by Geoffrey, Cecily and me.
