My accomplice, Jackie West, who has died aged 74, was a distinguished second-wave feminist, whose 4 many years of scholarship and activism made a notable contribution to native, nationwide and worldwide ladies’s rights.
Her analysis, which culminated in a PhD by publication, consisted of three foremost areas: gender and employment; sexuality and sexual well being; and prostitution and playing. It was the final that garnered essentially the most consideration from tutorial friends and NGOs, leading to a memorable 2014 BBC Radio 4 Girl’s Hour debate on intercourse staff’ rights, with Sheila Jeffreys. That very same yr, Jackie contributed a chapter discussing the mobility of intercourse staff for a guide, Globalization in Observe, edited by Nigel Thrift.
Jackie was born in London, the primary of three youngsters of Peter West, the BBC sports activities and leisure presenter, and Pauline (nee Pike), a secretary and later homemaker. After attending Ashford faculty in Kent, the place she completed as head woman, Jackie learn for a bachelor’s and a grasp’s in sociology on the College of Exeter and was then employed as a lecturer, aged simply 23, by the division of sociology on the College of Bristol. Jackie was the primary lady appointed to a tenure-track place there, remaining in publish for 38 years and finally rising to go of division in 2003, earlier than changing into graduate dean of the college of social sciences and regulation in 2007.
Jackie supervised 18 doctoral college students, alongside serving as a visiting lecturer, exterior examiner and convention organiser. In some ways, nonetheless, it was her grassroots activism that was most radical. She helped set up six feminist motion and analysis teams by means of the Seventies alone, one in all which resulted in an progressive reader on ladies’s research, revealed by Virago in 1979. Simply as this guide made seamless connections between the worlds of employment and domesticity, so too was Jackie’s agitation for ladies’s rights holistic and daring. The Working Ladies’s Constitution of 1974, which she helped type, was an instance. This 10-point rallying cry demanded equal pay, free state-run nurseries and free contraception and abortion.
This final focus was Jackie’s most distinctive legacy. As an govt committee member — and vice chair from 1993 to 2001 — of the Brook Advisory Centre in Bristol, she liaised with everybody from GPs to teenage moms. Furthermore, she spearheaded protests and legislative strain by way of the pro-choice Ladies’s Abortion and Contraception Marketing campaign, which politicised and mobilised hundreds of younger ladies for marches and petitions.
I met Jackie whereas learning for my very own PhD in sociology on the College of Bristol, and she or he is survived by me and our two youngsters, 4 grandchildren and her two siblings.
