Maureen Colquhoun

Posted on June 30, 2021 by ealasaidbooks

Maureen Colquhoun, 1928-2021, was a Labour politician, and the first openly lesbian MP, who pressed tirelessly for women’s rights, moving to Ambleside, Cumbria, in 1992.

Maureen Colquhoun, on the left of the photo, died this year, in February 2021, at the age of ninety two. In 1992, she, and her partner, Barbara Todd, moved to Ambleside, Cumbria, where they spent the latter part of their lives. Maureen Colquhoun became a councillor on Lakes parish council, and she was also a member of the Lake District National Park Authority. Involved in local issues, she sought, for example, speed limits on Lake Windermere and fewer low flying military exercises over the Lake District.

Maureen Colquhoun was born on 12 August, 1928, in Sussex. As the photograph above suggests, she went on to live an active political life. She joined the Labour party as a teenager, and then studied at the London School of Economics. She became a West Sussex councillor for the party, in Shoreham. During her time as a councillor here, she was blocked briefly by Conservatives from sitting on committees, and described as a “chatterbox”. Colquhoun was, in fact, the only woman member of the council authority at this time.

In 1974, Colquhoun was elected as the MP for Northampton North. She served as MP until losing her seat in the 1979 general election, following a deselection battle. During Colquhoun’s time as MP, she made her mark, raising issues, with which today, we have become more familiar. In 1975, she argued for the provision of a creche for female delegates at Labour party conferences. Colquhoun also asked the speaker in the House of Commons, George Thomas, to address her as Maureen Colquhoun or as Ms Colquhoun. Thomas agreed to pronounce the prefix in a way which would elide the distinction between Mrs and Miss. We are all familiar with the use of Ms as a title today, but it was rare in 1976, and the first time that such a request had been made in the House of Commons.

Colquhoun introduced a private member’s bill to the house in 1975, the Balance of Sexes Bill. It proposed equal numbers of men and women for public appointments. In the order for the second reading of the bill, Colquhoun said, “My Bill is designed positively to discriminate for women…

shall merely draw the attention of the House today to some of the everyday bread-and-butter bodies that affect everybody’s lives. For example, the Sugar Board has five men and no women. The Agriculture Training Board has 27 men, no women. Is it to be said that the only rôle of the woman in agriculture is that of the farmer’s wife?

The Committee of Investigation for Great Britain has seven men, no women. I cannot think how Great Britain can be investigated without the help of women.”

You can read more here. The discussion of the time does not go into non binary gender or gender non-conforming issues, except insofar as it concerns the role of women in public life.

Colquhoun’s bill did not become law, but it pushed on the debate about equal opportunities in a pioneering way. Subsequent legislation and measures reflect the way that attitudes have shifted, and we do sometimes see positive discrimination today.

At this time, in 1975, Maureen Colquhoun met Barbara or Babs Todd, and the two women fell in love. Barbara Todd was co-editing the lesbian and bisexual women’s magazine, Sappho, which she and Jackie Forster, and other women had founded. This magazine was started in 1972, after the first British lesbian magazine, Arena Three had folded, and it continued until 1981.

Cover of Sappho from November 1976 showing ‘the three Botticelli beauties.
Courtesy of Glasgow Women’s Library

Colquhoun left her husband, Keith, and moved in with Todd. Their housewarming party led to public exposure, in that Nigel Dempster revealed the women’s relationship in the Daily Mail newspaper, in 1976.

This, and other issues, led to Colquhoun being deselected as a candidate in 1977 by the Labour party, some of whom did not approve of her “obsession with trivialities such as women’s rights”. Colquhoun was later reinstated as a candidate, but lost her seat of Northampton North in the 1979 general election. Before Colquhoun left parliament, in 1979, she introduced a bill to decriminalise prostitution, the Protection of Prostitutes Bill. She brought fifty prostitutes into the committee room in the House of Commons for the first reading of the bill (LSE). This bill did not become law, although it was allowed a second reading. The issues which it raised are still very much debated today.

After leaving parliament, Maureen Colquhoun remained active, in the charity Gingerbread, as a research assistant, in the Secretaries and Assistants’ Council and becoming a councillor in Hackney, where she served from 1982-1990. In 1992, as I have mentioned, she and her partner, Barbara Todd, moved to Ambleside, Cumbria. Colquhoun and Todd married in 2015, and lived together until Barbara Todd died in February of 2020. Maureen Colquhoun, who died a year later has left a political legacy behind her.

Acknowledgements:

https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsehistory/2019/02/13/maureen-colquhoun/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maureen_Colquhoun

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cumbria/content/articles/2005/08/24/low_flying_feature.shtml

https://www.theargus.co.uk/news/12950825.maureen-colquhoun-a-vocal-revolutionary/

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/maureen-colquhoun-labour-mp-northampton-north-obituary-b1803439.html

https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1975/may/16/balance-of-sexes-bill

https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/librarycollections/2021/07/02/listening-to-maureen-colquhoun/
A blog on Maureen Colquhoun, politics, and sound heritage, with a clip of Maureen Colquhoun speaking in a 1973 interview.

https://womenslibrary.org.uk/2012/02/09/archive-item-of-the-month-sappho/

https://womenslibrary.org.uk/explore-the-library-and-archive/lgbtq-collections-online-resource/a-decade-of-sappho-in-lesbian-herstory/

https://womenslibrary.org.uk/2016/09/14/sappho-and-lesbian-visibility-making-the-personal-political/

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/sappho-magazine#

Lesbian, part two

Posted on September 27, 2020 by ealasaidbooks

Four-Piece Composition: Reclining Figure 1934 Henry Moore OM, CH 1898-1986 Purchased with assistance from the Art Fund 1976 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T02054 Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND (3.0 Unreported) License. © The Henry Moore Foundation. Photo © Tate

Lesbian has become the dominant word for women with same sex desires, the L in LGBT, but it had at one time serious competitors in other words, including sapphist, and tribade.

It is unsurprising that both Sapphist and Lesbian should have been used intermittently over the last couple of centuries to indicate women who liked women. The ancient Greek poetry of Sappho, from the isle of Lesbos, which describes fulsomely her same sex desires, has been a pattern handed down to us for all who identify the same way.

In contradistinction to male homosexuality, lesbianism has not been specifically outlawed in the past in Britain, and so, there is not a word describing it which is linked to legislation and the criminal courts, in the way that sodomy has that association.

Tribade, from the Greek, to rub, is a word which is almost never used in recent times, although it used to appear in literary or gossipy contexts. Robert Burton, in his seventeenth book, The Anatomy of Melancholy, mentions tribades amongst a long list of those who, from the strength of a tyrannical passion, or from weakness or a depraved nature, are subject to love’s tyrannies: those little women tribades with lascivious loins, who rub each other by turn, and who having such skillful genitals, even besides complete Venus for eunuchs. This is hot stuff, and it is so hot, that he writes it in Latin, so that only other educated men could read it! In fact, it is hard to find use of this word by women for themselves. It is also not the sort of respectable word which Cumbrian newspapers would print for their reading public. Tribade has not completely been extinguished as a term, but it is deeply unfashionable nowadays. Could it ever make a comeback?

Sapphist, however, although appearing in medical contexts, was used by at least some women, and sometimes in contexts where homosexuality and bisexuality were accepted. Dora Carrrington, the artist who has immortalised in a famous painting the Cumbrian hamlet of Watendlath, wrote in July 1925 a rather anguished letter to her lover, Gerald Brennan, about her relations with both men and women and about her experience of gender. Gerald Brennan replied to her, advising, “for your own happiness you should give up men and become a complete sapphist”. (Gerzina, p.229) The word, sapphist, a woman having relations with women, was understood and acceptable. More recently, “Sappho” magazine was published by and for gay and bisexual women in Britain from 1972-1981.

So, a pertinent question might be, why don’t we say or write SGBT and SGBTQ, instead of LGBT and LGBTQ? Both lesbian and sapphist were available terms. Interestingly, the term, LGBT which we are currently very used to, has itself evolved over time. If we go back to the 1960s, the 1970s, and the 1980s, then we would find organisations and names which do not use the current acronym. The Committee for Homosexuality Equality, which became called the Campaign for Homosexual Equality in 1971; there was a Cumbrian & Borders branch. We also find, The Gay Rural Aid and Information Network, or GRAIN, including a newsletter for rural communities, was founded in 1976. The L in the GLF, the Gay Liberation Front, founded in 1970, stands for liberation. This does not mean that gay women were forgotten or unrepresented in these organisations; the Gay Liberation Front in particular, seems to have been a queer campaigning body, with a wide spectrum of interests and occasional involvement in anarchic street theatre.

But the word, lesbian, has a long history, and was still in use at this time. You might find it used by women themselves, or printed, as part of the name of gay telephone help and information lines. At some point, and this, I believe, was the crunch moment, lesbian was the word for gay women which was adopted to form the acronym, LGB, in the 1980s. As Pink News explains, this acronym has been gradually expanded; concurrently with LGB, LGBT has been in use since the 1990s. LGBTQ is a further expansion, probably from the 2000s onwards, with the Q standing for queer. While LGB and LGBT occur in the Oxford English dictionary, LGBTQ does not yet have an entry, although it is increasingly used. Of course, the acronym can be expanded into LGBT+, LGBTQ+, LGBTQI, with the addition of I for intersex, and LGBTQIA+, with the addition of A for asexual. It could probably morph into even more forms. It is my belief, that being stabilised in an acronym has helped the word, lesbian, retain its dominance over sapphist and sapphism.

A great deal of personal choice remains in describing oneself, and some women might use the word, gay, or another word, instead of lesbian. Perhaps there are, or were, colloquial Cumbrian expressions for gay, lesbian, and other terms, which don’t always make their way into print. If you know of such a word or phrase, then feel free to get in touch, using the contact form on this blog.

Now, in addition to words like gay, lesbian, homosexual, and transgender, there has been a creation of new terms like pansexual, genderqueer, sapiosexual, non binary, and many more. The only certainty about language is that it changes over time.

Acknowledgements:

https://www.bl.uk/lgbtq-histories/lgbtq-timeline

https://www.bl.uk/lgbtq-histories/articles/arena-three-britains-first-lesbian-magazine

https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/blue-plaques/blue-plaque-stories/lgbtq-plaques/

The Oxford English Dictionary. The entries on “lesbian”, “sapphist”, and “tribade”, like other entries, is viewable through the number on a Cumbria public library card.

https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2017/11/06/how-has-the-lgbt-acronym-evolved/ Pink News

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/10800/10800-h/10800-h.htm Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, 1621

Valerie Traub. The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press, 2002, p.168

Harriette Andreadis. Sappho in Early Modern England: Female Same-Sex Literary Erotics, 1550-1714. Chicago ; London : University of Chicago Press, 2001, p.45

Gretchen Gerzina. Carrington. Oxford University Press, 1989, p.229

Ed. David Garnett. Carrington: Letters and Extracts from her Diaries. Jonathan Cape, 1970. With a biographical note by Noel Carrington. Also issued by Oxford University Press, 1979, pp.323-6

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/moore-four-piece-composition-reclining-figure-t02054

The picture at the top of this post is a detail from Henry Moore’s Four-Piece Composition: Reclining Figure, 1934. As the Tate catalogue description explains, the figure evokes a reclining female, while the alabaster from which the figure parts are carved is Cumberland alabaster, which was dug from fields in Cumbria

Lesbian, part one

Posted on September 14, 2020 by ealasaidbooks

The history of the word, lesbian, is linked with that of the ancient Greek poet, Sappho, from the island of Lesbos, who, by writing so eloquently about her same sex desires, allowed a long term shift in the word’s meaning.

Nowadays, the primary meaning of lesbian denotes a woman who is attracted to other women; it is the L in LGBTQ+, and indeed, the word is usually used in this sense too, in adjective form. So much is this the case, that it has become difficult to use Lesbian in the sense of native to the Greek Isle of Lesbos, although this may just be possible depending on context.

Sappho lived in the seventh and sixth centuries BC, and was acknowledged by contemporaries and all subsequent ages as a great lyric poet – she was also a musician who played the lyre. Although as explained on Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s work, Sappho reflects on “love, desire, marriage, exile, cushions, bees, old age, shame, time, chickpeas and many other aspects of the human situation”, gradually over time, her poems which deal with her desires for women have made her synonymous nowadays with same sex relations between women. And so, by transference, the famous Lesbian gives us the modern term, lesbianism.

But, as we can see by tracing the use of the word through Cumbrian local papers, this exclusive meaning is relatively modern. Originally, Lesbian as a noun meant a native of the Greek island of Lesbos, and as an adjective, relating to that island. Very occasionally, Lesbian can stand by itself to mean a wine from Lesbos. As the Carlisle Journal on 8 April 1881 notes, Chian and Lesbian were the names of two ” ‘brands’ ” of wine, “much appreciated by Horace…Et Chia vina aut Lesbia”. It is perfectly possible to mention Lesbian here, without any sexual connotation. In fact, the article is about a recent earthquake in the Greek islands, including the island of Chios, which affected many thousands of people.

The Westmorland Gazette, on 30 January, 1847, carries an extended description of Manzanilla wine, with cultural and tasting notes. It includes a sentence which would be hard to print today, without instant thoughts of double entendre: “It [Manzanilla} may be compared to the ancient Lesbian, which Horace quaffed so plentifully in the cool shade, and then described as never doing harm.”

As well as wine, Lesbian may also denote a man who comes from Lesbos – usage like this is technically possible today, but most unlikely, because of the primary application of the word now to women. The Maryport Advertiser of 8 October, 1869, says of an ancient Greek male poet called Lesches, “what remains of this Lesbian shows that he was but a mere chronicler in rhyme of old Grecian traditions”. Lodged in between an advert for an English herb drink, and a comment on the game laws, we find in the Carlisle Patriot, 11 December, 1858, a line from Horace about “the Lesbian, fierce in war”. We might at first think that this means an Amazon-like tribe of ancient Greek female warriors, but it is an epithet for a male soldier. So, in fact, lesbian nowadays has become primarily a gendered word.

“A Lady’s Letter” in the English Lakes Visitor, on 25 June, 1887, gives a lengthy description of ladies’ fashion in France and England in the early nineteenth century: “At this period everyone was still bent on reproducing the attire of Greece and Rome…The hair was worn à la Medusa, or arranged in the Lesbian fashion”. This refers to the way that women put up their hair in what they thought was the manner of ancient Greece – Lesbian really does mean Lesbian, of Lesbos, and the rest of the column discusses ladies’ bonnets and hats and their trimmings in much detail.

“Our Ladies’ Budget”, a ladies’ column in the Carlisle Journal on 15 June, 1894, in the course of a comprehensive discussion of the latest fashions and materials, advises, “I have seen few prettier or more artistic gowns than Liberty’s ‘ Lesbia,’ a modification of the 1830 style, with removable silk vest”. Lesbia here, acts as a female ancient Greek name, so that potential gown purchasers know to expect a classically styled garment.

We come nearer the mark in the Westmorland Gazette, 23 February, 1861. This is very subtle. The paper reviews “Translations by Mr. Gladstone”, and prints in full, in English and in Latin, verse by Catullus, based on one of Sappho’s most famous poems, fragment 31.

Readers would know that it is based on Sappho, because the Gazette explains that, “The four Greek stanzas from which Catullus borrowed his Latin Sapphics have made the name of the Lesbian poetess famous for ever.” It is apparent that the poem is an expression of desire for a woman, and even although the poem as we have it in the newspaper necessarily has the male-authored Catullus version, which Gladstone has translated, the information is there that the poem was originally by Sappho, a woman.

Lesbian with its modern meaning does occur, through its associations with Sappho, before the twentieth century, but is still rare with that usage, especially in material which might be read by any literate person. As we move into and through the twentieth century, today’s sense of the word becomes more common. I shall look at the more recent history of the word in my next post, and how, for a time, it seemed that “Sapphist” and “Sapphic” might become the dominant terms.

Acknowledgements:

The Oxford English Dictionary. The entries on “lesbian”, as noun and adjective, like other entries, is viewable through the number on a Cumbria public library card.

Carlisle Journal, Friday 8 April, 1881, p.4

Westmorland Gazette, Saturday 30 January, 1847, p.4

Maryport Advertiser, Friday 8 October, 1869, p.6

Carlisle Patriot, Saturday 11 December, 1858, p.7

English Lakes Visitor, Saturday 25 June, 1887, p.7

Carlisle Journal, Friday 15 June, 1894, p.2

Westmorland Gazette, Saturday 23 February, 1861, p.3

Anne Carson. If Not, Winter: fragments of Sappho. London: Virago, 2003 Fragment 31 is on pp.62-3, and begins, “He seems to me equal to gods that man/whoever he is who opposite you/sits and listens close/to your sweet speaking”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lesbian

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sappho_31

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Carson

https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/moore-four-piece-composition-reclining-figure-t02054

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Maureen Colquhoun

Lesbian, part two

Lesbian, part one