Matthew Parris, a onetime Conservative lawmaker and columnist, wrote in The Instances of London in 2018: “Labour might stay with individualists. Not lesbians, although. When she got here out she was sunk, and deselected, and completed.”
Maureen Morfydd Smith was born on Aug. 12, 1928, in Eastbourne, on the southern English coast, and raised by Elizabeth Smith, a single mom. She adopted her political allegiance on the age of 17, when she joined the Labour Get together. She was later a member of the left-wing Tribune Group of the get together. She was a graduate of the London College of Economics.
In 1948 she married Keith Colquhoun, a British journalist and novelist, with whom she had three kids; he died of prostate most cancers in 2010.
Maureen Colquhoun first ran for a seat in Parliament, from Tonbridge, a commuter city south of London, in 1970, however misplaced. From 1971 to 1974 she served as the one feminine city council member in Shoreham-by-Sea, on the English Channel. Her Conservative Get together adversaries on the council barred her serving on committees, referring to her as a “chatterbox.”
Colquhoun gained a seat within the Home of Commons in February 1974, an election that introduced Harold Wilson to energy as a Labour prime minister; on the time, lower than 30 p.c of the home’s 635 lawmakers had been girls.
A yr later, Colquhoun left her husband to maneuver in with Todd.
All through her parliamentary profession she displayed “an uncomfortable capability for upsetting equally my mates and my enemies,” as she wrote in her memoir, “A Girl within the Home” (1980).
Colquhoun campaigned in favor of the Intercourse Discrimination Act of 1975, which outlawed gender-based discrimination, and pushed for equal standing for women and men in operating public establishments.
Supply: NY Times