Overlooked No More: Maureen Colquhoun, Pathbreaking Politician Waylaid by Bias
nytimes.comThis article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
LONDON — As a determined pioneer of women’s rights, Maureen Colquhoun boldly drew attention to the nascent campaign for feminist change in Britain’s male-dominated Parliament in the 1970s.
Once, for instance, she took a group of sex workers with her to a committee room at the Houses of Parliament in her ground-breaking fight to secure for them a new status that would protect them from prosecution.
She was also the first member to ask the speaker of the lower house to address her as Ms., not Mrs.; he promised to meet her request by slurring his pronunciation of the former to make it sound more like the latter.
