Obituary
Leonora Lloyd -
"She grabbed life by the scruff of its neck"
Leonora Lloyd’s death on January 23 2002 at the young age of 61 has deprived the labour movement of a doughty fighter for socialism, for workers rights, for the environment and above all for a woman’s right to control her fertility. She is mourned by many friends and comrades and by her family particularly her children Vanessa and Stephen and her sister Tessa.
Leonora died only 18 days after the celebration of her father Charlie van Gelderen’s life which took place on January 5 (see facing page), following his death in October last year.
She was determined to speak there to celebrate his contribution to the movement, though she was obviously fighting to overcome the pain her illness brought.
All her life she was a fighter. She grew up in a political household, with meetings and discussions taking place all around her. She joined the Labour League of Youth in 1954 at the age of 14 and the Socialist Labour League in the late 1950s. From those teenage years she was always involved in one – or often many things – including the Aldermarston marches and many anti apartheid rallies.
Her packed funeral at Hither Green Cemetery on February 1 saw many tributes from friends, family and colleagues giving witness to the many facets of her contribution to the struggle for a better world.
Former General Secretary of the Labour Party, Jim Mortimer saluted the work she did as President of the London Regional Council of MSF. From the Socialist Campaign Group, Jeremy Corbyn recalled her tireless lobbying of MPs to defend abortion rights, and remembered how Labour MP Jo Richardson, when asked a question on an aspect of women’s rights to which she didn’t immediately know the answer, would often say "I must ask Leonora".
Dr Wendy Savage from Doctors for Choice, and Michelle Carlyle who knew her from her involvement in the abortion struggle spoke with strong emotion about her strong personality and irreplaceable commitment.
Sue Lukes and Graham Bash from the Labour Briefing Editorial Board also contributed to the picture. Leonora became involved in Briefing in 1991 and for some years was Co-Chair of its Editorial Board.
Former Labour Party NEC member Liz Davies, now Chair of the Socialist Alliance, spoke of Leonora’s fight to win the safe Tory seat of Hendon South for Labour in the 1992 General Election. Liz argued that had Leonora won the seat, she would have been one of the very few MPs, along with Jeremy Corbyn, who would have stuck to her principles through thick and thin.
Leonora’s younger sister, Tessa van Gelderen acted as Mistress of Ceremonies, threading together the other contributions with powerful recollections of her own. The phrase that I use to title this article comes from one of those cameos.
Each speaker not only recalled Leonora’s political contribution and beliefs but reminded us of many other things that made her unique – her endless knitting, her ever present crossword puzzles, the deep joy that her two grandchildren Lucy and Thea gave her.
But for many of us, it is for her contribution to the struggle for women’s liberation that Leonora will be most remembered.
She was one of the founders of Socialist Woman, a magazine launched by the International Marxist Group in 1969 as the voice for a network of Socialist Women’s’ groups. Socialist Woman predated the foundation of the Women’s’ Liberation Movement in Britain, launched at a conference at Ruskin in 1970. Even before this, Leonora had been involved in 1968 in the setting up of NJACCWER, the Joint Action Campaign Committee for Women’s Equal Rights.
NJACCWER was founded from a meeting in the House of Commons, organised by one of the officials involved in the famous Ford’s machinists’ strike of 1968. While the Ford strike was not formally about equal pay, it was certainly concerned with the principle of equal pay for work of equal value – the principle that would be central to the 1970 Equal Pay Act introduced by Barbara Castle.
The Ford strike itself was part of a broader rank and file movement around equal pay, which also involved the setting up of an equal pay committee in Scotland for example.
NJACCWER launched a charter which took up issues beyond the Equal Pay question – also calling for equality of opportunity for women in employment, education and public life, promising to "keep on fighting until the women of this country have full rights in every sphere".
In practice however, through its 18 months of real activity it campaigned only for Equal Pay. The highlight of its existence was the Equal Pay demonstration on 18 May 1969, attended by 2000 women from all over Britain.
There can be no doubt that the work of NJACCWER was central to ensuring that the 1970 Act was introduced and passed. However, a militant campaign was also needed to ensure that the legislation was put into practice.
Employers tried to reorganise to get round the limited terms of the act, so that there was no "like" work between women and men that could be compared.
Unfortunately NJACCWER failed to live up to this challenge, which is why subsequently the IMG, together with others, was instrumental in pushing the Working Women’s Charter campaign – which continued to organise around the same issues but also broadened out to take up questions such as abortion and contraception.
Looking back through the pages of Socialist Woman in preparing to write this obituary reminded me of what a vital role socialist women played in the creation of the broader women’s movement in this country. It also underlined how quickly our ideas changed in a political period as rich as those years which followed in the wake of the massive upheavals of 1968.
Leonora’s first contributions to Socialist Woman were mainly on the question of women’s low and unequal pay, though she also wrote a number of reviews of books and films – such as the influential series of programmes on the history of the suffragettes, Shoulder to Shoulder.
Of course the particular role in which Leonora’s contribution was most unique was in her enormous contribution to the creation and sustaining of the National Abortion Campaign, founded in 1975.
Limited abortion law reform had taken place in 1967, but was to suffer a series of sustained attacks through the mid-70s. A series of MPs, backed by the extremely well organised anti-abortion lobby funded and organised by the Catholic Church, launched assault after assault on the limited rights we had won through that legislation.
In between battling off James White, Bill Benyon, James Corrie and Victoria Gillick, pro-choice campaigners also attempted to fight against the restrictions of the 67 Act itself. While a huge step forward, the Act still leaves women dependent on the approval of two doctors to get an abortion and so exercise our right to control our bodies and therefore our lives.
We campaigned against the inequity that existed and still exists today in provision in different parts of the country because of the existence of a ‘conscience’ clause that meant that doctors could refuse to perform or consent to the performing of abortions.
We fought for the Labour Party to see abortion as a political issue rather than one on which individual MPs should be allowed to defy party policy by voting against women’s rights.
In all of this and more Leonora was so often at the centre. She worked full time for NAC from 1983-93, but even when her paid employment was elsewhere, the fight for abortion rights was at the centre of her beliefs and her activity.
She spoke at countless meetings, in particular understanding the importance of winning support from the trade unions for a woman’s right to choose. – the Women’s TUC, for example, passing a resolution in support of abortion and contraception on demand as far back as 1975.
The huge demonstrations that NAC organised in opposition to each successive attempt to restrict our rights would not have been possible without the huge support we generated amongst the ranks of trade union women.
For many women, this battle to defend and extend women’s control over our fertility was the first contact with the ideas of the women’s liberation movement. This fight also challenged the idea that the role of trade unions was only to take up issues of pay and conditions – rather than to fight on all the issues that affect working people – and working class women in particular.
At the same time as playing a high profile, leadership role, no task was too small for Leonora. She went from public debates with anti-abortionists under the bright lights of the TV cameras, back to the chaotic NAC office in Wesley House to get out yet another mailing to supporters often late at night.
She was everywhere, inspiring others with her conviction that without control over our bodies, women would never have control over our lives.
One contribution that she was particularly proud of was the Schools Kit that she developed for NAC. It was vital to her that younger women should not suffer the return to the backstreets that women who had grown up before the 67 Act had lived through – at the cost of so many lives.
Leonora also understood that the battle for abortion rights was an international struggle. Back when NAC was launched in 1975, women in France active in MLAC (Mouvement pour la Liberté de L’avortment et de la contraception – Movement for free abortion and contraception) hosted the first international conference on abortion, contraception and sterilisation attended by women from across Europe, from the United States and from Latin America.
This took place at a time when the Supreme Court in Germany had just thrown out a more advanced abortion law than that in place at the time, and when abortion clinics in Italy were under attack from the right.
The conference led to greater co-ordination of battles across Europe in particular – with for example an international solidarity demonstration being organised in Italy in October 1975. In 1978, Leonora organised for NAC to host the second conference here in Britain in June of that year.
This internationalism was to continue to be an important thread of her political activity through the years ahead.
Many of the restrictions on women’s rights that motivated Leonora to devote so much of her life to the fight for socialist feminist ideas in the 1970s have not been won today. On the day of her funeral, it was reported in the press that the anti-abortionists intend to launch an attack on the ‘morning after pill’, using medical advances that have lowered the age of "viability" of the foetus to restrict our rights still further.
As we report elsewhere, women’s rights to control our fertility are under assault in Portugal and in Ireland, with the forthcoming referendum on March 6. One way we can pay tribute to Leonora is to step up our own commitment to those battles.
There will be a commemoration of Leonora’s life later in the year.