My friend Veronica Beechey, who has died aged 75, was a pioneering feminist sociologist and an influential patients’ rights advocate.
Veronica was appointed lecturer in sociology at Warwick University in 1973, as the women’s liberation movement was gathering strength. Inspired by this, she began researching and writing about the position of women in modern Britain. It was pathbreaking work, carried on partly at Warwick but also in one of the many feminist study groups springing up across the country. Research on women was almost non-existent in UK universities; women wanting to learn about female lives and history had to create their own intellectual milieux. I met Veronica in the Political Economy of Women Group, based in and around London. I remember well her intellectual ardour and incisiveness.
In 1983 she was recruited by the Open University to develop a women’s studies course. Here she played a key role, working with an interdisciplinary team of feminist scholars to produce a landmark course. Her OU publications and other books, still available, fully demonstrate her erudition, analytical sophistication and abiding commitment to gender equality.
Veronica was born in Hastings and brought up in Battle, Sussex, the daughter of Benjamin Beechey, an accountant, and his wife, Marjorie (nee Inskipp), who had worked in the Post Office until her marriage barred her from the civil service.
Veronica’s passion for social justice was evident early on. After attending Ashford School for Girls and then Hastings College, she taught at a Tehran school for poor and vulnerable children. On returning to the UK she signed up for sociology at the newly opened Essex University. She soon got caught up in student politics and the anti-Vietnam movement. Advised to do less politicking and more studying, she went on campaigning and achieved a first in her degree. An Oxford doctorate and teaching stints in American universities followed; then a lectureship in sociology at the University of Warwick.
Throughout the 1980s, as her intellectual life flourished, Veronica became ill with acute myalgic encephalomyelitis, and in 1990 she took medical retirement from the OU. Yet she retained campaigning energies. She was a patient at the University College London hospital, where she became a leading advocate of patients’ rights, serving three terms as patient governor between 2005 and 2019, and acting as the hospital council’s first lead governor. She served on many influential committees and founded a High Quality Patient Care Group, representing patients and reporting to the board of directors, which she chaired for six years. Even as her own health failed, she published articles criticising the marketisation of the NHS and its impact on patient care. Some of my final, and fondest, memories are of her raising hell over patient transport being outsourced.
Veronica was also a passionate and talented gardener, seldom happier than spring-planning her beautiful garden.
She is survived by her sister, Hilary Beechey, and 11 nieces and nephews. Her brothers, Terry and Robin, predeceased her.
