Beatrix Campbell
| Beatrix Campbell | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Mary Lorimer Beatrix Barnes 3 February 1947 Carlisle |
| Residence | United Kingdom |
| Nationality | British |
| Political party |
Green Party Communist (before 1989) |
| Movement | Marxist feminism |
Mary Lorimer Beatrix Campbell, OBE (née Barnes; born 3 February 1947) is an English writer and activist who has written for a number of publications since the early 1970s. Her books include Wigan Pier Revisited (1984), Goliath: Britain's Dangerous Places (1993) and Diana, Princess of Wales: How Sexual Politics Shook the Monarchy (1998). She has also made films, including Listen to the Children (1990), a documentary about child abuse.
Campbell was born in Carlisle, England. She was educated at Harraby Secondary Modern School and Carlisle and County High School for Girls. Her parents, Jim and Catherine Barnes, were Communist Party members. She had two younger siblings.
Beatrix Barnes took the name Beatrix Campbell on her marriage to Bobby Campbell, a former Glasgow shipyard fitter and fiddle player, who was part of the renaissance of radical politics and music in Scotland in the early 1960s. They met in London at the end of 1966 and lived in a commune in Tower Hamlets. They divorced in 1978 but remained close friends until his death in 1998. Bobby encouraged Beatrix to get a job in journalism, and she joined him at the communist daily The Morning Star, formerly The Daily Worker, where he was the boxing correspondent. She became a sub-editor and later a reporter. She became deeply committed to the women's liberation movement in 1970, and from that time was oriented towards women and women's issues.
Campbell was fourteen when, in 1961, she took part in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament's march from Aldermaston to London in protest against nuclear weapons, and was still a teenager when she joined the Communist Party. At that time the party was deeply divided over its relationship with the Soviet Union. She belonged to the party's anti-Stalinist wing that opposed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. In London, she and Bobby Campbell joined a dissident group within the Communist Party founded by university lecturer Bill Warren that produced a critique of both Stalinism and the party's economic policy.
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