The writer, teacher and disability rights campaigner Lois Keith, who has died aged 73, used her words and first-hand experience as a wheelchair user to challenge the barriers faced by disabled women.
Lois began to write about attitudes towards disability in the 1990s, part of a growing band of disabled women, including Jane (now Lady) Campbell, Jenny Morris, and Rosalie (now Lady) Wilkins, who were spearheading change in the years before the Disability Discrimination Act was passed.
In 1994, she gathered new voices in a pioneering anthology Mustn’t Grumble: Writing By Disabled Women, which won the Mind Book of the Year/Allen Lane award. It remained one of her proudest achievements and is still used in gender studies and disability courses worldwide. Her novels A Different Life (1997, for young adults) and Out of Place (2003) both championed positive images of disability. […]
First published in The Guardian on 11 May 2023. Read online here.
Photo: Lois Keith in 2019 at an exhibition in Bexhill-on-Sea, East Sussex, that featured a photograph of a 1991 protest against the Guardian’s portrayal of Britannia as a weak figure in a wheelchair [The Guardian]