My mother, Joan Perkin, who has died suddenly on her 89th birthday, was by any measure a remarkable woman. She was a working-class girl who left school at 16 and became a university professor 40 years later. She was also a socialist, a Christian and a campaigner for equality as well as a devoted mother.
Born in Stoke-on-Trent, to Henry Griffiths, a miner turned shopkeeper, and Jane (nee Walker), a governess, Joan was an ebullient child who read Greek myths under the bedclothes. Her mother’s death in 1938 and her father’s illness compelled her to leave school at 16, although her two older brothers had enjoyed a post-16 education.
Joan joined the civil service in 1942 and became Britain’s youngest National Insurance inspector aged 19. She married Harold Perkin in 1948; like her, he was a working-class idealist. Harold went on to Cambridge and later to eminence as a pioneering social historian. Joan supported him in his early career in Manchester, then threw herself into full-time motherhood and public service in Lancaster between the 1960s and 80s. A true “Guardian woman”, Joan founded a playgroup and a parent-teacher association, campaigned for the Labour party, and became a magistrate and a school and college governor, but always prioritising her family.
Harold never changed a nappy, but he didn’t doubt women’s intellectual abilities. When Joan decided to take A-levels and a degree, he almost burst with pride. She graduated at 53, and powered on to publish It’s Never Too Late, a guide for women returning to education. In 1984 Joan accompanied Harold to Northwestern University, Chicago, which embraced her late-blossoming talents. She became a history professor in her own right, producing three well reviewed books, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England (1989), Victorian Women (1993) and The Merry Duchess (2002).
Friends and family remember her appetite for life, the heated discussions, the exuberant parties, the red lipstick, hearty laugh, empathic smile, her genius for friendship, her affinity with young people, the way complete strangers would confide in her, her astonishing 7/7 walk across London, having escaped the Aldgate bomb.
She was wryly delighted to hear shortly before her death that she had been awarded the British Empire Medal. My brother, Julian, and I will receive it on her behalf later this year.
Harold died in 2004. She is survived by Julian and me, and by three grandchildren, Nathaniel, Hannah and Fabio.
