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.
In 2003 Lois joined the Conservatoire for Dance and Drama (which included Rada, Lamda, Bristol Old Vic and Rambert) as their first equality and diversity manager, where she remained for 12 years.
Her work there made established arts institutions question their assumptions, alter policies and open the door to disabled students. In 2016, she was made an OBE for her services to equality and diversity in higher education and the performing arts.
Lois and I met at a party held by the disability-led charity Shape Arts, where she later became a trustee. I had read her book Take Up Thy Bed and Walk – Death, Disability and Cure in Classic Fiction for Girls (2001), and when Frances Hodgson Burnett’s classic The Secret Garden was restaged I wrote a piece for the Guardian, heavily influenced by her work, condemning the revival of this tragic tale of life in a wheelchair.
We immediately became friends, often wandering around museums together muttering about the height at which paintings were hung, the broken lifts or the word “carer”, which Lois despised, being used to describe whoever was accompanying her, whether a friend or her husband, Colin.
An optimist by nature, she believed in the power of small stages to make big changes. On our frequent outings to a new exhibition, we rarely left without striking up conversation with the visitor services manager and agreeing to write in with recommendations for making their venue more accessible.
Lois was a constant activist. When she drove her adapted car, she would point out how low-traffic neighbourhoods were disadvantaging disabled drivers and bemoan the abuse of blue badges. An articulate, formidable talker, she was welcome on many boards and access committees, including at the Almeida theatre, Disability Arts in London and Channel 4.
A lifelong Guardian reader, she nevertheless joined a small group of women to protest against a 1991 billboard campaign by the paper at the time of Maastricht negotiations that depicted Britannia as a weakened, battered figure in a wheelchair – under the banner Women in Wheelchairs Are Powerful. The Guardian Is Wrong.
Lois was not a natural banner-waver, preferring to wield her pen than join a demonstration. Her voice – in person and in her writing – was strong but never loud. Measured words were her most powerful weapon, believing language could both reveal and change attitudes. On the board of the dance company Candoco (2003-10), she argued for it to move from being “integrated” to “inclusive”. It now describes itself as “the world’s foremost inclusive dance company”.
Her friend Joanna Owen remembers how Lois cut through “professional verbiage” when a charity organised a ladies’ day at the spinal injuries unit, now the London Spinal Cord Injury Centre, at the Royal National Orthopaedic hospital in Stanmore, north London, that included a programme of grooming, hygiene and toileting. Lois responded: “For fuck’s sake, we’re not poodles!” She and other disabled women took over the event, running an annual women’s day by and for women with spinal cord injuries for many years.
Born in south London, Lois was the younger child of Jewish parents, Hilda (nee Cohen), a homemaker, and Herbie Keith, a men’s clothier. As Herbie’s menswear business in Walworth Road expanded, they moved to Stanmore, where Lois went to Kingsbury county grammar school. In 1972, she graduated with a BEd in sociology and education from the University of Sussex. After a year out travelling in America, she returned to teach in the UK, first at primary then secondary school.
In 1976, she gained a master’s in sociology of education from the Institute of Education, University of London, and was later appointed head of English at Walworth school, close to where she grew up. Throughout her life she spoke of the challenges faced by the children there at a time when the National Front paraded through Camberwell.
Lois married Colin Schofield, an Australian engineer, in 1981. Their first child, Rachel, was born in 1982, and a second daughter, Miriam, in 1984. In 1985 Lois was injured in a traffic accident and became a permanent wheelchair user. She spent time in the spinal injuries unit in Stanmore, where Lois, a lifelong Labour supporter, shared a room with Margaret Tebbit, wife of the Conservative cabinet minister Norman Tebbit.
Lois’s employer, the Inner London Education Authority, tried to persuade her to retire at only 35. She argued fiercely against physical impairment limiting ambition. Eventually, in 1986 she was appointed to Ilea’s English Centre as an advisory teacher, then to North Westminster community school teaching English literature. A highly regarded teacher, she became education consultant for BBC Schools Television.
Five years ago she was diagnosed with cancer, treating this challenge much as she had all earlier ones by simply carrying on, cooking roast chicken dinners and making smoked-salmon sandwiches for her grateful grandchildren. She often quoted her mother, Hilda: “We have a duty to be as happy as we can.”
Lois is survived by Colin, Rachel and Miriam, and her grandchildren, Isiah, Nathaniel, Aliya and Naomi. Her brother, Stephen, died in 1982.
• Lois Anne Keith, writer, teacher and disability rights campaigner, born 4 January 1950; died 10 April 2023
