Sue Innes; writer & journalist
Hyfler/Rosner
March 17, 2005
BYLINE: Zoe Fairbairns
AT A party held at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in
Edinburgh last October to celebrate The Biographical
Dictionary of Scottish Women, Sue Innes, historian, writer,
feminist activist and a co-editor of the dictionary,
acknowledged that celebration was a bit premature: the book
was not scheduled to be published for at least a year. "I'm
sure there will be more parties around the dictionary," she
said, "but I may not be able to attend them all. I wanted us
to have a party that I could attend."
Having thus acknowledged the brain tumour which (as everyone
in the room knew) was killing her, she moved off in her
wheelchair to chat to friends. Five months later, she died,
aged 56.
Born in 1948, Sue Innes attended Peterhead Academy and
Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen. Dropping out in 1967, she
went to the United States, where she became involved in
feminism and the campaign against the Vietnam War. She
returned to Scotland and in 1970, aged 22, began her first
year as an undergraduate at St Andrews University.
In this conservative environment, she created quite a stir,
with her first-hand knowledge of US radicalism and rock
music, and her flowing, soft- fabric hippie clothes which
she would swap at the drop of one of her Janis Joplin hats
for a formal evening gown (its elegance belying its almost
certain origins at a jumble sale) when some posh young man
wanted - as many did - to take her to a ball.
She studied English and Philosophy, and was a co-founder of
the first St Andrews women's liberation group. In 1971, when
the students' union Charities Committee decided to hold its
customary annual beauty contest for first-year female
students, she put herself forward as a protest candidate,
with a deliberately non-glamorous photograph and a manifesto
which declared that, since she was neither more nor less
beautiful than any other woman in the university, she would,
if elected, work for the abolition of beauty contests
everywhere. She did not win.
Graduating in 1974, she pursued a career of writing,
political campaigning, academic study, teaching and art
which included writing features for The Scotsman, going on
anti-nuclear marches and designing and illustrating the
feminist publisher Stramullion's 1984 edition of Ellen
Galford's novel Moll Cutpurse: her true history.
With her partner the playwright John Clifford she lived for
a while on a commune, and in 1980 and 1985 gave birth to
their daughters Rebecca and Katie. (By prior agreement, both
daughters were surnamed Innes; had they been sons, they
would have been given their father's name.)
Between 1988 and 1995 she was editor of the Living pages of
Scotland on Sunday, and wrote a weekly column in which she
focused on health, education and social issues, as well as
sexual politics.
Innes questioned everything, including her own assumptions
and methods. As both a journalist and an academic, she was
aware of the risks of glibness on the one hand, and pedantry
and obscurantism on the other; her writing trod a delicate
path that usually managed to avoid both. In her book Making
It Work: women, change and challenge in the 1990s (1995) she
wrote:
As campaigners, as feminists, we want to say, we do say,
women this, and women that. But to do so is to make
invisible the experiences of women to whom these particular
arguments do not apply. We cannot talk accurately of women
as a group or class; we also need to.
She described her 33-year relationship with John Clifford as
"at times tempestuous, but always loving". They shared
childcare, but still Innes felt frustrated by having to
compete in the workplace with people who either had no
domestic responsibilities, or who delegated them to others.
"It's only men who have careers," she said once. "Women have
lives."
Her passionate interest in women's lives led to her
editorial involvement in The Biographical Dictionary of
Scottish Women, and the 12 entries she was able to complete
(including the suffragist Eunice Murray and photographer
Franki Raffles) before her illness struck. She described in
a recent article in Etudes Ecossaises how the dictionary
seeks to move beyond the already well-known (Mary Queen of
Scots, Marie Stopes, Jennie Lee) and include "women who were
never eminent, but whose lives illuminate the world of
ordinary Scotswomen of their time and place, bondagers and
bookbinders, fishwives and housewives". She urged her
contributors to
consider the subject's whole life, rather than just her
claim to fame . . . recording what else she did alongside
what has led to her fragile place on the edge of the record.
The dictionary will be published in the spring of 2006 by
Edinburgh University Press, and will be dedicated to Sue
Innes.
Susan Katriona Innes, writer, journalist, historian and
activist: born Weymouth, Dorset 4 May 1948; Children's Page
Editor, The Scotsman 1988- 95; Editor, Living, Scotland on
Sunday 1996-97; Lecturer, Glasgow University 1999-2001;
reporter, Scottish Parliament Official Report 2001-02;
Research Fellow, Glasgow Caledonian University 2004; married
1980 John Clifford (two daughters); died Edinburgh 24
February 2005.