Tweedie, Jill Sheila

▪ 1994

      British journalist and author (b. May 22, 1936, Egypt—d. Nov. 12, 1993, London, England), was a columnist for The Guardian from 1969 to 1988 and on that paper's women's pages was one of the first to write about such feminist subjects as the treatment of women during childbirth, bride burning in India, the circumcision of women, and rape in marriage. Her writings served as an inspiration to a generation of women and in the 1970s and '80s helped shape the debate on the role of women. With humour, warmth, and sincerity, Tweedie explored what she and her readers had in common and made thousands of them feel that they knew her and were close friends. She was 1971's Woman Journalist of the Year, and her Letters from a Fainthearted Feminist (1982)—a compilation of columns, all of them letters from a housewife to a militantly feminist friend—became a BBC television series. Another of Tweedie's books was Eating Children (1993), the first volume of her autobiography, in which she recounted—not with self-pity but with wit—the mostly unhappy, unlucky early decades of her life. Her father was cruel and scornful, and she rebelled against him most of her life. After attending finishing school in Switzerland, Tweedie moved to Canada. There she went to work for a radio station, and at age 18 she married a Hungarian count. The first of their three children died at the age of five months, and when her marriage broke down, her husband abducted the other two and disappeared; she did not find them until they were adults. She had another son by her second husband, whom she had married in 1963, and she married for a third time in 1973, this time happily. At the time of her death, she was working on her second volume of autobiography, Frightening People.

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