Nina Fishman
Nina Fishman (26 May 1946 – 5 December 2009) was an
political activist
.
Fishman was born in
high school in Boulder, although she lived in Britain for a year in 1962 while her father held a visiting fellowship at the University of Cambridge
.
Fishman returned to Britain to read economics at the
British Communist Party and the trade unions
between 1933 and 1945.
In the 1970s, Fishman was a member of the British and Irish Communist Organisation, where she often wrote under the name Nina Stead.[1] In 1980 she was a supporter of Neil Kinnock, advocating a greater reliance on trade unionism in a televised debate on divisions in the Labour Party.[2]
She gained a teaching job at
Polytechnic of Central London in 1990. The polytechnic became the University of Westminster in 1992. She taught there until taking early retirement in 2007, serving from 2004 as Professor of Industrial and Labour History. Following her retirement she moved to Swansea, becoming an honorary research professor at Swansea University. In the 1990s, Fishman was one of several prominent members of Common Voice, a British group that advocated voting reform.[3]
She spent the last decade of her life researching a biography of
general secretary of the National Union of Mineworkers
from 1946 to 1959. She died of cancer at the age of 63. Her will left money for the Fishman Bursary at the University of Keele.
Publications
- The British Communist Party and the Trade Unions, 1933–45, Aldershot: Scolar Press (1995)
- Opening the Books: Essays on the Cultural and Social History of the British Communist Party, edited by E. J. Hobsbawm, Geoff Andrews, etc., and Nina Fishman (1995)
- Miners, Unions and Politics, 1910–47, by Alan Campbell, etc., Nina Fishman, and David Howell (1996)
- British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics: The Post-war Compromise, 1945–64, edited by Alan Campbell, Nina Fishman, and John McIlroy (1999)
- British Trade Unions and Industrial Politics: The High Tide of Trade Unionism, 1964–79, edited by John McIlroy, Nina Fishman, and Alan Campbell (1999)
- In Search of Social Democracy: Responses to Crisis and Modernisation, edited by John Callaghan, Nina Fishman, Ben Jackson, and Martin McIvor (2009)
- Arthur Horner: A Political Biography, by Nina Fishman (2010), Volume 1 1894–1944, Volume 2 1944–1968. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Footnotes
- ^ Paul Mercer,
Directory of British political organisations 1994. Longman, 1994, ISBN 0-582-23729-7(pp.49, 126).
- ^ Future of the Labour party | Labour Party | Neil Kinnock | Thames Debate | 1980, retrieved 27 September 2019
- ^ Nina Fishman and others, "Letters", The Guardian, 2 January 1992, p18. Other signatories of the letter included Gerald Aylmer, Beatrix Campbell, John Lloyd, Dick Pountain, and David Marquand.
References
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