Mary Susan McIntosh

Mary Susan McIntosh
McIntosh at Nuffield College in 1974
Born	13 March 1936 Hampstead, North London
Died	5 January 2013(2013-01-05) (aged 76) Queen Square, London
Academic background
Alma mater	St Anne's College, Oxford University of Essex University of California, Berkeley
Thesis	'Marxist and Feminist Analysis of the Family (1991)
Academic work
Discipline	Sociology
Institutions	University of Leicester Borough Polytechnic University of Essex

Mary Susan McIntosh (13 March 1936 – 5 January 2013) was a British sociologist, feminist, political activist and campaigner for lesbian and gay rights in the UK.

Mary Susan McIntosh was born on 13 March 1936 in Hampstead, North London, to Helena Agnes (Jenny) Britton and her husband Albert William McIntosh, a Jedburgh-born businessman and graduate of the University of Edinburgh, who went on to become the first Professor of Marketing at the London Business School. Both parents were socialists, members of the 1917 Club and later the Communist Party. Her elder brother, Andrew Robert McIntosh, was a Labour politician and minister who was created a life peer, Lord McIntosh of Haringey, in 1982.

McIntosh was educated at High Wycombe School for Girls and St Anne's College, Oxford, where she read Philosophy, Politics and Economics. After graduating in 1958, she moved to the United States where she worked as a graduate student and teaching assistant in the Sociology Department at the University of California, Berkeley. In 1960, she was deported from the US for speaking out against the House Un-American Activities Committee.

On her return to the UK, McIntosh worked as a researcher for the Home Office from 1961 to 1963 before taking up the post of lecturer in Sociology at the University of Leicester from 1963 to 1968. She later worked at Borough Polytechnic from 1968 to 1972, and as a research fellow studying prostitution at Nuffield College, Oxford, from 1972 to 1975. She joined the University of Essex in 1975 as a lecturer in the Department of Sociology. She later became the first female head of the department, and remained at the University until she retired in 1996. Throughout her career she taught a wide range of courses covering criminology, theory, sociology, social policy, the family, gender studies, feminism and Marxism.