1945- 2024
by Miriam E David & Elaine Unterhalter
Debbie Epstein
Debbie Epstein was born 17 February 1945, in Pretoria, South Africa. She was Professor Emerita of Cultural Studies in Education at the University of Roehampton, London when she died on 29 July 2024, aged 79. When Miriam discussed her writing a piece for HOWL about 6 months before she died, she referred to her ‘intellectual self-portrait’ for a book entitled Leaders in Gender & Education in 2013. She thought it said it all. So we take her at her word and use the essay to illustrate her feminist activism in education.
Elaine Unterhalter and I also draw on an academic essay, written with Jane Kenway of Monash University, Australia, to highlight Debbie’s feminist contributions. Before she became an academic in 1990, Debbie spent 17 years as a schoolteacher ending up as Head of Infants in a large primary school in Hertfordshire. In her essay she says she is committed to ‘teaching in working class schools and to “progressive” ideas about teaching’. She states: ‘I wanted to make a difference to children’s life chances by making them fall in love with reading, creativity and playing with mathematical concepts’. She also observes that ‘… ethnic minority pupils started to arrive…This led me to develop an activist and pedagogic interest in how to work with teachers, support staff and pupils in my own and other schools.’
Debbie was finely attuned to the problems of racism having spent her childhood and teenage years in apartheid South Africa in a particular setting of anti-racist engagement. Her family was ‘part of the atheist, socialist/communist Jewish community, many of whom were later to be found amongst white anti-apartheid activists, and the tradition of argumentation was carried forward into my family of origin and beyond’.
When, in 1987, Debbie left school teaching and moved to Birmingham she worked as an Adviser to the LEA addressing Race Equality in predominantly white schools. Issues of whiteness and anti-racist strategies also informed her PhD at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), University of Birmingham. Her interest in popular culture fed into her subsequent work which was highly innovative addressing how different people responded to portrayals of sexualities.
Debbie’s work on sexuality and education has had the most impact, we think. She was ‘involved in feminist politics, through consciousness-raising and Women for Peace, in the National Union of Teachers through which I became (Women’s Convenor for the Socialist Teachers’ Alliance and, when the anti-homosexual Clause (later to become Section 28) of the Local Government Act 1988 was introduced, I became a leading member of the Stop the Clause Campaign in Birmingham and nationally.’
At this time she came out, fought against Section 28 and worked part-time as an administrator on the Open University, Gender and Education MA summer school course. This led her to edit Challenging Lesbian and Gay Inequalities in Education in 1994. This was one of the first books to address the links between sexuality and education. It provided opportunities for many to publish their work at a time when publishers did not necessarily welcome the topic.
By the time Debbie retired in 2020, the field of gender, sexuality and education was flourishing but it has come to involve intense disputes over trans-gender issues. Debbie assumed a gender-critical stance a few years prior to her retirement and engaged in public debate on the topic. For example, on 16 October 2018, she was amongst 54 signatories to a letter to The Guardian about ‘academics being harassed about their research into transgender issues’. They said ‘We maintain that it is not transphobic to investigate and analyse this area from a range of critical academic perspectives. We think this research is sorely needed, and urge the government to take the lead in protecting any such research from ideologically driven attack.’ (The Guardian letters, 2018, 16 October)
We don’t have a united view on her gender critical position, but we share a belief that, the significance of Debbie’s ground-breaking work of the 1990s and its legacy remains. In fact, many people who do not currently share her perspective have told us that her work on education and sexualities helped to open the way for them to pursue their own research in this field and that it widened the scope of the field considerably. We now briefly mention our individual views of Debbie.
Miriam first met Debbie when she was interviewed for a post as a Lecturer in Gender and Women’s Studies at the then London Institute of Education (IoE). Tangentially connected to Diana Leonard’s Centre for Research and Education on Gender (CREG), I became familiar with Debbie’s academic activism and her politics. I also slowly became familiar with her personal life. Eventually, she became involved with some of the feminist seders that I organised with Mary Davis and we became friends especially since she was just 6 months older than I.
Debbie had a rapid ascent through academe. Our friendship blossomed when she moved back to London. Debbie had become very involved with the founding of the Gender & Education Association (GEA) in 2002 and, separately, the journal Gender & Education. In her self-portrait, Debbie also mentions how she became involved in editing a book series with Mairtin Mac an Ghaill entitled Educating Boys, Learning Gender and that they ‘sought out books that engaged critical men’s studies in order to explore questions of masculinity in schools.’ Pam Alldred and I were fortunate to work with Debbie in publishing from our research on sex and relationships education in schools in 2007. She was immensely helpful, supportive, and patient as an editor, understanding the vagaries of academe.
Elaine also first met Debbie when she worked at the IoE. Although we knew some of the same people, in the niche world of South African exiles in the UK, this group was quite dispersed and factionalised, and our paths had not crossed. At IoE she was one of a handful of feminist academics who were outspoken, critical, intellectually and politically articulate, and fearless. Diana Leonard led this group, who were helping to build the scholarly field of gender and women’s studies in education. There was a lot of fun and mutual support, together with disagreements, and anxieties about job insecurity, and worries about how we did or did not fit into IoE.
Debbie and I joined a research team with Robert Morrell, Lebo Moletsane and Deevia Bhana at the University of KwaZulu Natal in South Africa looking at how gender was being approached in schools as the AIDS pandemic ravaged communities, in the days before antiretroviral drugs. Through these research visits to Durban and some township schools, Debbie talked us through her experiences with research, her sensitivity to some of the issues about homophobia and gender-based violence and some of the complexities of hierarchies, silence and popular culture. We wrote collaboratively.
A stand out one for me drew on students’ letters to their future selves, where Debbie’s attention to the interplay of the personal and the political was so illuminating. (Unterhalter, Epstein, Morrell, and Moletsane, 2004). We did not all agree, and the negotiation across these differences was a valuable learning for all of us. A central motif was how much Debbie loved being in South Africa. She wrote about this with an evocative elan and affection describing her experiences as ‘familiar stranger’ rejoicing in the positive changes after the end of apartheid, but mourning the extent of the legacy left of poverty and inequality.
Debbie herself notes that, towards the end of her career, she trained as a psychotherapist and turned to ‘theorisation of the psychosocial, drawing on psychoanalytic theory’. She observes that elite schools foster ‘narcissistic character styles and versions of masculinity’ and asks about the implications for society given that such schools produce those who rule over the rest of us. As always, she pulls no punches. Debbie leaves a powerful legacy in the minds and hearts of many in and beyond the academy. She moved from the segregated suburb in which she grew up into an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic, culture of oppositions in which cultures of gender and schooling became focal concerns. Here her boundary crossings between the personal and the political were a source of inspiration. She ended her self-portrait: ‘I now work part time as a professor and part time as a psychotherapist. In both cases, I wish to integrate the political, psychic and social not only in order to understand but also to contribute to change.’
References
Epstein, D (2013) A Feminist DNA: Exploring a Political/Intellectual History in Weaver-Hightower, M.B. and Skelton, C. Eds., Leaders in Gender and Education: Intellectual Self-Portraits, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, Sense Publishers, 71-89
The Guardian Letters 16 October 2018 Academics are being harassed over their research into transgender issues https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/oct/16/academics-are-being-harassed-over-their-research-into-transgender-issues
Unterhalter, E. Epstein, D., Morrell, R. and Moletsane, R. 2004, ‘Be yourself: Class, race, gender and sexuality in South African school children’s accounts of social relations’ Pedagogy, Culture and Society Vol. 12, No. 1, 53-72