Fran Broady, 1938-2014

Submitted by AWL on 20 May, 2014 - 4:22
Fran Broady

Fran Broady, who was a leading member of our organisation in the 1970s, died on 18 May at the age of 75.

Fran met us in 1970, when we were an opposition tendency in IS (forerunner of, but very much more open than, today's SWP). The IS/SWP expelled our tendency in December 1971, because of our campaign against the switch of line to "No to the Common Market" from advocating European workers' unity. Fran chose our small expelled group without hesitation.

I remember a conversation with a student member of another left group in 1972, when we were labouring to get a circulation for our new, small, primitively-produced newspaper.

He liked the paper because it combined activist reporting with more theoretical articles, obviously (he said) by well-read writers. The article he pointed to was one by Fran ("Slaves of the slaves", Workers' Fight 11, 23/07/72).

"In the family, the man is the boss and the woman the worker... We have a long struggle ahead of us to establish our rights as human beings. Laws alone will never do that. We will have to do it ourselves...

"It is not enough to confine ourselves to fighting for women's rights. We must take up our place in the working class and fight on all fronts, the economic, the political, and the ideological".

Yet Fran's formal education had been limited. She was working in a factory when she first met us; she later worked in other jobs, including for many years for Manchester City Council in a women's hostel.

I remember her telling me about her first laborious effort to read the Communist Manifesto. The unfamiliar word "proletarians" was in the first section heading. Fran looked it up in a dictionary: "Someone who owns nothing but their children".

She quickly educated herself in Marxism. Characteristic, also, was her first excursion to sell a socialist newspaper (Socialist Worker, it would have been). She sold some copies at a factory gate, but had one left as she travelled home. So she buttonholed the bus driver and sold it to him.

She was active in the lively women's movement of the early 1970s, and part of setting up one of the first women's refuges in Britain, in Manchester in 1972.

Her leaning was to ebullient polemic rather than subtle tactics. In 1976, this made her part of a dispute inside the women's fraction of our organisation (then called I-CL), with Fran and Marian Mound regarding the others (Pat Longman, Michelle Ryan, Juliet Ash) as tending to political self-effacement in the name of movement-building, and the others regarding Fran and Marian as abstractly declamatory.

The dispute was transcended (with no dead-end aftermath) by the "transitional slogan" of a working-class-based women's movement.

Fran's domestic life was not smooth. Her husband Dave Broady, for whom I wrote an obituary in Solidarity just last month, was an angry, unsettled character.

Eventually Fran drifted out of activity. But her ideas, and her special admiration for Frederick Engels above other Marxist writers, didn't change. She was active in the union; read our paper; donated money from time to time.

Her last years, after retiring from work, were difficult. Her health was poor: hypothyroidism, diabetes, arthritis. Her son David died suddenly in 2012, at the age of 47. Her ex-husband Dave was jailed for manslaughter in 2008, and then died in unclear circumstances. Relations with her daughters Karen and Rachel were not easy.

In January 2014, Fran collapsed at home and was taken to hospital and diagnosed with pneumonia. At first she mended well: she was interested and pleased when I took her a copy of our new book of cartoons from the US socialist press, 1930s to 1950s. But after the pneumonia was cured, she remained weak and declined towards death.

We send our condolences to Fran's family and friends, and especially to her daughter Karen who works with AWL in Manchester.



Fran is the second from the left, at the front, at this meeting of the Workers' Fight and Workers' Power National Committees to form a National Committee of a new organisation, the International-Communist League, a forerunner of AWL, in December 1975.

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