Betty Lockwood, Baroness Lockwood

Betty Lockwood, Baroness Lockwood (22 January 1924 – 29 April 2019) was a Labour Party activist. She was heavily involved in promoting equal opportunities for women on a national and international level.

Biography Born in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, the daughter of Arthur Lockwood, a coal miner, Betty Lockwood followed an unconventional route into politics. She left Eastborough Girls School at 14, then continued her studies at night school. With the support of a Mary Macarthur scholarship for working women, she read economics and politics at Ruskin College in Oxford.

After attending university she became active in the Labour Party as regional women's organiser for Yorkshire, then moved to London as women's officer. She campaigned for equal pay and was instrumental in the creation of the Equal Pay Act 1970.

From 1975–83 she served as the first chair of the Equal Opportunities Commission and was chair of the European Advisory Committee on Equal Opportunities for Women and Men (1982–83). On 27 February 1978 she was elevated to a life peerage as Baroness Lockwood, of Dewsbury in the County of West Yorkshire. She sat in the House of Lords until her retirement on 18 May 2017.

Lockwood died on 29 April 2019.

She was chair of the National Coal Mining Museum for England. She received four honorary doctorates and was President of the Yorkshire Arthritis Research Campaign. She was also a member of Soroptimist International, a group working to advance the status of women and was a patron of the Born in Bradford research project. She listed her hobbies as enjoying the Yorkshire Dales and opera.

Family She married Lieutenant-Colonel Cedric Hall in 1978. He died in 1988.