Some of her concerns look rather silly now. And she failed utterly, in a grand display of public humiliation.
She didn’t campaign for change, she campaigned for stasis. She spent 37 years organising letter-writing campaigns in an effort to halt the arrival of what she called ‘the permissive society’, horrified as she was by the displays of sex and violence that suddenly appeared on British television screens from the 1960s onwards.Ī contemporary of hers described her as ‘a little Canute, exhorting the waves of moral turpitude to retreat’. Born in 1910, she never let go of her Edwardian sensibilities, even as the society she knew collapsed around her ears. The much ridiculed campaigner Mary Whitehouse is one of history’s losers.
