Mary Whitehouse

For the comedy show, see The Mary Whitehouse Experience. For the television film with Julie Walters, see Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story.

Mary Whitehouse
CBE
Whitehouse in 1981
Born
Constance Mary Hutcheson

(1910-06-13)13 June 1910
Nuneaton, Warwickshire, England
Died23 November 2001(2001-11-23) (aged 91)
Colchester, Essex, England
EducationChester City Grammar School
Alma materCheshire County Teacher Training College
OrganisationNational Viewers' and Listeners' Association
Movement
Spouse
Ernest Raymond Whitehouse
​
​
(m. 1940; died 2000)​
Children5[1]

Constance Mary Whitehouse CBE (née Hutcheson; 13 June 1910 – 23 November 2001)[2] was a British teacher and conservative activist. She campaigned against social liberalism and the mainstream British media, both of which she accused of encouraging a more permissive society. She was the founder and first president of the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, through which she led a longstanding campaign against the BBC. A hard-line social conservative, she was termed a reactionary by her socially liberal opponents. Her motivation derived from her Christian beliefs, her aversion to the rapid social and political changes in British society of the 1960s, and her work as a teacher of sex education.[3]

Whitehouse became an art teacher, at the same time becoming involved in evangelical Christian groups such as the Student Christian Movement (which became increasingly more liberal leading up to, and after, a 1928 split with the Universities and Colleges Christian Fellowship) and Moral Re-Armament. She became a public figure via the Clean-Up TV pressure group, established in 1964, in which she was the most prominent figure. The following year she founded the National Viewers' and Listeners' Association, using it as a platform to criticise the BBC for what she perceived as a lack of accountability and excessive use of bad language and portrayals of sex and violence in its programmes. During the 1970s she broadened her activities and was a leading figure in the Nationwide Festival of Light, a Christian campaign that gained mass support for a period. She initiated a successful private prosecution against Gay News on the grounds of blasphemous libel, the first such case for more than 50 years. Another private prosecution was against the director of the play The Romans in Britain, which had been performed at the National Theatre.

Whitehouse's campaigns continue to divide opinion. Her critics have accused her of being a highly censorious, bigoted figure, and her traditional moral convictions brought her into direct conflict with advocates of the sexual revolution, feminism, children's rights, and LGBT rights. Others see her more positively and believe she was attempting to halt a decline in Britain's moral standards. According to Ben Thompson, the editor of an anthology of Whitehouse-related letters published in 2012, "From [...] feminist anti-pornography campaigns to the executive naming and shaming strategies of UK Uncut, her ideological and tactical influence has been discernible in all sorts of unexpected places in recent years."[4]

  1. ^ Elizabeth Udall "Mary Whitehouse: 'Sometimes I denied she was my mother'", Archived 29 June 2011 at the Wayback Machine The Daily Telegraph, 27 May 2008
  2. ^ "Mary Whitehouse obituary". The Guardian. 23 November 2001. Retrieved 21 November 2022.
  3. ^ "Mary Whitehouse, 91; Led British TV Cleanup". Los Angeles Times. 26 November 2001. Archived from the original on 6 March 2016. Retrieved 5 January 2016.
  4. ^ Ben Thompson "Ban this filth!" Archived 12 November 2012 at the Wayback Machine, Financial Times, 9 November 2012. This article is a reprint of the introduction to Ben Thompson (ed.) Ban This Filth!: Letters From the Mary Whitehouse Archive, London: Faber & Faber, 2012 ISBN 978-0571281497