Cynthia Cockburn

Cynthia Kay Cockburn (née Ellis; 24 July 1934 – 12 September 2019) was a British academic, feminist, and peace activist.

Cynthia Kay Ellis was born in Barrow upon Soar, a village in rural Leicestershire, to father Shirley Ellis and mother Constance (née King). She attended Malvern St James Girls School.

Cockburn was a researcher in the fields of gender, war and peace-making, labour processes and trade unionism, and refugees. She was active in the international women's peace movement.

Cockburn was a visiting professor in the Department of Sociology at City University London and honorary professor in the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender at the University of Warwick.

An active antimilitarist, she was involved in a number of peace and anti-war organisations. She visited the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp between 1981 and 2000. In 1981, she was part of a group of women who founded Women Against War in the Gulf, and in response to the Bosnian Yugoslav wars, the group evolved to become Women Against War Crime. From 1993, they began calling the group Women in Black in support of other international peace movement efforts, specifically those taking place in Israel, Italy, and Yugoslavia. She was also involved with Women Against Fundamentalism, the European Forum of Socialist Feminists, and was a member of the Women's International League for Peace & Freedom.

As both an academic and activist, Cockburn presented talks at a number of conferences. In May 2017, she was honoured at the Gender and Peace Conference in Istanbul, and presented the keynote address.

Cockburn was selected to be featured in the British Library project, 'Sisterhood and After', an oral history archive of feminists active in the 1970–1980s.

On 14 October 2017, the journal Feminist Review celebrated Cockburn's contribution to feminist scholarship by co-hosting an event with the SOAS Centre for Gender Studies and provided free access to a number of her published articles.