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Silvia Rodgers, Baroness Rodgers of Quarry Bank, FRSL (néeSzulman; 3 March 1928 – 8 October 2006), was a German-British writer and political activist. She was married to the politician Bill Rodgers.
Rodgers was born in Wedding (Berlin) to working-class Jewish parents.[1] Her parents were members of the Communist Party of Germany.[2][3] Her mother insisted that Silvia not participate in the Nazi salute at school.[3] In an afterword to her memoir, Rodgers wrote "When I was ten and still in Berlin, I had that feeling that there was nothing I could not do".[4]
Silvia Szulman and Bill Rodgers married in 1955.[5] The couple had three daughters: Rachel, Lucy and Juliet.[1]
Rodgers influenced her husband's political career, particularly his decision to leave the Labour Party and set up the Social Democratic Party.[1] Bill Rodgers said that most of the child-rearing fell to Silvia and that he was neglectful; she also worked as a dentist when he was first in parliament as they were not well-off.[6] She was noted as a political hostess.[1][5]
Rodgers described herself as feeling like an outsider, dislocated and marginal.[1][4]
Rodgers completed a PhD in anthropology at Oxford, on the subject of the rituals of ship-launching: The symbolism of ship launching in the Royal Navy (1983).[1]
"Women's space in a men's house: the British House of Commons" (1981), in Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps, ed. Ardener, S
A memoir, Red Saint, Pink Daughter: a communist childhood in Berlin and London (1996), joint winner of the Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Prize for Non-Fiction (1997)[7][8][9]
The Politician's Wife: life with Bill Rodgers (2007)
