LONDON – Shirley Williams, a trailblazing female lawmaker who tried to reshape a British political system dominated by two big parties, has died at 90.
Williams' party, the Liberal Democrats, said she “died peacefully in the early hours of Monday.” Born in 1930 to political scientist George Catlin and feminist writer Vera Brittain, Williams was elected to Parliament as a Labour lawmaker in 1964 after several failed attempts.
She served as education secretary in a Labour government in the 1970s — one of the country’s first female Cabinet ministers.
In 1981, believing the Labour party was veering too far to the left, she was one of the “Gang of Four” Labour politicians who split to form the centrist Social Democratic Party in an attempt to