Leah Leonora Leneman (3 March 1944 – 26 December 1999) was a popular historian and cookery writer. She wrote about Scottish history including the struggle for

women's suffrage Women's suffrage is the right of women to vote in elections. Beginning in the start of the 18th century, some people sought to change voting laws to allow women to vote. Liberal political parties would go on to grant women the right to vot ...

Biography

Leah Leneman was born in De Kalb, Illinois. Her father David was an artist from

Warsaw Warsaw ( pl, Warszawa, ), officially the Capital City of Warsaw,, abbreviation: ''m.st. Warszawa'' is the capital and largest city of Poland. The metropolis stands on the River Vistula in east-central Poland, and its population is officia ...

, her mother Lisa was a singer from

Vienna en, Viennese , iso_code = AT-9 , registration_plate = W , postal_code_type = Postal code , postal_code = , timezone = CET , utc_offset = +1 , timezone_DST ...

; both had escaped anti-semitic persecution in Europe by circuitous routes. They met in New York and were making their way to California when Leah Leneman inconveniently arrived midway. She grew up in

Hollywood, Los Angeles Hollywood is a neighborhood in the Central Los Angeles, central region of Los Angeles, California. Its name has come to be a metonymy, shorthand reference for the Cinema of the United States, U.S. film industry and the people associated with i ...

where David painted theatre and film studio sets, in a cosmopolitan multilingual household full of his artwork (like Chagall but more erotic) and beautifully painted furniture. Leneman was educated in a private English/Hebrew school and later at Hollywood High School, hanging round the studio gates with her camera and compiling a large album of personal snaps of the stars. She embarked on an acting career in the early 1960s, first at HB Studio in

Greenwich Village, New York Greenwich Village ( , , ) is a neighborhood on the west side of Lower Manhattan in New York City, bounded by 14th Street to the north, Broadway to the east, Houston Street to the south, and the Hudson River to the west. Greenwich Village ...

under William Hickey, then at the Tower Theatre in Islington, London. In London as a foreigner and as her acting career faltered, Leneman could only take jobs for which no British worker was available. Fortunately the city in the 1960s had labour shortages, plus a Jewish diaspora whose businessmen would vouch for her indispensability. She worked as an usherette at the Odeon, Leicester Square, and also as a reservation clerk at

BOAC British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) was the British state-owned airline created in 1939 by the merger of Imperial Airways and British Airways Ltd. It continued operating overseas services throughout World War II. After the passi ...

the forerunner to British Airways. This entitled her to inexpensive travel and she began to tour the world. By 1970 she was determined to live permanently in Britain and applied for citizenship: the police saw her passport full of stamps from India, Burma, Japan and beyond and were anxious to know if she was a communist. Thus Leneman became British, and was required to give up her US citizenship. Influenced by the

Vedanta ''Vedanta'' (; sa, वेदान्त, ), also ''Uttara Mīmāṃsā'', is one of the six (''āstika'') schools of Hindu philosophy. Literally meaning "end of the Vedas", Vedanta reflects ideas that emerged from, or were aligned with, t ...

movement of

Hinduism Hinduism () is an Indian religion or '' dharma'', a religious and universal order or way of life by which followers abide. As a religion, it is the world's third-largest, with over 1.2–1.35 billion followers, or 15–16% of the global p ...

, in 1963 Leneman became vegetarian and by 1970 a

vegan Veganism is the practice of abstaining from the use of animal product—particularly in diet—and an associated philosophy that rejects the commodity status of animals. An individual who follows the diet or philosophy is known as a vegan. Di ...

. From her many travels she often contributed to ''The Vegetarian'', the magazine of the Vegetarian Society UK, who offered her a job as assistant editor at their base in

Altrincham Altrincham ( , locally ) is a market town in Trafford, Greater Manchester, England, south of the River Mersey. It is southwest of Manchester city centre, southwest of Sale and east of Warrington. At the 2011 Census, it had a population o ...

. Her travels also piqued her interest in history and she began to study it seriously. In 1974 at her Altrincham flat, her dressing gown ignited from an unguarded gas fire, inflicting third degree burns to her lower body, and second-degree burns to her back. She spent three months lying on her belly in the Burns Unit at Wythenshawe Hospital. Leneman recovered by 1975 and passed enough

A-level The A-Level (Advanced Level) is a subject-based qualification conferred as part of the General Certificate of Education, as well as a school leaving qualification offered by the educational bodies in the United Kingdom and the educational aut ...

s to enroll that year, aged 31, as a student of history at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 15 ...

. She settled permanently in the city, and insofar as ethnicity is self-defined, this marks her transition to being Scottish. She also won her first contract for a cookery book based on her recipes, ''Slimming the Vegetarian Way'', and this was to be a life-long career strand. It was in tune with broader trends bringing vegetarianism to the mainstream, boosted by the popularity of cuisines such as Chinese which were less reliant on meat or dairy produce, and with their ingredients becoming more widely available, first in wholefood shops then the supermarkets. Her Ph.D. thesis became her first history book, ''Living in Atholl'', based on the archives at

Blair Atholl Blair Atholl (from the Scottish Gaelic: ''Blàr Athall'', originally ''Blàr Ath Fhodla'') is a village in Perthshire, Scotland, built about the confluence of the Rivers Tilt and Garry in one of the few areas of flat land in the midst of the Gr ...

castle, which documented a society transitional between highland and lowland ways of life against the backdrop of the Jacobite rebellions. (The multilingual Leneman learned Gaelic in order to better read her sources.) This led to a productive collaboration with Rowy Mitchison in the Department of Economic and Social History at Edinburgh. 17th and 18th century Presbyterian churches pried into their parishioners' sex lives and called them to account, while Scots lawyers argued over which relationships were marriages "by habit and repute" (entailing property rights and legitimate children) and which were fornication. ''Girls in Trouble'' and ''Sin in the City'' brought these aspects of

social history Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...

and

women's history Women's history is the study of the role that women have played in history and the methods required to do so. It includes the study of the history of the growth of woman's rights throughout recorded history, personal achievement over a period of ...

in Scotland to a wide audience. Divorce, separation from cruelty, and re-marriage were available to Scots of modest means in an era when it was exceptional in England and Ireland. In 1990 the National Museum of Scotland commissioned a series of mini-biographies, ''Scots Lives'', and Leneman wrote the first, on

Elsie Inglis Eliza Maud "Elsie" Inglis (16 August 1864 – 26 November 1917) was a Scottish doctor, surgeon, teacher, Women's suffrage, suffragist, and founder of the Scottish Women's Hospitals for Foreign Service, Scottish Women's Hospitals. She was the ...

. This expanded into ''In the Service of Life'' a full-length account of Inglis' remarkable career during the Great War, raising a series of mobile battlefront hospitals staffed entirely by women, conducting advanced surgery and enduring multiple adventures and privations across wartime Europe. Many of those volunteers were from a suffrage background or were politicised by their experience, and in ''A Guid Cause'' Leneman went on to document women's struggle for the vote in Scotland. Leneman never held a tenured academic position, preferring to live from short-term grant to grant. From 1976 her partner was Graham Sutton (born 1950), a public health doctor, who shared her aversion to marriage and children. In 1991 she developed breast cancer but remained symptom-free until 1997, travelling, publishing and learning scuba-diving. She then became seriously ill, only to enjoy a puzzling two-year remission and resume life and work. Her health again declined in late 1999 and she died at home in Edinburgh. She was survived by her partner and by her sister Helen Leneman (born 1945), a Cantor and notable Bible scholar.

Legacy

The Leah Leneman Prize is awarded annually to writers in Scotland for an essay on women's or gender history.

Publications

: Food & cookery: * ''Slimming the Vegetarian Way''. Thorsons 1980 republished as ''Slim the Vegetarian Way'' Thorsons 1993 * ''Vegan Cooking: The Compassionate Way of Eating''. Thorsons 1982 * ''The Amazing Avocado''. Thorsons 1984 * ''The International Tofu Cookery Book''. Routledge & Kegan Paul 1986 * ''Vegetarian Pitta Bread Recipes''. Thorsons 1987 * ''Soya Foods Cookery''. Routledge & Kegan Paul 1988 * ''The Single Vegan''. Thorsons 1989 republished as ''Vegan Cooking for One'' Thorsons 2000 * ''The Tofu Cookbook''. Thorsons 1992 * ''365 plus one Vegan Recipes''. Thorsons 1993 republished as ''Easy Vegan Cooking'' Thorsons 1998 * ''Vegan Cooking for Everyone''. Thorsons 2001 : History: * ''Living in Atholl: a social history of the estates, 1685–1785''. Edinburgh University Press 1986 * ''Perspectives in Scottish History: essays in honour of Rosalind Mitchison'' (editor). Aberdeen University Press 1988 * ''Sexuality and Social Control, Scotland 1660–1780'' with

Rosalind Mitchison Rosalind Mary Mitchison FRSE (11 April 1919 – 19 September 2002) was a 20th-century English historian and academic who specialised in Scottish social history. She was affectionately known as "Rowy" Mitchison. Life Rosalind Mary Wrong wa ...

. Basil Blackwell 1989 * ''Fit for Heroes: Land settlement in Scotland after World War I''. Aberdeen University Press 1989 * ''A Guid Cause: the Women's Suffrage Movement in Scotland''. Aberdeen University Press 1991 , Mercat Press 1995 * ''Martyrs in Our Midst: Dundee, Perth and the Forcible Feeding of Suffragettes''. Abertay Historical Society 1993 * ''In the Service of Life: the story of Elsie Inglis and the Scottish Women's Hospitals''. Mercat Press 1994 * Leah Leneman (1997) The awakened instinct: vegetarianism and the women's suffrage movement in Britain, Women's History Review, 6:2, 271-287 * ''Girls in Trouble : sexuality and social control in rural Scotland, 1660–1780'' with

. Scottish Cultural Press 1998 * ''Sin in the City : sexuality and social control in urban Scotland, 1660–1780'' with

. Scottish Cultural Press 1998 * ''Alienated Affections: The Scottish Experience of Divorce and Separation, 1684–1830''. Edinburgh University Press 1998 * ''The Scottish Suffragettes'' (series editor Iseabail Macleod). NMS Publishing 2000 * ''Promises, Promises: Marriage Litigation in Scotland 1698-1830''. NMS Enterprises 2003 : Other: * ''Consumer Feedback for the NHS: A Literature Review'' with Lyn Jones and Una Maclean. King Edward's Hospital Fund for London 1987

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Leneman, Leah 1944 births 1999 deaths 20th-century American people 20th-century American women American women historians Historians of vegetarianism Vegan cookbook writers