Mo Mowlam - Early Life

Early Life

Mowlam was born at 43 King Street, Watford, Hertfordshire, England, the middle of three children of Tina and Frank, but grew up in Coventry, where her father rose to become Coventry's assistant postmaster. She would later be awarded the Freedom of the City in 1999. She was the only one of the family's three children to pass the 11-plus exam. She started at Chiswick Girls' grammar school in West London, then moved to Coundon Court School in Coventry, which, at the time, was one of the first comprehensive schools in the country. She then studied at Trevelyan College, Durham University, reading sociology and anthropology. She joined the Labour Party in her first year. She worked for then-Labour MP Tony Benn in London and American writer Alvin Toffler in New York, moving to the United States with her then-boyfriend and studying for a PhD in political science at the University of Iowa on the effects of the Swiss system of referenda.

Mowlam was a lecturer in the Political Science Department at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in 1977 and at Florida State University in Tallahassee from 1977 to 1979. During her time in Tallahassee, her apartment was broken into by someone who she suspected was Ted Bundy, a serial killer and rapist who murdered thirty-five young women and attacked several others.

Mowlam returned to England in 1979 to take up an appointment at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1981, she organised a series of alternative lectures to the Reith lectures being given that year by Laurence Martin, the university's vice chancellor. These were published as Debate On Disarmament, with their proceeds going to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.