My mother, Rosemary Fost, who has died aged 87, devoted her formidable mind and unquenchable energy to research, campaigning and prolific networking in the fields of health, ecology, childbirth and education. She was convinced that joy is our right and proper state, and the focus of her work was to support individuals to realise their own truth and wisdom. Only at the end of her life did she recognise that her passion for the demystification of knowledge and grassroots co-operation, and her opposition to hierarchy, made her – in the truest sense of the word – an anarchist.
She was born in Streatham, south London, and educated at Cheltenham ladies' college and St Hilda's College, Oxford, where she gained a first-class history degree. She had a gift for seeing beyond conventional interpretations into the root of the ideas that shape history. Her sharp insights and directness of expression won her many loyal friends and a few enemies.
She started a BPhil with the philosopher Gilbert Ryle, which was unfinished due to a year of ill health caused by severe insecticide poisoning, which precipitated her interest in the organic movement in the 1940s. Ryle remained a lifelong friend and ally who shared the same vision of "cracking" the mind-body dichotomy (the conventional Cartesian view of mind as an entity separate from body). Rosemary explored this in practical terms in her work with the National Childbirth Trust (1966-82) where, as honorary secretary of the education committee, she invited international pioneers of natural birth to train NCT teachers to undo the physiological conditioning caused by fear and a medicalised approach to childbirth, and instead reconnect women with their innate body wisdom.
Rosemary was passionate about the effects of environment, community and informed choice on creating positive health (not merely absence of illness) and about the interconnectedness of all living systems – especially, as a keen organic gardener, the relationship between healthy soil and a healthy gut. A keen member of the Soil Association since the 1950s, she was a trustee of the McCarrison Society for nutrition and health, and chair then trustee of the Pioneer Health Foundation, promoting research into the nature of positive health.
Alongside her tireless social engagement Rosemary threw herself into family life with four children, four grandchildren and the joy of classical music she shared with her husband, Leo, a civil servant and brilliant amateur pianist, whom she married in 1957.
Leo died in 1998. Rosemary is survived by her children, Tim, me, Robert and Leonie; and her grandchildren, Bryony, Jake, Max and Zoe.