My friend AnnMarie Wolpe, who has died aged 87, was an anti-apartheid activist and feminist. Throughout her life, she displayed enormous resilience, sustained by an ironic sense of humour and wonderful elan.

In 1963, her husband, Harold Wolpe, a civil rights lawyer and member of the ANC and the South African Communist party, was arrested and imprisoned in Johannesburg under the 90-day detention act. He was listed as a co-conspirator of those who would become the defendants in the Rivonia trial, among them Nelson Mandela.

AnnMarie smuggled tungsten files and metal cutters into the prison inside loaves of bread and a chicken carcass. She helped bribe a guard, as well as passing messages to and from other prisoners and their families. With another detainee, Arthur Goldreich, Harold made his escape; they spent 18 hours in the boot of a car as they were driven out of South Africa across the border into Swaziland. Harold fled into exile in the UK.

AnnMarie was arrested but her lawyer, Joel Joffe, negotiated with the police to allow her to leave South Africa. She was forced to leave behind her three children, including a baby recovering from pneumonia, though they were subsequently able to join their parents in the UK.

The Wolpes forged successful academic careers, Harold as a sociologist at Essex University, and AnnMarie researching educational policy and publishing three books on the subject. She set up the women’s studies programme at Middlesex University and in 1980 was a founder member of the journal Feminist Review.

Daughter of Polly and Abraham Kantor, AnnMarie grew up in Johannesburg, where her father was a successful entrepreneur, and met Harold while they were both students at Witwatersrand University. Members of his political circle did not approve of the marriage, perceiving AnnMarie as a bourgeois princess who was incapable of understanding their radicalism, but her actions after his arrest earned their respect.

In later years, she was an exotic figure in feminist circles, a slightly camp grande dame, vivacious and beautiful, although sometimes at odds with the often puritanical attitudes of some feminists towards self presentation. She was devoted to her husband and children at a time when women were questioning traditional attitudes towards family life, but she was fully aware, through her own experience, of the contradictions that confronted women and the compromises they could feel forced to make.

With the ending of apartheid the Wolpes returned to South Africa, to Cape Town. AnnMarie felt quite ambivalent about this but, once there, she and Harold played an educational role in the ANC.

Harold died in 1996. AnnMarie is survived by their son, Nicholas, two daughters, Peta and Tessa, and six grandchildren, Jonathan and Alicia, Jade, James, Liam and Olivier.