Eleanor Rathbone

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Standard Name: Rathbone, Eleanor
Birth Name: Eleanor Florence Rathbone
Indexed Name: Eleanor F. Rathbone
Feminist politician ER is called by a recent biographer the most significant woman in British politics in the first half of the 20th century.
Johnson, Richard William. “Associated Prigs”. London Review of Books, pp. 19-21.
19
She wrote books, pamphlets, and essays on the various social and political causes to which she was committed throughout her long career. In many of her texts, she blends argument about more than one of the many movements or initiatives she supported, such as feminism and state-funded family endowments.
Sepia photograph of Eleanor Rathbone campaigning outdoors. She leans forward as she speaks, her hands on a table bearing a vase of white flowers, There are trees and a banner behind her. She is wearing, apparently, a loose-fitting white summer suit, and a black hat, elaborate but compact.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Education Alison Uttley
At Manchester, AU lived in the women's residence, Ashburne House. Formative teachers in her life included Hilda Oakeley
Oakeley, a Somerville College graduate and a close friend of Eleanor Rathbone , had a great impact...
Friends, Associates Maude Royden
Courtney and Royden served together as executive members of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) , of which in 1911 Courtney became secretary. They also worked together as vice-chairs for the Women's International League (WIL)
Friends, Associates Amabel Williams-Ellis
Her political activities kept AWE at the centre of London's socially-conscious literary circles. Guests at The Well of Loneliness tea-party included Virginia Woolf , Rose Macaulay , Vita Sackville-West , G. B. Shaw , and...
Literary responses Sylvia Pankhurst
Save the Mothers was well reviewed. George Bernard Shaw responded enthusiastically to the book, and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence expressed her pleasure at its positive reception. Vera Brittain also praised it, favourably comparing SP 's activism for...
Occupation Maude Royden
MR served as a member of the Family Endowment Committee , which was organised by Eleanor Rathbone to investigate poverty in Britain and to instigate changes in the social and financial treatment of motherhood.
Lewis, Jane. “Beyond Suffrage: English Feminism in the 1920s”. The Maryland Historian, Vol.
vi
, No. 1, pp. 1-18.
10-11
Spartacus Educational. http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/, http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/.
under Eleanor Rathbone
Occupation Maude Royden
In 1915 she resigned from the society, which had its source in the merging in 1887 of seventeen organizations devoted to campaigning for women's emancipation. Lydia Becker , then Millicent Garrett Fawcett , had been...
Occupation Maude Royden
Once women had received the vote, MR , whose feminism stressed the differences epitomized in maternity, joined Eleanor Rathbone and Mary Stocks in arguing that the status of motherhood should be raised to that of...
Occupation Maude Royden
In June 1921, they moved the Fellowship Services to the Guildhouse, Eccleston Square, where MR continued to preach until she resigned in December 1936. She resigned because, she said, I have to choose; and...
Occupation Maude Royden
Between 1923 and January 1924, she used this position to urge the Church to revise its marriage service by removing implications of female subordination in marriage, specifically the command that the wife obey the husband...
politics Marie Belloc Lowndes
The letter challenged a recent antisuffragist manifesto, and stressed three points from Prime Minister Asquith 's statement to suffragists of 14 August. The points were that women had rendered as effective service to their country...
politics Millicent Garrett Fawcett
Yet suffrage did not cease to be her goal. She was instrumental, after the passing of the Representation of the People Act giving the vote to women over thirty in February 1918, in getting the...
politics Millicent Garrett Fawcett
Apart from the suffrage issue, MGF 's political attitudes were those of the Liberal Party of the Victorian era. Though she strongly supported education for girls, she opposed universal free education (and the family allowances...
Publishing Eva Mary Bell
In 1920 EMB was listed as a regular contributor to the Woman's Supplement of The Times.
“The Times Digital Archive 1785-2007”. Thompson Gale: The Times Digital Archive.
42568 (15 November 1920): 14
On 31 October 1929, in the continuing aftermath of Katherine Mayo 's book...
Textual Features Ray Strachey
In this volume contributors Eleanor F. Rathbone , MP (a very early woman member of the House of Commons), Mary Agnes Hamilton , Erna Reiss , Alison Neilans , and RS herself assess the legal...
Textual Features Rosita Forbes
RF builds her conclusion from the idea of two great influences in India that we, that is English people, are ignorant of: the influence of religion, and the influence of women. The latter is immeasurable...

Timeline

1867
Liverpool philanthropist William Rathbone (father of Eleanor Rathbone ) published a book arguing the necessity of organized rather than random acts of charity.
Early 1919
The National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship formed from the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies to continue the campaign for equal suffrage.
6 February 1920
The Woman's Leader (new incarnation of The Common Cause) began publication in London. Under its new title it became the most substantial feminist periodical of the 1920s.
1928
Members of the British Federation of University Women (later known as the British Federation of Women Graduates ) established the Sybil Campbell Libraryfor the study of the expansion of the role of women in recent generations.
30 May 1929
Labour came in twenty-six votes ahead of the Conservatives in the first general election with full women's suffrage: the prospect of voting by women under thirty brought the demeaning nickname of the Flapper Election....
December 1929
The Duchess of Atholl spoke in the House of Commons on the issue of female circumcision or genital mutilation among the Kikuyu people of Kenya.
March 1933
The Woman's Leader (formerly The Common Cause) ended publication; once again it was revived in a new form, the following month, as The Townswoman.
1935
The Council of Action for Peace and Reconstruction was founded; its leaders included economist H. A. L. Fisher , politician David Lloyd George , and activists Elizabeth Cadbury and Eleanor Rathbone .
15 June 1945
Family allowances were established in England.
Earlier 1981
Merseyside county councillor Margaret Simey , already an activist on behalf of poor communities, became chairman of the Liverpool police authority not long before the Toxteth race riots broke out.

Texts

Rathbone, Eleanor. “A Personal View of the Refugee Problem”. New Statesman and Nation, pp. 568-9.
Rathbone, Eleanor. Child Marriage: The Indian Minotaur. G. Allen and Unwin, 1934.
Rathbone, Eleanor, Maude Royden, Dame Kathleen D’Olier Courtney, Emile Burns, Henry Noel Brailsford, and Elinor Burns. Equal Pay and the Family: A Proposal for the National Endowment of Motherhood. Headley, 1918.
Rathbone, Eleanor. Falsehoods and Facts about the Jews. V. Gollancz, 1945.
Rathbone, Eleanor. Report of an Inquiry into the Conditions of Dock Labour at the Liverpool Docks. Northern Publishing, 1904.
Rathbone, Eleanor. The Case for Family Allowances. Penguin Books, 1940.
Rathbone, Eleanor. The Disinherited Family. E. Arnold, 1924.
Rathbone, Eleanor, and Malcolm Thomson. War Can Be Averted. V. Gollancz, 1938.
Rathbone, Eleanor. William Rathbone: A Memoir. Macmillan, 1905.