A Liverpool Exemplar - Eleanor Rathbone

Eleanor Rathbone, born in London on the 12th of May 1872, the daughter of the social reformer William Rathbone V1 and his second wife, Emily Acheson Lyle, was one of the most remarkable British women of the 20th Century. Born into this prominent Liverpool family, spending her early years in Liverpool, she spent her career fighting against injustices and trying to make life better for those in need. Her family encouraged her to concentrate on social issues; the family motto was "What ought to be done can be done". Denied an Oxford degree by her gender, she was one of the 'steamboat ladies' who travelled to Ireland between 1904 and 1907 to receive an ad eundem University of Dublin degree at Trinity College, Dublin. 

Eleanor Rathbone speaking in 1943, the people in the room clearly knowing they are in the presence of someone special. Nancy Astor is third from right.

 

In 1897 she became the Honorary Secretary of the Liverpool Women's Suffrage Society Executive Committee in which she focussed on campaigning for women to get the right to vote. Her research on the working conditions at Liverpool Docks and its impact on families started a life-long campaign for a family allowance. Alongside her father she worked to investigate social and industrial conditions in Liverpool, until he died in 1902. They also opposed the Second Boer War and in 1903 she published their 'Report on the results of a Special Inquiry into the conditions of Labour at the Liverpool Docks'. In 1905 she assisted in establishing the School of Social Science at the University of Liverpool where she lectured in public administration. She was elected Councillor for Liverpool’s Granby Ward in 1909, standing as an Independent rather than aligning with a political party, a seat she held for twenty-six years. Eleanor and others, such as Alice Morrissey, saw women's participation in religious, political and franchise groups co-operating in Liverpool despite the sometimes violent sectarianism and political divisions of the community at that era. In 1913, with Nessie Stewart-Brown, she co-founded the Liverpool Women Citizen's Association to promote women's involvement in political affairs.

At the outbreak of WW1 she organised the Town Hall Soldiers' and Sailors' Families Association to support wives and dependants of soldiers, acting as an administrative arm of the War Office and dealing with the payment of separation allowances to wives. Influenced by this, she helped form the Family Endowment Committee in 1918, which campaigned for women to be paid an allowance to alleviate their economic dependence on husbands and formed the '1918 Club' in Liverpool which still meets at the Adelphi Hotel and is, reputedly, the oldest women's forum still meeting. She also opposed violent repression of rebellion in Ireland and was instrumental in negotiating the terms of women's inclusion in the 1918 'Representation of the People Act'.

In 1929 Eleanor was elected M.P. for the Combined English Universities, again standing as an Independent. During the Spanish Civil War and Second World War she worked passionately on behalf of refugees. Eleanor Rathbone died suddenly of a stroke on the 2nd of January 1946, but just months before her death, after decades of campaigning, the Family Allowance Act was passed.

The University of Liverpool acknowledges her by way of its Eleanor Rathbone Building; the site housing the School of Law and Social Justice and the Dept of Psychology, as well as the Eleanor Rathbone Theatre used for stage productions and musical performances. The building's unique architecture has evolved from many additions to the original farmhouse cottage William Rathbone IV bought in 1809 in which he and Eleanor lived. Edge Hill University also has a hall of residence called Eleanor Rathbone in honour of her work as a social reformer.

It is only when you look back at the causes Eleanor took up in her life – votes for women, family allowances, feminism, family planning, anti-Nazism when Hitler came to power, the plight of colonial women, Jewish refugees, anti-appeasement, the Spanish Republic, wartime internees, the Polish officers deported to the USSR, Keynesian economics before it was fashionable, German civilians at the war’s end – that you can only be impressed. She was so wonderfully clear-sighted that it’s not even surprising to find her warning of the possibility of a Nazi-Soviet pact two years before the event.

see also:- http://www.thefootballvoice.com/2020/09/a-liverpool-exemplar-john-brodie.html?q=Fanny