Claire Brooks left an indelible impression on just about everyone with whom she was involved. She was warm hearted, spirited, emotional, unwavering in her support of individuals and causes once she had decided they were worthy of her backing and quite impossible to cajole into an effective tactical force. She was a one off, typically…

Millicent Fawcett, a radical and pioneering feminist, is best known as the leader of the suffragists, the constitutional campaigners for women’s votes. Born in Aldeburgh on 11 June 1847, Millicent Garrett was the eighth of the 11 children born to businessman Newson Garrett and his wife Louisa, neé Dunnell. Her father, a Liberal, encouraged political…

Josephine Butler was a social reformer with a broad feminist commitment, whose willingness to speak publicly on sexual issues distracted from her wider views. Born in Northumberland on 13 April 1828, Josephine Elizabeth Grey was the 7th child of John Grey, a cousin of Earl Grey, the Prime Minister responsible for the 1832 Reform Act,…

Born on 21 April 1787 in the family’s Piccadilly home, Emily Mary Lamb was the 5th surviving child of Elisabeth Lamb née Milbanke, the wife of the first Viscount Melbourne, but the identity of her natural father is unclear. Emily’s brother, William, the second Viscount Melbourne, described their mother as an ‘excellent wife but not…

An English radical, whose advocacy of equal rights for women and men attracted considerable attention in her lifetime, Wollstonecraft has subsequently acquired a reputation as the pre-eminent feminist polemicist of her day. Wollstonecraft was born on 27 April 1759 in Spitalfields, London, the second of seven children of Edward John Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Dixon. Her…

Margaret Wintringham was one of the first of the small band of Liberal women MPs. Like the other Liberal women elected in the 1920s, her political career was curtailed by the steady decline and disintegration of inter-war Liberalism.

Emma Alice Margaret Tennant later became Mrs Asquith and eventually the first Countess of Oxford and Asquith but she was universally known as ‘Margot’. Margot was married to an immense personality, yet was also a great personality in her own right, who appears to have exerted significant influence over the career of her husband. Unlike…

Eleanor Acland was born Eleanor Margaret Cropper in Westmoreland in 1878, into a family with political connections. Her paternal grandfather, Sir James Cropper, was Liberal MP for Kendal from 1880 to 1885, while her maternal grandfather was Lord Knutsford who had been a Conservative MP and secretary to the colonies from 1887 to 1892. After…

When Lady Violet Bonham Carter died in 1969, the Liberal Party lost its most powerful and indomitable female campaigner. The vacuum she left was filled by Beatrice Nancy Seear, always known by her middle name, a formidable politician possessed of a towering intellect. Seear was an active Liberal and latterly Liberal Democrat for over fifty…