Eleanor Rathbone

ONE OF Liverpool?s pioneering daughters is being honoured for defying discrimination and campaigning to improve the lives of other women.

Eleanor Rathbone, a self-confessed ?whole-hearted feminist?, is one of six women to appear on a commemorative set of stamps.

She was the city?s first woman councillor and later became an MP.

Born in 1872, Eleanor was the daughter of MP and philanthropist William Rathbone. She studied at Oxford University but returned to the city soon after graduating.

Her Mossley Hill family home, Greenbank House, is now marked with a blue plaque.

She represented Granby ward for 25 years, from 1909 to 1934.

The council?s current deputy leader, Cllr Flo Clucas said last night: ?She did a huge amount to further education in this city and elsewhere.

?I?m highly delighted the Royal Mail have put women where they deserve to be: at the top of the tree rather than at the bottom. We have been fighting and fighting to get women recognised.?

At the beginning of World War I, when many suffragettes called time on their campaigns, Eleanor continued, and set up the Town Hall Soldiers? and Sailors? Families Organisation, helping the women and children left behind.

In 1919, she became the leader of the National Union of Women?s Suffrage Societies believing: ?The interests of women should be directly addressed by someone of their own sex?. She became an independent MP in 1929, a job she kept until the year before her death in 1946.

Always dedicated to relieving the country?s poverty-stricken people, she campaigned for the introduction of a family allowance to be paid to the woman of the household. The Family Allowance Act became law in 1945, the year before her death.

Eleanor wrote a number of books and supported socialist and feminist causes around the world.

Cllr Clucas said she would continue to campaign to have the memories of other Liverpudlian heroines recognised, including Kitty Wilkinson, who instigated the opening of the first public wash house.

Other women honoured today are Marie Stopes, who pioneered family planning, and civil rights activist Claudia Jones, equal pay campaigner Barbara Castle, women?s rights activist Millicent Garrett Fawcett and her sister Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first British woman to qualify as a doctor.

Juliette Edgar, head of special stamps at the Royal Mail, said: ?It?s easy to forget the enormous contribution women have made in key areas of our lives over the last century.?

benschofield - LDP

I've read about her before, she sounded a mighty fine woman.

Shame the Uni own her former home on Greenbank Lane, I think they use It as a lounge now.

I walked Into the grounds and they wern't bothered I took a photo when I tried last year. I want to take another one and make a more artsy photo.:PDT_Piratz_26::PDT_Piratz_26:

[URL="http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxmolyneux/510812644/"]http://www.flickr.com/photos/maxmolyneux/510812644/

http://farm1.static.flickr.com/230/5...143811c30b.jpg

A beauty of a building.

Greenbank House - ART & HERITAGE COLLECTIONS - JOHN JAMES AUDUBON - University of Liverpool

Our school applied for some funds from the Eleanor Rathbone Charitable Trust and were awarded ?1000 - so she continues to do good work in Liverpool to this day.

I done my YTS at the Rathbone Theatre workshop in the mid 80's.......I'm not sure why it was named after Eleanor Rathbone,but at the time I believe it was the only theatre YTS in the country,
Cathy Tyson amongst others also did their YTS's there :PDT_Piratz_26: