Eleanor F. Rathbone (1872–1946)

Eleanor Florence Rathbone was born in London, the daughter of renowned social reformer William Rathbone VI and his second wife, Emily Lyle. She spent her early years living in Liverpool. She attended Kensington High School, London, and went on to Oxford University, where she read Classics. To do so, she had to study with tutors outside of Somerville College, which at that time did not have a Classics tutor. At Oxford, she became friends with Hilda Oakeley, Margery Fry, Mildred Pope, Barbara Bradby, and other women who became lifelong friends and colleagues, and developed a passion for debating. Because women were denied Oxford degrees at the time, she traveled to Ireland to receive a degree at Trinity College Dublin. After Oxford, Eleanor worked alongside her father to investigate social and working conditions in Liverpool; 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 became the first woman elected to the Liverpool City Council in 1909 and wrote articles for the suffragist magazine The Common Cause. 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 World War I, Eleanor organized the Town Hall Soldiers' and Sailors' Families Association to support the wives and dependents of servicemen.

In 1919, when Millicent Fawcett retired, Eleanor Rathbone took over the presidency of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (the renamed National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies). In 1929, she was elected to Parliament as an Independent for the Combined Universities, a position she held until the year before her death. She argued for unemployment benefits and health insurance, and opposed the violent repression of rebellion in Ireland, but the cause perhaps most closely associated with her was the creation of family allowances paid directly to mothers, which she achieved, against great opposition, with the passing of the 1945 Family Allowance Act.

Eleanor also was one of the first to recognize the potential danger from Nazi Germany during the early 1930s. She championed human rights and devoted herself to defending states and people vulnerable to fascist and Nazi aggression. She pressured Parliament to grant entry for those fleeing the Nazis and in late 1938, set up the Parliamentary Committee on Refugees. A major focus of her activism was assisting émigrés and citizens in the UK who were being classified as enemy aliens. During World War II she pressured the government to publicize evidence of the Holocaust. She wrote numerous reports and books on her parliamentary and public work.