Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience

Contemporary Review, Sept, 2004

Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience. Susan Pedersen. Yale University Press. [pounds sterling]25.00. xv 469 pages. ISBN 0-300-10245-3. Eleanor Rathbone was born into one of the great (and wealthy) radical Dissenting families, the Unitarian Rathbones of Liverpool. A supporter of the suffrage movement she became the first woman to sit on Liverpool's City Council and she was an MP from 1929 to her death in 1946.

Her radicalism was that of the late Victorian era and drew on the more radical traditions of English Nonconformity. As such it was centred on individual liberty and practical changes to improve the quality of life for as many people as possible, rather than on theoretical 'constructs'. (She had no time for either Marx or Freud which raises her value enormously.) As Prof. Pedersen writes, Eleanor Rathbone was this country's 'most remarkable interwar woman politician'. Her 'feminism' was of the pre-hysterical type. This balanced and well researched biography seeks to tell her private, as well as public, life and brings into focus her long friendship with Elizabeth Macadam. Drawing on her Nonconformist background Eleanor Rathbone made much of her 'conscience' as does her biographer. ('Conscience' does seem a prerogative of those on the 'left' of politics. Conservatives are seldom allowed it.) Sometimes one wishes for a little more background knowledge: to refer to the 'Anglican monopoly of religious instruction in the schools' for the 1830s is non-sense. Except for the odd Dissenting academy all schools had been established by the Church: had there been no Church schools there would have been no schools. (J.M.)