Remembering Eleanor Rathbone

• THIS year marks the 75th anniversary of the first payment of family allowance (now child benefit) to mothers on August 6 1946.

This universal benefit, the first measure of the new welfare state, was the brainchild of the formidable feminist campaigner, Eleanor Rathbone MP. She worked tirelessly for nearly 30 years until the Family Allowances Act was finally passed in 1945.

As part of an overdue tribute to Rathbone, Crossroads Women, which runs the Crossroads Women’s Centre in Kentish Town, and The Remembering Eleanor Rathbone Group have worked together on an oral history project.

We interviewed 145 women and 10 men, aged 36 to 95, including several Camden residents, on what family allowance meant to them and their families.

The resulting publication will be launched online on November 18. Speakers include Baroness Lister, professor of sociology at Loughborough university, Jenny Rathbone, great niece of Eleanor and a Member of the Senedd for Cardiff Central, as well as volunteers from the organisations involved and some of the mothers who took part.

The project is a timely reminder that child poverty is not only still with us but rising, and that the caring work of mothers and others remains undervalued.

We are particularly keen to make contact with anyone who has a connection to, and or recollection of members of the original Family Endowment Committee set up by Rathbone in 1917. They were Maude Royden, Mary Stocks, Kathleen Courtney, Elinor & Emile Burns, & HN Brailsford; or any others who were involved, then or later.

If you can help, please get in touch. You can attend the launch by joining at https://bit.ly/Eleanor Rathbone.

LESLEY URBACH
The Remembering Eleanor Rathbone Group lcurbach@googlemail.com

SOLVEIG FRANCIS
Crossroads Women contact@crossroadswomen.net