• THANK you for your report (Don’t let MP Eleanor ever be forgotten, December 2). That was indeed the point of our oral history project.

It was not only students at Parliament Hill School who carried out interviews but a team of volunteers from Crossroads Women and The Remembering Eleanor Group, joint co-ordinators of the project.

It is important to acknowledge that at the beginning of the 20th century Eleanor Rathbone traced the horrendous child poverty she saw all around her to mothers’ poverty and financial dependence.

It is clear from the interviews that mothers used family allowance (now child benefit) as their independent power to address their children’s poverty.

This is again true in today’s Britain where five million children live in poverty and single mothers particularly have to resort to food banks to feed them.

Most of the women (and men) we interviewed thought mothers were entitled to be paid for their work.

As Rathbone said: “Nothing can justify the subordination of one group of producers – the mothers – to the rest, and their deprivation of all share of their own in the wealth of a community which depends on them for its very existence.”

If you are interested in helping us to get Rathbone and her work better known, please get in touch.

Her classic, The Disinherited Family, republished 1986, is available at our centre and the project’s publication and launch event are on: www.crossroadswomen.net

SOLVEIG FRANCIS
Crossroads Women, NW5