Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience Susan Pedersen

When British women demanded the vote in the years before the First World War, they promised to use political rights to remake their country and their world. This is the story of Eleanor Rathbone, the woman who best fulfilled that pledge. Rathbone cut her political teeth in the suffrage movement in Liverpool, spent two decades crafting social programmes for poor women and children, and was for seventeen years their advocate in the House of Commons. She also played a critical role in imperial policymaking and in the opposition to appeasement. In the last decade of her life she sought to rescue Spanish republicans and Jews threatened by Hitler's rise to power. In this important book, Susan Pedersen illuminates both the public and private sides of Rathbone's life while restoring her to her rightful place as the most sophisticated feminist thinker and most effective British woman politician of the first half of the twentieth century.

'Susan Pedersen has done an excellent job, producing a serious work of scholarship on a rather dry subject which she has managed to make accessible and interesting to non-academic readers. Her portrait of Eleanor Rathbone shows an admirable woman' - Literary Review

'Excellent...a biography of distinction' - Prospect Magazine

'A marvel of intelligence and historical sense...Pederson chronicles her subject's inner self with assured empathy' - BBC History Magazine

'Eleanor Rathbone [had] a remarkable political career dictated by the workings of her conscience, and Susan Pederson's book, appropriately, is a celebration of that' - Times Literary Supplement

'Susan Pederson's new biography is the most comprehensive and unlikely to be surpassed. Carefully researched, detailed and compelling, it places Rathbone in her social and political context, exploring both her public and private life' - The Guardian