Associated Prigs 
R.W. Johnson
When Susan Pedersen writes that Eleanor Rathbone was the most significant woman in British politics in the first half of the 20th century she might have added that another Somerville alumna, Margaret Thatcher, clearly earned that title in the century’s second half. No one can doubt the extent to which Thatcher stamped herself on the 1980s, but the effect of reading this fine biography is to make one wonder, not just why Rathbone is now forgotten but whether she wasn’t Thatcher’s superior in everything but achieving power. As you look back at the causes Rathbone took up – votes for women, family allowances, feminism, family planning, anti-Nazism (immediately Hitler came to power), the plight of colonial women, Jewish refugees, anti-appeasement, the Spanish Republic, wartime internees, the Polish officers deported to the USSR (at a time when other left-wingers were loath to support such an ‘anti-Communist’ cause), Keynesian economics before it was fashionable, German civilians at the war’s end – you really can’t fault her. She was so wonderfully clear-sighted that it’s not even surprising to find her warning of the possibility of a Nazi-Soviet pact two years before the event.
Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.
R.W. Johnson, an emeritus fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, lives in Cape Town, where he is completing a book on South Africa since the advent of democracy.
Other articles by this contributor:
Rogue’s Paradise · The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War by Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova
How Mugabe came to power · R.W. Johnson talks to Wilfred Mhanda
Burning Blankets · Robert Mugabe’s latest tidy-up
Cads · Roosevelt’s Secret War: FDR and World War Two Espionage by Joseph Persico.
Nerds, Rabbits and a General Lack of Testosterone · Major and Lamont
Mr Shepperd to you · Classes and Cultures: England 1918-51 by Ross McKibbin
Where do we go from here? · Zimbabwe
Her Boy · Mark Thatcher
print layout
tell a friend