Margaret Nevinson
Margaret Nevinson | |
|---|---|
 Margaret Nevinson in 1910. | |
| Born | Margaret Wynne Jones 11 January 1858 Leicester, England |
| Died | 8 June 1932 (aged 74) London, England |
| Nationality | British |
| Occupation(s) | Educator, Suffragist |
| Spouse | |
| Children | 2 (including Christopher) |
Margaret Wynne Nevinson (née Jones; 11 January 1858 – 8 June 1932) was a British suffrage campaigner.
Nevinson was one of the suffragettes who split from the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) in 1907 to form the Women's Freedom League (WFL). She wrote many articles for the WFL journal, The Vote, and also wrote many suffrage pamphlets including A History of the Suffrage Movement: 1908-1912, Ancient Suffragettes and The Spoilt Child and the Law. Nevinson was also the first woman Justice of the Peace in London as well as serving as a Poor Law Guardian.
Early life[edit]
She was the daughter of the Rev. Timothy Jones and his wife Mary Louisa; her father, a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, died in 1875.[1][2]
Between 1882-3 she took a course of lectures in English given by Henry Morley at University College London.[3]
In the Workhouse (1911)[edit]
Performed in 1911 in the Kingsway Theatre, In the Workhouse was one of the most controversial plays produced by Edith Craig's Pioneer Players as part of a triple bill with Chris St. John's The First Actress and Cicely Hamilton's Jack and Jill and A Friend (King's Hall, 1911). It is an exposé of the iniquities of the Coverture Act, which decreed that a married woman had no separate legal existence from her husband and therefore meant that if her husband entered - or left - the workhouse, she and her children were obliged to go with him.
Set in a workhouse ward, where a group of mothers, married and unmarried, look after their children, it exposes the contradictions of a system where Penelope, a respectable, secure, mother of five and unmarried is freer than respectable Mrs Cleaver who returns from her appeal to the Board of Guardians to announce that legally she has no right to leave the workhouse, even though she has work to go to and a home available for herself and her children.
The play, with its refusal to condemn vice and the unmarried mother, was either condemned for offensiveness or acclaimed for its importance. The Pall Mall Gazette compared it to the work of Eugène Brieux "which plead for reform by painting a terrible, and perhaps overcharged, picture of things as they are... Such is the power of the dramatic pamphlet, sincerely written and sincerely acted. There is nothing to approach it in directness and force. It sweeps all mere prettiness into oblivion."
Two years after the play was produced, the law was changed in large measure due to Nevinson's and other suffragists' campaigns.
The play was revived in 1979 by Mrs Worthington's Daughters, a feminist theatre company, directed by Julie Holledge in a double-bill with Susannah Cibber's The Oracle (1752).[4]
Role in the suffrage movement[edit]
Nevinson refused to pay taxes.[5] Margaret also published pamphlets through the Women's Freedom League including Ancient Suffragettes (1911) and Five Year's Struggle for Freedom: a History of the Suffrage Movement (1908-1912).[4]
Nevinson's husband was also active in the suffrage movement, becoming a founder of the Men's Political Union for Women's Enfranchisement for which he wrote at least one dramatic sketch.[4] After Margaret's death her husband remarried, to her close friend and prominent suffragist, Evelyn Sharp.[4]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ John, Angela V. "Nevinson [née Jones], Margaret Wynne (1858–1932), women's rights activist". Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/45464. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
- ^ Foster, Joseph (1888–1892). . Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886. Oxford: Parker and Co – via Wikisource.
- ^ Mitchell, Charlotte. "Women students at UCL in the early 1880s" (PDF). Women students at UCL in the early 1880s.
- ^ a b c d Croft, Susan."In the Workhouse." Votes for Women and Other Plays, Twickenham, Aurora Metro Publications, 2009, pp. 193-209.
- ^ "Other Societies - Women's Tax Resistance League". The Vote. 22 May 1914. p. 81.
External links[edit]
- Spartacus article on Margaret Nevinson
- Works by Margaret Wynne Nevinson at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Margaret Nevinson at Internet Archive
- Works by Margaret Nevinson at LibriVox (public domain audiobooks)
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