Margaret Nevinson

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Margaret Nevinson
Margaret Nevinson in 1910.
Born
Margaret Wynne Jones

(1858-01-11)11 January 1858
Leicester, England
Died8 June 1932(1932-06-08) (aged 74)
London, England
NationalityBritish
Occupation(s)Educator, Suffragist
Spouse
​
(m. 1884)​
Children2 (including Christopher)

Margaret Wynne Nevinson (née Jones; 11 January 1858 – 8 June 1932) was a British suffrage campaigner and author. She was one of the radical activists who in 1907–8 split from established suffragist groups to form the Women's Freedom League. She was a prominent early female Justice of the Peace in London, as well as serving as a Poor Law Guardian.

Early life and marriage[edit]

She was the daughter of the Rev. Timothy Jones and his wife Mary Louisa Bowmar of Canning Place, Leicester, second daughter of Thomas Bowmar, married in 1854; her father, a graduate of Magdalen College, Oxford, died in 1875.[1][2][3][4] At the time of his death he was vicar of Buckden, Huntingdonshire, having left St Margaret's Church, Leicester some weeks earlier.[5][6] He was Welsh, from Silian, Cardiganshire.[2] The marriage was his second, his first wife having died and being commemorated in a window of the church. The parish comprised more than half of Leicester's population in 1863.[7]

In a family with five boys, Margaret learned Latin and ancient Greek as they did, taught by their father.[1] Their upbringing was High Church.[8] Her mother fearing that knowledge of Greek might make her unmarriageable, it was replaced by French and drawing.[9]

Timothy Lloyd (1855/6–1920), an older brother, graduated at Lincoln College, Oxford in 1879, and followed his father into the Church of England.[10][11][12] Two more of the sons, Trevor Bowmar (third), and Mervyn Alban (fourth) went to Malvern College; Mervyn left in 1875 and was educated at Eton College, becoming a sailor and surveyor in Queensland.[13][14][15][16] Margaret attended St Anne's Rewley, a convent school in Oxford, a finishing school in Paris, and later took an external degree at the University of St Andrews.[1][8][17]

Margaret had a teaching career, as a governess in a family, a pupil teacher in Cologne, and as a classics mistress at South Hampstead High School.[1] In 1882–3 she took a course of lectures in English given by Henry Morley at University College London.[18] She married in 1884 Henry Nevinson; while the marriage lasted, it appears that both parties regretted it, and in their autobiographies they gave it minimal attention.[8]

East End of London[edit]

Returning to England after a year spent in Germany, Henry and Margaret Nevinson became involved in the settlement movement work at Toynbee Hall, in London's East End, while living for two years at a flat in model dwellings, the Brunswick Buildings, Goulston, Whitechapel. She taught French at the Hall, and supported a girls' club at St Jude, Whitechapel.[1][19][20] Of this involvement in settlement work, she later wrote "I never recall a dull moment" of the two years.[21]

Nevinson also work as a rent-collector for landlords that were charitable organisations.[17] The prevalent model for this role came from the Katharine Buildings in Aldgate, where the collector of rents also acted as a consultant in managing household budgets. Nevinson was one of the group, with Beatrice Potter, Ella Pycroft and Maurice Paul, who tried at this period to make the approach into a practical plan of management.[22] She was a collector both at the Katharine Buildings, for Olivia Hill, and at the Lolesworth Buildings in Spitalfields.[23]

Ross tentatively attributes to Margaret Nevinson an essay "A Lady Resident" appearing in 1889 in East London by Charles Booth.[19] Henry Nevinson published in 1895 Neighbours of Ours: Slum Stories of London, a collection of 1880s stories based on the couple's East End times. Margaret was not credited, and was aggrieved, having supplied background material.[24][25]

Works[edit]

In the Westminster Gazette, Nevinson wrote stories that drew on her service as a Poor Law guardian, with a strong emphasis on the social vulnerability of women.[26] A volume of those, with two from the Daily News and one from the Herald, was published in 1918 as Workhouse Characters, and other sketches of the life of the poor.[27]

Nevinson wrote many articles for the WFL journal, The Vote, and also wrote suffrage pamphlets. Those published through the Women's Freedom League included A History of the Suffrage Movement: 1908-1912, and Ancient Suffragettes (1911). There was also The Spoilt Child and the Law.[28]

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).[28]

Role in the suffrage movement[edit]

Nevinson was a constant public speaker for the suffrage cause at times during the Edwardian period. She played on her Welsh heritage, in a speech at London's Steinway Hall saying "the Welsh ought to make good suffragists".[29] She was secretary of the Actresses' Franchise League, succeeding Bessie Hatton.[30]

Militancy[edit]

Nevinson had multiple and overlapping memberships in women's activist groups. She joined the Hampstead branch of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), which believed in a constitutional route to votes for women. She then for a short period was with the Pankhurst family militants of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).[31] In 1907 she was with Charlotte Despard a founder member of the Women's Freedom League (WFL), as some 70 women broke away from the WSPU. They rejected some of the Pankhurst tactics, such as arson, and adopted tax resistance.[1] Nevinson later refused to pay taxes.[32]

In summer 1908 Muriel Matters set out to take a WFL campaigning van into counties south of London. Nevinson joined it in Kent in mid-September. They braved noisy hostility and some man-handling of the van on visits to Canterbury and Herne Bay.[33]

At a contentious meeting of the London Society for Women's Suffrage (LSWS) in November 1908, Nevinson was in a minority group of four who pressed for resolutions requiring the NUWSS to adopt an electoral stance opposed to the Asquith administration, and also requiring that the NUWSS executive committee should shun party political positions. Millicent Fawcett took a forceful line against the proposals: with her three colleagues Flora Murray, Mrs. Hylton Dale and Louisa Garrett Anderson, Nevinson was associated with the , and suspicion that the WSPU was looking to control the NUWSS led to defeat. Fawcett made it clear that the dissident group should leave the LSWS.[34]

Other interests[edit]

Nevinson was one of the first female magistrates appointed in England.[35]

Family[edit]

Henry 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.[28] After Margaret's death he remarried, to her close friend and prominent suffragist, Evelyn Sharp.[28]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d e f 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.)
  2. ^ a b Foster, Joseph (1888–1892). "Jones, Timothy (2)" . Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886. Oxford: Parker and Co – via Wikisource.
  3. ^ "Marriages". Nottinghamshire Guardian. 29 June 1854. p. 8.
  4. ^ "Marriages". Church & State Gazette (London). 30 June 1854. p. 14.
  5. ^ "Presentation to Rev. T. Jones". Leicester Guardian. 14 July 1875. p. 6.
  6. ^ "Local News". Leicester Guardian. 11 August 1875. p. 5.
  7. ^ White, William (1863). History, gazetteer and directory of the counties of Leicester and Rutland. Sheffield: W. White. pp. 163–165.
  8. ^ a b c Walsh, Michael J. K. (2007). A Dilemma of English Modernism: Visual and Verbal Politics in the Life and Work of C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946). University of Delaware Press. p. 26. ISBN 978-0-87413-942-6.
  9. ^ Rosenzweig, Linda W. (October 1994). Anchor of My Life: Middle Class American Mothers and Daughters, 1880-1920. NYU Press. p. 143. ISBN 978-0-8147-7455-7.
  10. ^ Foster, Joseph (1888–1892). "Jones, Timothy Lloyd" . Alumni Oxonienses: the Members of the University of Oxford, 1715–1886. Oxford: Parker and Co – via Wikisource.
  11. ^ Nevinson, Henry. Fire of Life. London: James Nisbet And Co Ltd. p. 10.
  12. ^ "Death of Canon L. T. Jones". Northampton Mercury. 9 January 1920. p. 13.
  13. ^ Malvern College (1905). The Malvern register, 1865-1904. Malvern: Office of the Malvern Advertiser. p. 70.
  14. ^ "Marriages". Northern Whig. 14 February 1888. p. 1.
  15. ^ Lansdown, Richard (1 January 2006). Strangers in the South Seas: The Idea of the Pacific in Western Thought : an Anthology. University of Hawaii Press. p. 332. ISBN 978-0-8248-2902-5.
  16. ^ Bartlett, O. E. J. (12 August 1930). "AN ECHO FROM OLD OXLEY.—I". Brisbane Courier.
  17. ^ a b Crawford, Elizabeth (2001). The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide, 1866-1928. Psychology Press. p. 445. ISBN 978-0-415-23926-4.
  18. ^ Mitchell, Charlotte. "Women students at UCL in the early 1880s" (PDF). Women students at UCL in the early 1880s.
  19. ^ a b Ross, Ellen (2007). Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860-1920. University of California Press. p. 40. ISBN 978-0-520-24905-9.
  20. ^ John, Angela V. (15 August 2019). Rocking the Boat: Welsh Women who Championed Equality 1840-1990. Parthian Books. p. 88. ISBN 978-1-912109-22-7.
  21. ^ Parratt, Catriona M. (1999). "Making Leisure Work: Women's Rational Recreation in Late Victorian and Edwardian England". Journal of Sport History. 26 (3): 481. ISSN 0094-1700.
  22. ^ Roodenburg, Herman (2004). Social Control in Europe: 1800-2000. Ohio State University Press. p. 159. ISBN 978-0-8142-0969-1.
  23. ^ Ross, Ellen (26 July 2007). Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860-1920. Univ of California Press. p. 173. ISBN 978-0-520-24906-6.
  24. ^ Nevinson, Henry Woodd (1895). Neighbors of Ours: Slum Stories of London. Holt.
  25. ^ Walsh, Michael J. K. (2007). A Dilemma of English Modernism: Visual and Verbal Politics in the Life and Work of C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946). University of Delaware Press. p. 27. ISBN 978-0-87413-942-6.
  26. ^ Eustance, Claire; Ryan, Joan; Ugolini, Laura (1 February 2000). Suffrage Reader: Charting Directions in British Suffrage History. A&C Black. p. 153. ISBN 978-0-7185-0178-5.
  27. ^ Nevinson, Margaret Wynne (Jones) (1918). Workhouse Characters, and other sketches of the life of the poor. London: G. Allen & Unwin Ltd. pp. 8–9.
  28. ^ a b c d Croft, Susan."In the Workhouse." Votes for Women and Other Plays, Twickenham, Aurora Metro Publications, 2009, pp. 193-209.
  29. ^ Honourable Society of Cymmrodorion (London) (1995). The Transactions of the Honourable Society of Cymmrodorian. The Society. p. 90.
  30. ^ Joannou, Maroula; Purvis, June (1998). The Women's Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives. Manchester University Press. p. 146. ISBN 978-0-7190-4860-9.
  31. ^ Walsh, Michael J. K. (2007). A Dilemma of English Modernism: Visual and Verbal Politics in the Life and Work of C.R.W. Nevinson (1889-1946). University of Delaware Press. p. 29. ISBN 978-0-87413-942-6.
  32. ^ "Other Societies - Women's Tax Resistance League". The Vote. 22 May 1914. p. 81.
  33. ^ Liddington, Jill (1 January 2014). Vanishing for the Vote: Suffrage, citizenship and the battle for the census. Manchester University Press. pp. 30–31. ISBN 978-1-84779-888-6.
  34. ^ Hume, Leslie (6 April 2016). The National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies 1897-1914 (Routledge Revivals). Routledge. p. 61 and note. ISBN 978-1-317-21326-0.
  35. ^ Bartley, Paula (1 April 2022). Women’s Activism in Twentieth-Century Britain: Making a Difference Across the Political Spectrum. Springer Nature. p. 77. ISBN 978-3-030-92721-9.

External links[edit]

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