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.

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 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] Two of the sons, Trevor Bowmar (third), and Mervyn Alban (fourth) went on to Malvern College; Mervyn left in 1875 and was educated at Eton College, becoming a sailor and surveyor in Queensland.[9][10][11][12] 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][13]

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.[14] 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, Whitechapel. She taught French at the Hall, and supported a girls' club at St Jude, Whitechapel.[1][15] Of this involvement in settlement work, she later wrote "I never recall a dull moment" of the two years.[16] Ross tentatively attributes to Margaret Nevinson an essay "A Lady Resident" appearing in 1889 in East London by Charles Booth.[15]

Nevinson also work as a rent-collector for landlords that were charitable organisations.[13] 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.[17]

Works[edit]

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).[18]

Role in the suffrage movement[edit]

Nevinson refused to pay taxes.[19] 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).[18]

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.[18] After Margaret's death her husband remarried, to her close friend and prominent suffragist, Evelyn Sharp.[18]

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b c d e 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. ^ Malvern College (1905). The Malvern register, 1865-1904. Malvern: Office of the Malvern Advertiser. p. 70.
  10. ^ "Marriages". Northern Whig. 14 February 1888. p. 1.
  11. ^ 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.
  12. ^ Bartlett, O. E. J. (12 August 1930). "AN ECHO FROM OLD OXLEY.—I". Brisbane Courier.
  13. ^ 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.
  14. ^ Mitchell, Charlotte. "Women students at UCL in the early 1880s" (PDF). Women students at UCL in the early 1880s.
  15. ^ 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.
  16. ^ 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.
  17. ^ Roodenburg, Herman (2004). Social Control in Europe: 1800-2000. Ohio State University Press. p. 159. ISBN 978-0-8142-0969-1.
  18. ^ a b c d Croft, Susan."In the Workhouse." Votes for Women and Other Plays, Twickenham, Aurora Metro Publications, 2009, pp. 193-209.
  19. ^ "Other Societies - Women's Tax Resistance League". The Vote. 22 May 1914. p. 81.

External links[edit]

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