Edith Summerskill, Baroness Summerskill

Edith Summerskill, Baroness Summerskill

Edith Clara Summerskill, Baroness Summerskill CH (* 19th April 1901 in London , † 4. February 1980 in Highgate ) was a British politician of the Labor Party .

Life

After attending school, the daughter of a doctor began studying medicine at King's College London and, after completing her studies, worked as a doctor at Charing Cross Hospital in London in 1924 .

Her political career began in local politics when she was elected a member of the Middlesex County Council for the Labor Party in 1934 and was a member until 1941. Candidate at that time they both 1934 constituency Putney and 1935 in the constituency of Bury unsuccessfully for a seat in the lower house ( House of Commons ) . In 1938 she was finally elected to the House of Commons as a candidate for the Labor Party, where she represented the constituency of Fulham West until 1955 .

During the 1930s she was one of the founders of the Socialist Health Association, which promoted the establishment of the National Health Service in 1948 . She also campaigned for equality between men and women in the British Home Guard during World War II .

In 1945 she became Parliamentary Secretary in the Ministry of Food, assuming her first government office in the government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee . On February 28, 1950, as part of a government reshuffle, she became Minister for National and Social Security and held this position until the end of Attlee's term in October 1951.

Later she was 1954-1955 Executive Chairman ( Chairwoman ) of the Labor Party. In this capacity, she accompanied Clement Attlee, now leader of the opposition , on a trip to the Soviet Union in August 1954 , where she was received by the Prime Minister of the USSR, Georgi Maximilianowitsch Malenkow . In 1955, after the dissolution of her constituency, she was re-elected to the House of Commons and belonged to this until 1961 for the constituency of Warrington . She received criticism from the Conservative Party in 1957 when she pretended to be Norwegian on a trip to Egypt because she would have been ashamed to be English. Then she got the nickname "Miss Norway" by the Tories .

After leaving the House, it was in 1961 as a life peer with the title Baroness Summerskill , of Kenwood in the County of London in the nobility raised and belonged until her death in the upper house ( House of Lords ) to. She was also awarded the Order of the Companions of Honor in 1966 .

Her daughter Shirley Summerskill was also a longtime MP in the House of Commons. Her grandson, Ben Summerskill , has been Chairman of Stonewall , the UK's best-known and most prominent lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender organization , since 2004 .

Publications

• Babies without Tears (1941)
• Wanted — babies: A trenchant examination of a grave national problem (1943)
• Letters to my Daughter (1957)
• The Ignoble Art (1957)
• A Woman's World: Memoirs (1967)

literature

• Edith Baroneß Summerskill , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 16/1980 of April 7, 1980, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

• United Kingdom Ministers (Guide To Women Leadership)
• Biography (Spartacus Educational)
• What have you done for the feminist movement? (Women's History Month)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Doctor Edith Summerskill-A Party Political Broadcast on the advantages of the new National Health Service (April 3, 1948, BBC)
2. ↑ DER SPIEGEL (No. 34/1954)
3. ↑ DER SPIEGEL (No. 7/1957)