Ray Strachey

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ray Strachey

Ray Strachey , née Rachel Pearsall Conn Costelloe (born June 4, 1887 in Westminster , † July 16, 1940 in London , England ) was a British suffragette , politician , engineer and writer .

Life

Strachey's father was the Irish lawyer Benjamin "Frank" Conn Costelloe, her mother the art historian Mary Berenson . She was the older of the two girls in her family. Her younger sister was Karin Stephen , née Costelloe, who married Adrian Stephen , the younger brother of Virginia Woolf , in 1914 . Ray Strachey was educated at Kensington High School and Newnham College , Cambridge .

Like several other female math graduates of the time, Strachey developed an interest in engineering. Even if her mother did not encourage her in this decision, she took a course in electrical engineering at Oxford University in 1910 and planned to study electrical engineering at the technical college of the City and Guilds of London Institute in October 1910. She wrote to her aunt: "I have decided to go to London next winter for my engineering work" and that she had been encouraged and supported by Hertha Marks Ayrton . Due to her marriage, she gave up her plan, but continued to be involved in the society of welders, which she had helped to found.

Create

For most of her life, Strachey worked for organizations promoting women's suffrage , starting with her studies in Cambridge when she joined the Mud March in February 1907 and spoke at meetings in the summer of 1907. In July 1908 she took part in the National Union of Societies for Women's Suffrage (NUWSS) .

Most of Strachey's publications are non-fiction and deal with issues of suffrage. She is most often remembered for her book The Cause (1928). Her writings are kept in the London School of Economics women's library.

Strachey worked closely with Millicent Fawcett , sharing her liberal feminist values, and resisting any attempt to integrate the suffrage movement into the Labor Party. In 1915 she became parliamentary secretary of the NUWSS and worked in this capacity until 1920.

Strachey showed great interest in employing women in engineering professions. In 1919 women were legally excluded from most jobs in the engineering industry in England. In 1920, Strachey campaigned on behalf of the "Association of Women Welders" to ensure that women were allowed to continue practicing their profession. To counteract the housing shortage, she founded a company in 1922 to build small mud houses based on a prototype from 1922, which was known as "Copse Cottage". Women were hired to build the houses, but there were problems getting the right clay and the chimney builders refused to cooperate. The Mavat company exhibited a bungalow at the Women's Arts & Crafts Exhibition in Central Hall in London in 1925. Strachey was defeated, but she found work for all of the women involved.

In her book, Women's Suffrage and Women's Service , she described the London Society for Women's Service's establishment of an oxy-fuel welding school . In 1937 she wrote about the employment of women in professional and commercial roles in Careers and Openings for Women .

After World War I , when women were given the right to vote and run for parliament, Ray Strachey ran as an independent parliamentary candidate in the Brentford and Chiswick constituency in the 1918, 1922 and 1923 general elections, but to no avail. She rejected Eleanor Rathbone's attempt to establish a broad-based feminist program in the 1920s. In 1931 she became the parliamentary secretary of the UK's first female MP, Nancy Astor , and in 1935 became director of the Women's Employment Federation. She was also regularly heard on the radio for the BBC .

family

On May 31, 1911, Strachey married in Cambridge civil servant Oliver Strachey , with whom they had two children, Barbara (1912-1999) and Christopher (1916-1975). Oliver Strachey was the older brother of the Bloomsbury Group biographer Lytton Strachey . Other siblings in the Strachey family were the psychoanalyst James Strachey , the writer Dorothy Bussy and the educator Pernel Strachey . Ray's mother-in-law was Jane Strachey , a well-known author and advocate of women's suffrage, who headed the Mud March in London in 1907.

Publications

Biographies

Web links

Commons : Ray Strachey  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Brown, Susan (2008). < "Ray Strachey entry" . Susan Brown, Patricia Clements, Isobel Grundy (The Orlando Project).
  2. ↑ Holmes, Jennifer, author. (12 February 2019). A working woman: the remarkable life of Ray Strachey. ISBN 9781789016543 . OCLC 1094626302
  3. ^ Law, Cheryl (2000). "Demobilization: 1918-1922". Suffrage and power: the women's movement, 1918-1928. IB Tauris. p. 76. ISBN 1860644783 . OCLC 845364951.
  4. ↑ Thom, Deborah. (2000). "Passengers for the War". Nice girls and rude girls. IB Tauris. p. 189. ISBN 1860644775 . OCLC 893459019.
  5. ^ "Architects, Builders and Garden Cities | Historic England". historicengland.org.uk.
  6. ^ Strachey, Ray (1937). Careers and openings for women ... Faber and Faber Ltd. OCLC 37909293.
personal data
SURNAME Strachey, Ray
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British politician
DATE OF BIRTH June 4, 1887
PLACE OF BIRTH Westminster
DATE OF DEATH July 16, 1940
Place of death London