Becoming a MP and the campaign for family allowances
On the Road to Westminster
"As the first woman from your native City of Liverpool to enter the House of Commons, a few of your admirers and friends desire to express their great pride and satisfaction in the honour you have won"
In the years after the First World War, Eleanor Rathbone concentrated on feminist politics, becoming a leading voice in the movement which saw the introduction of widows’ pensions in 1925 and the equal franchise legislation of 1928. After a successful campaign, she was elected as the Independent MP for the Combined English Universities in 1929, a position she would hold until her death in 1946.
Not bound by having to represent a specific locale nor by the restrictions of any political party, she took advantage of her intellectual standing and non-party status to speak on the basis of conscience alone.
Fighting for Family Allowances
After her death, Eleanor came to be primarily remembered for her successful campaign for family allowances (or ‘child benefit’), a cause which featured prominently throughout her life.
Building on work Eleanor undertook in the 1920s and before, The Disinherited Family is the founding document behind the ideal of family endowment. Using statistics and comparative studies of family allowance systems across Europe and the British Empire, Eleanor made the case for direct payment of benefits to mothers on moral, economic, and humanitarian grounds.
William Beveridge and Hugh Dalton - prominent economists and politicians who played a role in designing the British welfare state - heralded this work as being one of the most important treatises in redistributive economics. It won a number of prominent converts to her cause, and allowed her to set up the Family Endowment Society, but despite Eleanor's successful campaigns earlier in the decade, no major political party came out in support of the policy; by the early 1930s it seemed it would be indefinitely postponed. The economic slump meant even the Independent Labour Party bowed to trade union fears of effects on wage bargaining.
This newspaper feature on Eleanor Rathbone (left) highlights how the Second World War and resulting legacy of state intervention meant that eventually "the Government … accepted the principle of family allowances". Moreover, they became a key assumption in William Beveridge's new social security plan. However, it was only due to serious pressure from Eleanor Rathbone and other women's organisations that when the Family Allowances Act was finally passed in 1945 - just months before her death - payments were made directly to the mother.
Always looking towards the future, Eleanor noted in her speech to celebrate the passing of the Family Allowances Act that - although the new Bill is a triumph - there are still further issues that would need to be addressed, such as the continued provision of adequate maintenance for all children.
