Edith Summerskill, Baroness Summerskill

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Edith Summerskill, Baroness Summerskill bigraphy, stories - British politician

Edith Summerskill, Baroness Summerskill : biography

19 April 1901 – 4 February 1980

Edith Clara Summerskill, Baroness Summerskill CH PC (19 April 1901 – 4 February 1980) was a British physician, feminist, Labour politician and writer. She was appointed to the Privy Council in 1949.

Letters to my daughter

During the 1950s, Summerskill wrote a series of letters to her daughter Shirley, who, like her mother, was an active feminist. Shirley studied medicine in Oxford at that time and later became a doctor and a Member of Parliament and of Cabinet. Edith Summerskill’s letters to Shirley were collected and published in a book Letters to My Daughter (1957). Summerskill outlines her belief that women are superior to men in almost every way. In support of such a theory Summerskill presents three "facts": Firstly that only women can enjoy two worlds of creative enterprise the biological and the intellectual. Secondly she suggests women are physically stronger, live longer are constitutionally tougher, having greater stamina. Finally she believes women have equal if not greater intellect than men.http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=jDpVAAAAIBAJ&sjid=eZUDAAAAIBAJ&pg=7041,4239691&dq=only-women-can-enjoy-two-worlds-of-creative-enterprise&hl=en

The letters address exactly the same issues that Pym and her educated women are struggling with. Although Summeskill’s book contains only Edith’s letters to her daughter, the mother’s response to questions raised by the daughter creates a sense of an ongoing dialogue between the two, concerning issues of education for women, equality and achievements. In reply to Shirley’s question about the part that married women are playing in the affairs of the country, her mother writes:

The insistent demand of women for recognition in spheres of work outside the home, which has quietly but unremittingly been advanced in the course of the last hundred years, has grudgingly been conceded. As a doctor and a Member of Parliament I am fully conscious of the fact that the doors both of the medical schools and of the House of Commons had to be forced by furious and frustrated women before their claims were recognized. It would be quite inaccurate to suggest that we were welcomed into the universities or into public life. (143)

Summerskill constantly struggles for and raises consciousness about women’s equal rights. In response to Shirley’s complaint about “the stock question” of the anti-feminists, “Why have not more women achieved eminence in the arts and sciences?” She answers: “Personally I am astounded that so many have distinguished themselves despite the conditions which society has imposed upon them” (181). Summerskill maintains that in spite of the difficulties and prejudices, women are making progress and have achievements in music, visual art, and literature as well as some advancement in science and technology (181). Yet Summerskill’s conclusion in 1956 is similar to the one Virginia Woolf reached twenty-five years earlier. Woolf claims that even when all the outward obstacles are overcome, she, or any other a woman, has not solved the problem of “my own experiences as a body” (1942: 206); Edith Summeskill makes the parallel concession that for a woman, the “most powerful force, which takes her off the course” is the “biological urge to have a family” (187).

References & notes

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)

Early life

Summerskill was educated at King’s College London and was admitted to medical school at Charing Cross Hospital Medical School. One of the first few women to be admitted to medical school. She was one of the founders of the Socialist Health Association which spearheaded the National Health Service (1948). She pressed for equal rights for women in the British Home Guard. In 1938 she initiated the Married Women’s Association to promote equality in marriage and became its first president.