The First Biographical Dictionary   of  Women Humanitarians  British women active between 1900 and 1950. by Sybil Oldfield `After every war  someone has to tidy up. Things won`t pick themselves up, after all...` Wislawa Szymborska.

Long before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1946, long before the founding of Oxfam, of Amnesty International or of Medecins sans Frontieres, there were women doctors, nurses, political activists, refugee workers, educators, medical researchers, famine and epidemic relief workers, educators, and social and economic reformers who reached out to rescue strangers.
 

The Quaker Marian Ellis

This biographical dictionary has at its core the Quaker, suffragist and/or socialist women who spoke out against war in wartime - supporting the anti-militarist Women`s International Congress at The Hague in April 1915.   In addition, the archives of the Salvation Army, the Save the Children Fund, the British Red Cross, the Society of Friends, the Church Missionary Society, the Wellcome Institute`s History of Medicine, the Women`s Library and Anti-Slavery International, among others, have been searched for lifestories of great women humanitarians from Britain this century.

Women Humanitarians does not merely include such well-known figures as Sylvia Pankhurst, Eleanor Rathbone MP, the Nobel Prize winner Dorothy Hodgkin, Dame Janet Vaughan FRS and Virginia Woolf, but also many less famous women who should never have been forgotten. Meet Alicia Little, the first effective campaigner against foot-binding in China; meet Alice Harris, the first human rights photographer who publicized the atrocities in the Belgian Congo; meet Edith Pye the midwife who saved a thousand refugee mothers and babies behind the French trenches in World War One; meet Dr Edith Brown, still lecturing in surgery at eighty in Partition-torn India - and nearly a hundred and fifty other British women who spent themselves in the struggle against the inhumanity of their time. They have been left out of the history books for too long. In a century which saw two World Wars, the Russian Revolution and Famine, the Great Depression, the Spanish Civil War, political persecution, the enforced mass migration of Displaced Persons, these women tried to prevent the horrors or, when they failed at that, they struggled to help clear up the ensuing mess. other entries

Alicia Little in China

The socialist Ada Salter of Bermondsey, East London

We need to remember that intelligent, energetic, even heroic, kindness does exist and that without the lifework of these women - and of all the other human beings like them - our world would have been even less fit for our children and grandchildren to inherit.     Women Humanitarians is an unusually inspiring - and inspiriting - Biographical Dictionary; it is a pioneering work that should be stocked by all good reference libraries and colleges.

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