Margery Corbett Ashby
Dame Margery Irene Corbett Ashby, DBE (19 April 1882 – 15 May 1981) was a British Liberal politician, feminist and internationalist.
She was born at Danehill, East Sussex, the daughter of Charles Henry Corbett a barrister who was sometime Liberal MP for East Grinstead and Marie Corbett herself a Liberal feminist and local councillor in Uckfield. Margery was educated at home. With her sister Cicely and friends, she founded the Younger Suffragists in 1901. Though she passed her Classics exam at Newnham College, Cambridge University refused to grant her a degree because she was female.
After deciding against teaching, she was appointed Secretary of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in 1907. She married lawyer Brian Ashby in 1910. Their only child, a son, Michael, was born in 1914.
In 1918 she mounted the first of seven unsuccessful attempts to be elected to the House of Commons. In 1929 she was Liberal candidate at Hendon.
She served as President of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance from 1923 to 1946.
Famous quotes containing the word margery:
“Though Margery is stricken dumb
If thrown in Madge’s way,
We three make up a solitude;
For none alive to-day
Can know the stories that we know
Or say the things we say....”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)