Susan Pedersen's new biography of Eleanor Rathbone (1872–1946) restores a neglected presence to the heart of twentieth-century British politics. Rathbone is best known for her book The Disinherited Family (1924), a precise dissembling of the inadequacies of the breadwinner wage system. Her advocacy of an alternative system of support for the family led directly to the Family Allowances Act of 1945, a cornerstone of the welfare state. But The Disinherited Family was, as Pedersen points out, as important and innovative in its way as Henry George's Poverty and Progress (1879) and J. A. Hobson's Imperialism (1902), a sweeping feminist revision of how society and the economy might be perceived. Rathbone was also at the center of the suffrage struggle and the growth of “new” feminism in the 1920s, a contributor to imperial questions in the 1930s, and a passionate advocate of the cause of refugees and Jewish victims of the Holocaust in the 1940s.

Given the doorstopper volumes dedicated to reserve team Labour and Conservative figures or the myriad studies chronicling the minority and largely uninfluential movements of British fascism and communism, the lack of attention given to as important a figure as Rathbone is perhaps surprising. It says a great deal about the selective amnesia of political memory and political history in twentieth-century Britain. Independence was at the core of Rathbone's personality and outlook, not least in her feminism. A personal fortune permitted her to campaign without reliance on party organization, and she won a university seat at least partly immune from the influence of mainstream parties. But this hard-won independence in life may have ensured Rathbone's obscurity in death. There is no party narrative into which she can be inserted, nor is it possible to argue over her membership of, or contribution to, a particular ideological tradition. And so Rathbone cedes the stage to lesser players. But the “politics of conscience” represented by independent figures like Rathbone is something that needs to be examined and celebrated.

Rathbone exemplified the way that the ideology of nineteenth-century idealism found life in middle-class philanthropy, social service, and political action. Through figures like Rathbone, such Victorian ideas sprawled across the twentieth century. She was born into a wealthy and respected Liverpool merchant family. Her father, William, lit the fire of conscience and duty in Eleanor. She also grew up with a strong commitment to women's independence. These qualities were further developed at Oxford University. When she returned to Liverpool, Rathbone joined the settlement movement. If idealism inspired her social action, the empiricism of social science allowed Rathbone to understand the difficulties of life in the backstreets and tenements of her native city and to make cogent arguments for reform. Rathbone's voluntary work also established a solid political base; she sat as an Independent on Liverpool City Council between 1909 and 1935.

Pedersen argues that Rathbone gained an “education in friendship and feminism” at Oxford, which helped her “imagine the abstract citizen as female” and demonstrated the potential strength of women's networks (49). This led her into the suffrage movement in the first decades of the twentieth century. But the suffrage campaign offered another kind of education, which shaped Rathbone's personal political outlook. Pedersen suggests that Rathbone found the “two tenets” of her future political modus operandi in the suffrage movement: “her determination never to let an impossible ideal get in the way of an achievable good, and her commitment to `democracy' as a political process rather than an abstract principle” (116). Her belief in democracy as a process led Rathbone to oppose the militancy of the Women's Social and Political Union. She also departed from other suffragists in her rejection of an alliance with Labour. In this way, a future political path was drawn: one that followed realistic political action within the context of democracy but steered clear of formal political commitments.

After the First World War, Rathbone was one of the leading voices of “new” feminism, emphasizing women's particular needs within the context of a widened democracy. Motherhood, an experience she never had herself, became the focus of her untiring efforts for nearly twenty years. The dependence of women within the context of motherhood and the family was a consistent focus of Rathbone's feminist and reformist vision, from her early work in Liverpool through the campaign for family allowances. Rathbone had already picked apart the contradictions and inadequacies of the breadwinner wage system in The Problem of Women's Wages (1912), a critique that she developed in The Disinherited Family. Pedersen argues that The Disinherited Family is one of a handful of political texts that “lead their readers to see fundamental social and economic structures in a new light” (202). This is a substantial, but entirely justified, claim. Rathbone showed that a fundamental unit of social life—the family—was “ignored” (202) in economic thought. The work of men in the public sphere eclipsed the productive and reproductive work of women in the private sphere that sustained the family. The male breadwinner or family wage system that was supposed to provide for the family also willfully overlooked the structure of the British population, in which childless bachelors received the same family wage as men with four or five children. Rathbone's solution was simple, ingenious, and revolutionary: to pay directly for the raising of children through a state system of family allowances. The Disinherited Family thus redrew the economy and society along feminist lines, stressing that the fundamental division in society was not class, but sex. It also made visible productive and reproductive work in the private sphere. The Disinherited Family led to a twenty-year campaign for family allowances, finally realized at the end of the Second World War. But Rathbone's ultimate legacy was as much intellectual and political as it was welfarist, fundamentally revising the ways that economics, family life, and state action were perceived, a legacy that is still being worked through in the twenty-first century.

The family allowances campaign was one act of a long political life. Rathbone became MP for the Combined English Universities in 1929 and held the seat at her death in 1946. Over that period, she was a respected voice of feminism and became associated with a number of causes, such as feminist reforms within the empire and antiappeasement. Her tireless efforts on behalf of Jewish victims of the unfolding Holocaust was, according to Pedersen, her “finest hour” (321).

For a woman who helped bring the private sphere into the realm of public action, Rathbone was notably circumspect about her own private life. Elizabeth Macadam, her partner of nearly thirty years, burned many personal letters to bar entry into this sphere. Pedersen deals very sensitively and respectfully with Rathbone and Macadam's relationship, being careful to stress its particular context rather than submitting it to some overarching and restrictive framework. What emerges is exactly what should emerge, a story of deep love and commitment between two individuals.

There are some questions that might be posed about Rathbone's outlook. Without doubt, Rathbone is one of the major feminist thinkers of the early twentieth century. But there were times when the emphasis on gender made her blind to the importance of other categories of identity. She was never able to grasp the pull of nationalism, for example, particularly in the context of India in the 1930s. Rathbone's concern for the position of women in Indian society also initially clouded her judgment on the underlying racism of Kathleen Mayo's Mother India (1927). Unlike other “new” feminists in the interwar period, Rathbone never acknowledged the politics of women's sexual desires, even as she fought to protect the conditions of reproduction. Pedersen suggests that this may have been rooted in her own private life. Rathbone's attitude to class is also striking. The analysis of working-class life she offered in her written work was an empathetic evocation of the often-desperate position of working-class mothers. But it did not seem to make her particularly sympathetic to the question of class inequality: “such divisions struck her as simply a distraction from a more fundamental economic division, the division of sex” (206). This left Rathbone largely uncomprehending of the position of trade unions in the family allowance campaign and perhaps blunted her view of the complex relationship among femininity, masculinity, and class in working-class lives.

Pedersen's biography is a major work. As with the best biographies, it is both a moving portrait of an individual and a compelling study of that individual's times. Eleanor Rathbone's abiding hope was that “purposive collective action in a democratic state could improve human life, could prevent the world from foundering on the shoals of untrammeled selfishness, mutual hatred or apathy” (377). Her own life proved a testament to the realization of this hope.