Maud Pember Reeves
 Maud Pember Reeves     (author) | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Magdalene Stuart Robison 24 December 1865 Mudgee, New South Wales, Australia |
| Died | 13 September 1953 (Age 87) |
| Nationality | British |
| Alma mater | Canterbury College |
| Spouse | William Pember Reeves |
Suffragist, socialist, feminist, writer and member of the Fabian Society, married to William Pember Reeves the Agent-General, representative of New Zealand government within the British Empire. She spent most of her life in New Zealand and Britain. | |
Maud Pember Reeves was a suffragist, socialist, feminist, writer and member of the Fabian Society. She spent most of her life in New Zealand and Britain.
Contents
Marriage and family
Described as tall and striking, with a handsome face, full red lips, dark eyes, and brown hair, she met her husband, William Pember Reeves at a coming-out ball when she was nineteen. He was a journalist, politician, and son of a newspaper proprietor, who "grew up an Englishman." His vision for New Zealand was "no slums and no poverty". They married at Christchurch on 10 February 1885.
The Reeves's first child, William, lived only a few hours. Their daughter Amber Reeves was born in 1887 and their second daughter, Beryl, in 1889. In December 1895 their son Fabian was born.[1] Fabian (1895–1917) was killed in the First World War, aged 21 and a Flight Lieutenant in the RNAS.[1]
The family's household was unorthodox. In 1900 Reeves' favourite sister, Effie Lascelles, recently widowed, moved in with her two daughters. Reeves' daughter Amber remembered a house filled with children, relatives, servants, nursemaids, "frightful rows" in the nursery, and her mother too busy to pay much attention to children. The Reeves' marriage after the birth of Fabian was not intimate. William did not approve of birth control. H. G. Wells (who until his affair with Amber was a close friend) wrote that the tensions in their marriage were about money and birth control. When Amber, then a student at Cambridge, became pregnant by Wells (a public and political scandal), Reeves offended her daughter by suggesting an abortion.
In 1889, Reeves took the first part of a BA in French, mathematics, and English at Canterbury College (founded in 1873). In 1890 the family moved to Wellington, where her husband had been a radical member of the house of representatives since 1887. Reeves' studies were abandoned for her duties as the wife of a minister and suffragism.
In 1896 the family moved to London, England, after her husband's appointment as Agent-General, the representative of New Zealand government within the British Empire.[2]. The couple befriended a number of intellectuals members of the Fabian Society, including George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Sidney Webb and Beatrice Webb. Maud Pember Reeves made an address at the annual congress of the Women's Liberal Federation in 1898, and proposed a contribution the following year to the International Council of Women[3].
Institutional commitments and social activism
Maud Pember Reeves supported women's suffrage and participated in the founding of the women's section of the Christchurch Liberal Association, of which she takes the presidency. She then collaborated with Kate Sheppard, head of the Woman's Christian Temperance Union although she was not herself in favor of total temperance, and with Ellen Ballance, wife of the New Zealand prime Minister, John Ballance. In September 1893, New Zealand granted women the right to vote and Maud Pember Reeves chaired the first public meeting following this event, in Christchurch on the following October 11.[4]
Maud Pember Reeves joined the Women's Liberal Association, she became a member of the Fabian Society in 1904 and a member of the executive committee of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in 1906. At her instigation, the Fabian Society set out a clause on the equal rights of men and women in 1907, when she was elected to the executive committee of the society with Ethel Bentham and Marion Phillips.[4] Fabian Women's Group
She founded with Charlotte Wilson the Fabian Women's Group, which aims to give women a more important place in the Fabian Society. Beatrice Webb, Alice Clark, Edith Nesbit, Susan Lawrence, Margaret Bondfield and Marion Phillips were members of this group.[5]
Round About a Pound a Week (1913)
Initiated by Reeves in 1909, the FWG's Motherhood Special Fund Committee began a study of the domestic lives of families with new babies living on a subsistence wage of about a pound a week. The FWG had raised money and was able to give each mother extra cash for her children's food for their first year of life. The Fabians expected that the extra money would improve infant health and survival statistics for the sample group, which it definitely did—demonstrating that high child death rates in slum areas were caused by poverty and not maternal ignorance or negligence.[6]
The Lambeth mothers' project was prompted by the recognition that more infants died in the London slums than in Kensington or Hampstead. It asked 'How does a working man's wife bring up a family on 20s a week?'. Forty-two families were selected from a lying-in hospital in Lambeth, London, to have weekly visits, medical examinations from Dr Ethel Bentham every two weeks, and 5s. to be paid to the mother for extra nourishment for three months before the birth of the baby and for one year afterwards. The mothers wrote down their weekly expenditure. Eight families withdrew because the husbands objected to this weekly scrutiny. Eight other mothers who could not read or write dictated their sums to their husbands or children. The verbatim accounts of the 'maternal manner of recollecting'—'Mr. G's wages was 19 bob out of that e took thruppons for es diner witch is not mutch e bein sutch an arty man'—is one of the features of the book which is in part an ironic comment on class relations: Lambeth women, familiar with the habits of educated visitors, politely anticipated sitting in draughts, listening to the gospel of porridge, and being advised against marriage.[7]
The conclusions from the project were first published in 1912 as a Fabian Tract and later became Reeves' Round about a Pound a Week (1913). Poverty, the book argued, and neither maternal ignorance nor degeneration, caused ill health and high mortality. Had the children of Lambeth been 'well housed, well fed, well clothed and well tended from birth' who knows what they would have become. Fabian women were would-be lawmakers. The state must cast off its 'masculine' guise and 'co-parent'. The individual not the family should be the economic unit, and the state should pay family endowment, train midwives, make burial 'a free and honourable public service', introduce a legal minimum wage, and build clean, light, roomy buildings at economic rents for the working classes. If socialism should address the needs of working mothers then women themselves must want more: 'If people living on £1 a week had lively imaginations, their lives, and perhaps the face of England, would be different.'[7]
Later life and death
In March 1917 Reeves was appointed director of women's services in the Ministry of Food. Following the death of her son Fabian in June 1917 from wounds sustained during service in the First World War, Reeves turned privately to spiritualism.
From the early 1920s her participation in public life declined. She travelled to New Zealand with William in 1925, but while she had conversed with the London poor she had never met a Maori.
References
- ↑ a b Sinclair, Keith (1965). William Pember Reeves: New Zealand Fabian. Auckland: Oxford University Press. p. 332. OCLC 804267.
- ↑ https://www.teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3r11
- ↑ https://teara.govt.nz/en/biographies/3r11/reeves-magdalene-stuart
- ↑ a b https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/41214
- ↑ Ellen Ross,Maud Pember Reeves, Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860-1920, University of California Press, 2007, p. 208–225
- ↑ Ross, Ellen. "Maud Pember Reeves". Slum Travelers: Ladies and London Poverty, 1860-1920, University of California Press, 2007, pp. 208–225.
- ↑ a b Alexander, Sally. "Reeves [née Robison], Magdalen Stuart [known as Maud Pember Reeves] (1865–1953), suffragist and socialist." Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 2004-09-23. Oxford University Press.
This page imported content from Wikipedia on 01.01.2024.Wikipedia is not affiliated with Wikispooks. Original page source here
