Description

Meet Katharine Glasier, classics teacher turned political agitator, who campaigned throughout her life  against poverty and the class system. The daughter of a Congregational minister, she attended the Hackney Downs High School for Girls and read classics at Newnham College, Cambridge. Cambridge did not then allow women to receive degrees, but  always insisted on writing her name followed by the initials B.A.

She worked at a private girls’ school in Bristol until an encounter with a demonstration organised by working-class women led her to join the British Socialist Society and subsequently the Fabians. She handed in her notice at the private school and took another teaching post in a working-class area. She became a journalist and a lecturer, married ‘down’ several social classes when she fell in love with Bruce Glasier, a Scottish Trade Unionist, and wrote a regular column in the Independent Labour Party newspaper The Labour Leader. The campaigns in which she made a lasting difference included the struggle for the provision of baths at the pit-heads for miners, free school meals for the poor, nursery education, and the Save the Children fund.

n.b. around 1890