Alice Henry

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Alice Henry (March 21, 1857 - February 15, 1943), was an Australian suffragist, journalist and trade unionist who also became prominent in the American trade union movement as a member of the Women's Trade Union League.

A street in the Canberra suburb of Cook is named in her honour.

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She was born on 21 March 1857 in Richmond, Melbourne. She was the daughter of Charles Ferguson Henry and his wife Margaret née Walker her only sibling was her younger brother Alfred. At one stage Charles tried farming a selection of land in Gippsland it was here where Alice received her first lessons from her mother. Back in Melbourne she attended several schools, matriculating with credit from Richard Hale Budd's Educational Institute for Ladies in 1874. Her father's discussions of the protective tariff introduced her to politics. She later attributed her passionate commitment to justice, democracy, and women's rights to the equal treatment she and her brother received from her parents.Denied access to a university education, yet accepting the need to support herself, Alice tried teaching but following a serious illness turned to journalism. She became a close friend and working associate of leading reformers Catherine Helen Spence, Henry Bournes Higgins and his sister Ina, Bernard O'Dowd, and Vida Goldstein and her family. She was active in women's clubs and the women suffrage campaign, and gained a reputation as a courageous public speaker in support of social change. In 1905, aged 48, she left for England. There she heard George Bernard Shaw speak, observed the militant suffragists, and toured Scotland. In December she sailed for New York where American interest in Australian progressivism ensured her a ready audience. Her knowledge of Australian labour legislation and woman suffrage got the attention of Margaret Dreier Robins, who invited Alice to work for the National Women's Trade Union League of America in Chicago. he became a key figure in the campaign for woman suffrage, union organization, vocational education, and labour legislation. She wrote two books, and in 1920-22 directed the league's educational department. With the assistance of her close friend Miles Franklin, for eight years edited the league's official journal, initially the women's page of the Union Labor Advocate, then a separate publication, Life and Labor. She went to Melbourne in February 1925, intending to stay for two months but stayed for twelve. She then returned to America in March 1926 where she retired from active work and moved to Santa Barbara in California, in 1928. There, in 1929, her last significant article was on Henry Handel Richardson. It was published in the Bookman. Alice wishing to be with her brother, reluctantly returned to Australia in 1933. She was welcomed as a notable and successful Australian woman, but settling back into Melbourne was slow and painful. She attempted to continue her old activities by joining the Playgrounds' Association and the National Council of Women of Victoria. She gave radio talks on prohibition and modern poetry. In 1937 she compiled a bibliography of Australian women writers. But she missed her American life. Sadly in 1937, her brother was lost at sea and her health began to deteriorate. In 1938 she gave up her American citizenship and in 1939 she resigned from her committee work. A year later she entered a nursing home. She died in hospital at Malvern on 14 February 1943 and was cremated.

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