• Source: Dorothy Layton (suffragist)

Dorothy Layton, Lady Layton born Eleanor Dorothea Osmaston; 4 October 1887 – 18 March 1959) was an English suffragist and politician.




Life


Layton was born in Hampstead in 1887. She was the first of three children born to the suffragist Eleanor Margaret and Francis Plumptre Beresford Osmaston. Her father was a barrister and they lived in Limpsfield, Surrey. Her parents arranged her education at varios places until a bequest enabled her to attend Julia Huxley's Prior's Field School where she made friends with Julian and Aldous Huxley.
She went on to attend Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1906 where she continued her suffragism by joining the non-militant National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). She also joined the Fabian Society, captained the cricket team, played piano and studied history and economics. She was a member of a group of friends that Virginia Woolf called the "neo-pagans". The group included Rupert Brooke, Helen Verrall, Noël Olivier, Margery Olivier, Bill Hubback, Eva Spielman, Jerry Pinsent and Dolly Rose. She graduated and she would have gained a Cambridge degree in 1909 if she had been a man.
In 1910 she married one of her economics lecturers. They had three children in three years and during those years Dorothy sold the NUWSS paper "Common Cause" each week in Cambridge. She took to public speaking in 1913 during the Great Pilgrimage as suffrage supporters travelled from across the UK to meet in Hyde Park on 26 July. As they walked one of the eight NUWSS routes she would speak in villages as they passed.
Her husband was an active member of the Liberal Party but Dorothy refused to join until 1918 because of their poor support for the suffrage cause. Lloyd George considered her the more radical member of their marriage and their house did not have alcoholic drinks because of her objection to them.
In 1959 she died of cancer and her husband wrote an account of her life. It was published in 1961 with the simple title of Dorothy. He would die in 1966.




References

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