Helena Swanwick

Helena Lucy Maria Swanwick, née Sickert CH (1864, Munich – 16 November 1939) was a British feminist and pacifist.

Helena Sickert was the only daughter of the painter Oswald Sickert (technically of Danish nationality, though he always considered himself German and did not speak Danish) and the Englishwoman Eleanor Louisa Henry, an illegitimate daughter of astronomer Richard Sheepshanks, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge and an Irish dancer. Helena's brother was the well-known painter Walter Sickert. As a schoolgirl, reading John Stuart Mill's On the Subjection of Women influenced her to become a feminist. She was educated at Girton College, Cambridge, and she married the Manchester University lecturer Frederick Swanwick in 1888.

Helena Swanwick worked as a journalist, initially as a sort of protegée of C.P. Scott, and wrote articles for the Manchester Guardian. In 1906 she joined the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies in preference to the Women's Social and Political Union, because of her belief in non-violence. She quickly became prominent in the National Union, and was editor of its weekly journal, The Common Cause from 1909–1912. She remained on the NUWSS Executive until 1915. She was also a member of the Labour Party.

On the outbreak of World War I, she began campaigning for a negotiated peace. In 1915, together with such other prominent suffragists as Catherine Marshall and Agnes Maude Royden, she resigned from the National Union over its refusal to send delegates to the International Women's Congress at the Hague. She was one of the founding members of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. From 1914 she had already been active in the Union of Democratic Control. G. K. Chesterton would criticise her pacifism in the 2 September 1916 issue of Illustrated London News:

...
Wikipedia