Katherine St John Conway

Katharine Bruce Glasier
Katharine Bruce Glasier c. 1895
Born	Katharine St John Conway (1867-09-25)25 September 1867 Stoke Newington
Died	14 June 1950(1950-06-14) (aged 82) Earby, Lancashire
Nationality	British
Known for	socialist and journalist

Katharine Glasier (25 September 1867 – 14 June 1950) was an English socialist politician, journalist and novelist.

Glasier was born in Stoke Newington as Katharine St John Conway, the second of seven children. Her older brother was Robert Seymour Conway, a classical scholar and comparative philologist. Their father, Samuel Conway, was a Congregationalist minister based at Chipping Ongar, Essex; his wife, Amy (née Curling) came from a well-off family from Stoke Newington.

The family moved to Walthamstow while she was young. She attended Hackney High School for Girls and studied classics at Newnham College, Cambridge with a scholarship, graduating with a degree in the second class. Notwithstanding the practice of Cambridge University, which did not award degrees to women at that time, she appended the usual BA to her name.

Conway became a teacher at Redland High School in Bristol, where she was inspired to join the Bristol Socialist Society after seeing a demonstration by striking female cottonworkers. She quit her job to become a teacher at a board school in Bristol and moved in with Dan Irving where she also had to care for his wife, also joining the Fabian Society. She began lecturing for the organisation, and in 1893 became a founding member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). She was one of the fifteen members and the only woman elected to the ILP's first national administrative council in January 1893.