| Bessie Drysdale | |
| Birth Date: | 1871 |
| Birth Place: | Hereford, England |
| Occupation: | Teacher, activist, and writer |
| Years Active: | 1907–1950 |
| Organization: | Malthusian League, Women's Social and Political Union, Women's Freedom League |
| Known For: | Birth control campaigning and suffrage activism |
| Spouse: | Charles Vickery Drysdale |
Bessie Drysdale (née Ingram Edwards, 1871–1950) was a British teacher, suffragette activist, birth control campaigner, eugenicist and writer. She was a member of the Women’s Social and Political Union’s (WSPU) National Executive Committee and secretary of the Malthusian League.
Drysdale was born in 1871 in Hereford.[1] She worked as a teacher at Stockwell College in South London.[2]
She married Charles Vickery Drysdale, whose parents were Charles Robert Drysdale and Alice Vickery.[3] He was an electrical engineer, eugenicist, and social reformer, and was a founder member of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage (MLWS). The couple had one daughter called Eva Drysdale who died in 1914, aged 13, and an adopted son.
Drysdale was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU).[4] She was one of the 52 women arrested during a suffragette march to the House of Commons on 14 February 1907 and spent 21 days in Holloway Prison.[5] Later in 1907, Drysdale left the WSPU to join the breakaway group the Women's Freedom League (WFL). In 1908 she attended the congress of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in Stockholm, Sweden, as the WFL delegate. Her husband also attended to represent the MLWS.[6]
When the 1911 census was taken, Drysdale participated in the suffragette boycott and wrote on her form: “as the Government refuses me a vote and as I am not therefore recognised as a citizen, I refuse to perform the duties of one in giving the information required by the Government”. She signed as a member of the WFL.
Drysdale left the WFL in April 1912 to campaign for women's enfranchisement independently. During this time she also wrote for the short lived radical feminist magazine The Freewoman (1911-1913), which covered topics including sexuality, women's rights, motherhood and marriage.[7] [8]
Drysdale believed that the limitation of family size was the "lever for individual and social betterment," "a cure for social ills" and key to achieving women's emancipation.[9] From 1911 to 1923 Drysdale was secretary of the British eugenics and family planning organisation, the Malthusian League. She was also a member of the Eugenics Society.[10] Drysdale was one of the most prominent female members of these organisations and often highlighted the erasure of women's bodies and opinions in discourse about reproduction, through her writing and talks.
During the First World War, Drysdale published leaflets concerning the need to reduce the birth-rate during war shortages. She continued writing after the war, and attacked collectivism and socialism in her 1920 pamphlet "Labour Troubles and Birth Control".[11] In 1923 she ended an article with the line "working men and women look to yourselves, and get rid of poverty by refusing to breed it."[12] She has been described as "virulently anti-socialist".[13]
When the post-war Ministry of Health committed £1,100,000 to maternity care and child welfare programmes, Drysdale opposed the measure. She argued that the middle class was already overburdened with taxation to support the lower classes who created their own conditions by having too many children instead of adopting family planning methods. She wondered how long parents of small families would be expected to allow the poor to "solve their endless crises at the public expense".[14] She also wrote negatively about that areas of poor housing, stating that "slums are to a great extent made and constantly inhabited by natural slum types."[15]
Also after the war, Drysdale personally campaigned about family planning on a motor car tour,[16] and arranged meetings across Britain held by the American birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger.[17] Bessie gave Margaret advice about how to dress, telling her that the more radical a persons ideas the more conservatively they should dress.[18] They attended an internal conference of the Malthusian League together in Holland in 1921.[19]
In 1922, Drysdale and her husband founded the Walworth Women's Welfare Centre. This was one of the first birth control clinics in the country.[20]
Drysdale continued campaigning until she died in 1950.