#british-women — Public Fediverse posts

Beatrix Potter

Everybody remembers Peter Rabbit. Personally, I always preferred the duck.

Jemima Puddle-Duck may have possessed all the survival instincts of a damp tea towel, but at least she had ambition. Peter nicked vegetables, lost his clothes and became an international merchandising empire. Jemima set off to find somewhere private to lay her eggs and nearly got herself eaten by a fox. Neither, however, was half as interesting as the woman who created them.

Beatrix Potter has suffered rather badly from her own success. mention her name and up pops the neat little Victorian lady surrounded by rabbits in blue jackets, hedgehogs in aprons and mice apparently capable of maintaining considerably better households than most of us. It’s all terribly quaint. It is also only a fraction of the story.

Helen Beatrix Potter was born in London in 1866 into a wealthy family. Like many girls of her class, she was educated mainly at home and spent much of her childhood away from other children. Her younger brother Bertram eventually went away to school, while Beatrix remained under the supervision of governesses.

What she did have was animals. Lots of animals.

The Potter household accumulated rabbits, mice, birds, bats, lizards, snakes, frogs and various other creatures, many of which Beatrix and Bertram drew and studied. Some were pets. Some were specimens. Victorian natural history wasn’t always particularly sentimental, and Beatrix’s interest in the natural world went much further than tying a ribbon around a bunny and giving it a name.

She was a very talented observer. During family holidays in Scotland and the Lake District she drew plants, animals, insects and fungi with extraordinary accuracy, and it was fungi that really caught her attention.

Yes, before Peter Rabbit, there were mushrooms. Hundreds of them. Beatrix spent around a decade collecting, studying and painting fungi. She eventually produced more than 350 fungal illustrations, many of them extraordinarily precise. She wasn’t just painting attractive toadstools, either. She became fascinated by how fungi reproduced, experimented with germinating spores and observed them under a microscope. By 1896, she was successfully growing spores from fungal species on glass plates and recording what happened. This was serious natural history. In 1897, under the name Helen B. Potter, she submitted a scientific paper called On the Germination of the Spores of the Agaricineae to the Linnean Society of London. And this is where we need to dispose of one particularly persistent piece of Beatrix Potter folklore.

You will often read that the Linnean Society refused to allow Beatrix to present her own paper because she was a woman. That is not quite what happened. Women couldn’t become fellows of the Society until 1905, so there was unquestionably a barrier between Potter and the male scientific establishment. But authors did not ordinarily read their own papers at Society meetings anyway. Beatrix’s paper was read by the mycologist George Massee on 1 April 1897 and discussed by those present.

It wasn’t rejected either. The Society’s records show that Potter withdrew it herself a week later. She subsequently wrote that Massee had told her it had been well received but required more work before publication. For whatever reason, she never completed those revisions and the paper disappeared. So Beatrix Potter was not the author of a revolutionary scientific paper thrown out by a roomful of horrified Victorian men. The real story is more complicated, and considerably more interesting.

There is another myth attached to her scientific career: that she discovered lichens are a partnership between fungi and algae. She didn’t. That theory had already been proposed by the Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener, and evidence from Potters own coded journal suggests that she actually favoured a different interpretation. A mistranslated footnote later helped turn her into the forgotten discoverer of something she hadn’t discovered at all.

But she doesn’t need embellishment anyway. Her real work was impressive enough. Her strength lay in extraordinarily careful observation. Some structures visible in her fungal paintings were not formally described by scientists until decades later. Her illustrations were accurate enough to be useful in identifying species, and substantial collections of her botanical work survive today. It seems odd looking at them now. We know Beatrix Potter so completely through fluffy animals in waistcoats that seeing page after page of meticulously observed fungi feels like discovering that Enid Blyton spent her weekends rebuilding motorbikes.

Then came the bloody rabbit.

Peter Rabbit first appeared in an illustrated letter written in September 1893 to five-year-old Noel Moore, the son of Potter’s former governess Annie Moore. Noel was ill, and Beatrix entertained him with the story of four little rabbits called Flopsy, Mopsy, Cotton-tail and Peter. Years later, encouraged to turn the story into a book, she offered it to publishers. They weren’t particularly interested, but Beatrix was. So she published it herself. In December 1901, she paid for 250 copies of The Tale of Peter Rabbit to be printed. Another 250 followed in February 1902.

Then Frederick Warne & Co., which had previously passed on the book, reconsidered. The commercial edition appeared in October 1902 with an initial printing of 8000 copies. Another 12000 were printed the following month. Then another 8220 in December. Beatrix’s reaction to the whole ridiculous business was lovely:

“The public must be fond of rabbits!”

And indeed they were, because the bloody rabbit had gone beserk. Peter Rabbit became enormously successful, and Beatrix proved to have an extremely sharp understanding of what we would now call branding. She involved herself closely in the production of her books, scrutinising proofs, working on covers and title pages and even making suggestions about bindings. Then she went after merchandise.

In 1903 she created a Peter Rabbit doll and registered it’s design. Games and other products followed. This wasn’t an author sitting at home quietly while someone else exploited her characters. Beatrix Potter knew exactly what Peter was worth. Peter may have been stealing Mr McGregor’s lettuces, but Beatrix was building a business. More importantly, this business brought her independence. In 1905, using money earned through her books, she bought Hill Top, a farm at Near Sawrey in the Lake District. The same year should have been one of the happiest of her life, her editor, Norman Warne, proposed marriage in July. Beatrix accepted despite opposition from her parents. Only weeks later, Norman died from pernicious anaemia.

Hill Top became both a refuge and the beginning of an entirely new life. Beatrix continued writing, but increasingly found her attention drawn towards farming, land and the Lake District itself. She began buying property – and this is where the little old lady with the rabbits becomes seriously formidable. Beatrix became deeply involved with Herdwick sheep, the tough native breed associated with the Lakeland Fells. But she didn’t just acquire a picturesque flock to decorate the scenery. Beatrix learned about them, she bred them, she showed them, she won prizes. And she became sufficiently knowledgeable and respected to judge sheep herself.

Her standing within the farming community eventually became remarkable. She was elected president of the Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association – the first woman to ever receive that honour – although she died before she could take up the position. By this time, Beatrix Potter had become something very different from the image most of us inherited from the children’s books. She was a farmer, and she was buying farms for a reason.

Beatrix had become increasingly concerned for the future of the Lake District landscape. She understood that preserving it didn’t simply mean stopping somebody from putting an ugly building in front of a nice view. The traditional breeds, farming practices, people working the land and the farms themselves all mattered. She worked closely with the National Trust and had a long friendship with Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, one of it’s founders and an early supporter of her work. Rawnsley had even helped encourage Fredrick Warne to reconsider the little book about the troublesome rabbit.

As Beatrix’s wealth grew, she used it to acquire land. Lot’s of land. And when she died in December 1943, she left around 4000 acres to the National Trust, along with farms, cottages and flocks of Herdwick sheep. And you have to admit that is some magnificent achievement. A woman writes a story about a kleptomaniac rabbit, the rabbit makes her money, she uses the money to buy farms, then she leaves the farms to the nation. Peter Rabbit stole radishes. Beatrix Potter bought mountains.

It’s quite sad though, how the edges got sanded off her story. The illustrations are nothing less that beautiful, the stories are charming, the animals are unforgettable. But the woman behind all of that was considerably more complicated than the cosy image that survived her. She was an artist that took natural history seriously, a meticulous scientific illustrator and enthusiastic mycologist. She was a woman attempting scientific work in institutions where women still couldn’t participate on equal terms with men.

Beatrix was a writer who refused to leave a rejected book sitting in a drawer. She was a businesswoman who understood the possibilities of merchandising before merchandising was really a thing. A farmer who earned the respect of people who knew a lot more about sheep than children’ publishing. And a conservationist who used the fortune generated by her imagination to protect the landscape that she loved.

Even her apparent eccentricities make considerably more sense when you stop looking at her as the lady who drew rabbits and start looking at her as a Victorian naturalist. The animals, the specimens, the fungi, the microscopic observations, the endless drawings – they weren’t odd little sidelines to the children’s books, they came from the same place. Beatrix looked closely at things. She noticed how animals moved, how fungi grew, how landscapes worked and how quickly those landscapes could disappear. The she drew them, wrote about them, bought them or, occasionally, put them in tiny jackets.

And she also gave us Jemima Puddle-Duck, who remains proof that you can have absolutely no common sense whatsoever and still become an literary icon. She is an inspiration to us all.

Peter Rabbit can keep his stolen lettuces. I’ll take the duck.

And Beatrix can keep the Lake District

Eglantyne Jebb

There are some names that really ought to be better known. Eglantyne Jebb is one of them.

If the name means anything at all to you, you may know her as the founder of Save the Children. That alone would be quite an achievement, but it barely scratches the surface of what this extraordinary British woman actually did. Because Eglantyne didn’t just establish a charity. She helped change the way that the world thought about children.

Born in Shropshire on 25 August 1876, Eglantyne grew up in a comfortable and socially conscious family. Her mother, also called Eglantyne, was involved in charitable work, and the idea that those fortunate enough to have money and education had some responsibility towards those who did not was part of the world in which the younger Eglantyne was raised. She studied history at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, and afterwards trained as a teacher.

She hated it.

Which is probably worth mentioning, because we have a habit of tidying remarkable women into neat little biographies in which they appear to know exactly what they are doing from the age of twelve. Eglantyne didn’t, teaching wasn’t for her so she left it behind. Instead, while living in Cambridge, she became involved with the Charity Organisation Society and began investigating poverty. Not just feeling sorry for people. She investigated it. She visited families, gathered information and examined the conditions in which people were actually living. In 1906 she published Cambridge: A Study in Social Questions, based upon this research. It was an approach that would remain important throughout her life. Charity work was useful, certainly, but sympathy without understanding just wasn’t enough.

Then came the First World War. And afterwards came something which appalled her.

The fighting officially ended in November 1918, but the Allied blockade of Germany continued into the following year. Across Germany and Austria, civilians were suffering from severe shortages. Children, inevitably, were among those paying the price. To many British people these were the children of the enemy. To Eglantyne, they were children. That distinction – or rather her refusal to make it – is probably the key to everything that followed. Alongside her sister, Dorothy Buxton, Eglantyne became involved with the Fight the Famine movement. They wanted the blockade lifted and food allowed to reach starving civilians in Europe.

In 1919, Eglantyne took to Trafalgar Square with leaflets showing the effects of starvation on children. The headline was not subtle:

“Our Blockade Has Caused This – Millions of Children Are Starving To Death”

She was arrested. And there is something wonderfully ballsy about this part of her story. Britain had just emerged from a devastating war with Germany. Anti-German feeling had not disappeared overnight, and here was an Englishwoman publicly asking people to care about German and Austrian children. Eglantyne was prosecuted and fined £5.

Then something rather lovely happened. The prosecuting counsel was apparently so impressed by her argument that he offered to pay the fine himself. That £5 is regarded by Save the Children as its first donation. Eglantyne and Dorothy realised that protesting was not enough. Children needed food, medicine and practical assistance, and they needed it immediately. In May 1919 the Save the Children Fund was established.

Even then, persuading the British public to donate money to children in countries Britain had so recently been fighting was not an easy sell. Eglantyne was asking people to look beyond borders, governments and blame and see hungry children who had played no part in creating the war that had devastated their lives. And it worked.

The organisation rapidly expanded its work. In 1920 the International Save the Children Union was established in Geneva, and when famine devastated Russia in 1921, Save the Children launched another huge relief effort. A ship, the SS Torcello, was loaded with around 600 tons of food and medical supplies. During the Russian relief operation, meals funded through Save the Children were eventually feeding hundreds of thousands of people.

But Eglantyne had begun thinking beyond emergency relief. Feeding a starving child was essential. But why had the child been allowed to starve in the first place? Saving children after catastrophe was necessary. Could the world agree that children were entitled to protection before catastrophe swallowed them?

Today, the phrase Children’s Rights seems perfectly ordinary. In Eglantyne’s time, it was anything but. Children were generally considered dependants for whom adults were responsible. Eglantyne pushed the idea further.

Children should not have to depend on the goodwill of adults. They had rights of their own.

In 1923, she drafted a short document containing five principles. It became known as the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, or the Geneva Declaration. There was nothing complicated about it. Children should be given what they need to develop. Hungry children should be fed. Sick children should be cared for. Children should receive help in times of distress. They should be protected from exploitation.

Simple ideas. Revolutionary implications.

On 26 September 1924, the League of Nations adopted the Declaration of Geneva. Its opening declared that humanity owed the child “The best it had to give.”

Let’s just take a minute to think about that.

A woman born in Victorian England had helped persuade an international organisation representing nations across the world to formally recognise that the welfare of children was not simply a private family matter or an occasional subject for charity. Humanity itself had responsibilities towards them. A woman. Helped to convince them of that.

In the words of M People – “What have you done today to make you feel proud?”

Eglantyne did not live long enough to see where that idea would eventually lead. She suffered from serious thyroid problems and died in Geneva in 1928. She was only 52.

But the document survived her.

The United Nations adopted an expanded Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959. Thirty years later came the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, setting out children’s civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights across 54 articles. Eglantyne’s five simple principles had helped to lay the foundations for something vast.

And Save the Children survived too. What began in the ruins of the First World War became an international organisation still operating over a century later. In 2025 alone, Save the Children reported reaching 37.8 million children in 92 countries. Yet Eglantyne Jebb herself remains strangely absent from the collection of names we reach for when we talk about influential British women or Strong Feminine Energy.

Maybe part of the reason for that is because her work sits in that awkward space between activism, humanitarianism and political reform. She didn’t discover an element or fly an aeroplane or lead an army. There is no single dramatic moment into which her achievement can be squeezed. She looked at something society had largely accepted and said that it wasn’t good enough. Children should not starve because adults had gone to war. They shouldn’t suffer because they were born on the wrong side of a border. Helping them should not depend on someone feeling charitable and their protection should not be regarded as a favour. It should be their right.

In 2026, 150 years after her birth, millions of people know the organisation she created. Millions more live in countries which have formally accepted the principle she helped to introduce to international politics: that children possess rights simply because they are children. Yet comparatively, few know her name.

So let’s fix that.

Eglantyne Jebb.

Shropshire woman. Failed teacher. Social researcher. Campaigner. Lawbreaker. Humanitarian.

And the woman who showed the world that its children were owed something better.

A Little Something You Can Do

Writing about Eglantyne Jebb feels particularly timely.

At Buxton for Books this year, I met author Zoe Sharp. Next month, she will be driving a truck carrying supplies and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

Eglantyne believed that feeling sympathy for people in desperate circumstances wasn’t enough when there was something practical that could be done to help them. More than a century later, that seems like a pretty good principle to live by.

If you’d like to support Zoe and help towards the journey and the aid she is taking with her, you can find her JustGiving page here:

CONVOY4UKRAINE

Nobody is under any obligation to donate, obviously. But if this article has left you wondering what you can do today, here’s one small answer.

Eglantyne Jebb

There are some names that really ought to be better known. Eglantyne Jebb is one of them.

If the name means anything at all to you, you may know her as the founder of Save the Children. That alone would be quite an achievement, but it barely scratches the surface of what this extraordinary British woman actually did. Because Eglantyne didn’t just establish a charity. She helped change the way that the world thought about children.

Born in Shropshire on 25 August 1876, Eglantyne grew up in a comfortable and socially conscious family. Her mother, also called Eglantyne, was involved in charitable work, and the idea that those fortunate enough to have money and education had some responsibility towards those who did not was part of the world in which the younger Eglantyne was raised. She studied history at Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, and afterwards trained as a teacher.

She hated it.

Which is probably worth mentioning, because we have a habit of tidying remarkable women into neat little biographies in which they appear to know exactly what they are doing from the age of twelve. Eglantyne didn’t, teaching wasn’t for her so she left it behind. Instead, while living in Cambridge, she became involved with the Charity Organisation Society and began investigating poverty. Not just feeling sorry for people. She investigated it. She visited families, gathered information and examined the conditions in which people were actually living. In 1906 she published Cambridge: A Study in Social Questions, based upon this research. It was an approach that would remain important throughout her life. Charity work was useful, certainly, but sympathy without understanding just wasn’t enough.

Then came the First World War. And afterwards came something which appalled her.

The fighting officially ended in November 1918, but the Allied blockade of Germany continued into the following year. Across Germany and Austria, civilians were suffering from severe shortages. Children, inevitably, were among those paying the price. To many British people these were the children of the enemy. To Eglantyne, they were children. That distinction – or rather her refusal to make it – is probably the key to everything that followed. Alongside her sister, Dorothy Buxton, Eglantyne became involved with the Fight the Famine movement. They wanted the blockade lifted and food allowed to reach starving civilians in Europe.

In 1919, Eglantyne took to Trafalgar Square with leaflets showing the effects of starvation on children. The headline was not subtle:

“Our Blockade Has Caused This – Millions of Children Are Starving To Death”

She was arrested. And there is something wonderfully ballsy about this part of her story. Britain had just emerged from a devastating war with Germany. Anti-German feeling had not disappeared overnight, and here was an Englishwoman publicly asking people to care about German and Austrian children. Eglantyne was prosecuted and fined £5.

Then something rather lovely happened. The prosecuting counsel was apparently so impressed by her argument that he offered to pay the fine himself. That £5 is regarded by Save the Children as its first donation. Eglantyne and Dorothy realised that protesting was not enough. Children needed food, medicine and practical assistance, and they needed it immediately. In May 1919 the Save the Children Fund was established.

Even then, persuading the British public to donate money to children in countries Britain had so recently been fighting was not an easy sell. Eglantyne was asking people to look beyond borders, governments and blame and see hungry children who had played no part in creating the war that had devastated their lives. And it worked.

The organisation rapidly expanded its work. In 1920 the International Save the Children Union was established in Geneva, and when famine devastated Russia in 1921, Save the Children launched another huge relief effort. A ship, the SS Torcello, was loaded with around 600 tons of food and medical supplies. During the Russian relief operation, meals funded through Save the Children were eventually feeding hundreds of thousands of people.

But Eglantyne had begun thinking beyond emergency relief. Feeding a starving child was essential. But why had the child been allowed to starve in the first place? Saving children after catastrophe was necessary. Could the world agree that children were entitled to protection before catastrophe swallowed them?

Today, the phrase Children’s Rights seems perfectly ordinary. In Eglantyne’s time, it was anything but. Children were generally considered dependants for whom adults were responsible. Eglantyne pushed the idea further.

Children should not have to depend on the goodwill of adults. They had rights of their own.

In 1923, she drafted a short document containing five principles. It became known as the Declaration of the Rights of the Child, or the Geneva Declaration. There was nothing complicated about it. Children should be given what they need to develop. Hungry children should be fed. Sick children should be cared for. Children should receive help in times of distress. They should be protected from exploitation.

Simple ideas. Revolutionary implications.

On 26 September 1924, the League of Nations adopted the Declaration of Geneva. Its opening declared that humanity owed the child “The best it had to give.”

Let’s just take a minute to think about that.

A woman born in Victorian England had helped persuade an international organisation representing nations across the world to formally recognise that the welfare of children was not simply a private family matter or an occasional subject for charity. Humanity itself had responsibilities towards them. A woman. Helped to convince them of that.

In the words of M People – “What have you done today to make you feel proud?”

Eglantyne did not live long enough to see where that idea would eventually lead. She suffered from serious thyroid problems and died in Geneva in 1928. She was only 52.

But the document survived her.

The United Nations adopted an expanded Declaration of the Rights of the Child in 1959. Thirty years later came the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, adopted in 1989, setting out children’s civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights across 54 articles. Eglantyne’s five simple principles had helped to lay the foundations for something vast.

And Save the Children survived too. What began in the ruins of the First World War became an international organisation still operating over a century later. In 2025 alone, Save the Children reported reaching 37.8 million children in 92 countries. Yet Eglantyne Jebb herself remains strangely absent from the collection of names we reach for when we talk about influential British women or Strong Feminine Energy.

Maybe part of the reason for that is because her work sits in that awkward space between activism, humanitarianism and political reform. She didn’t discover an element or fly an aeroplane or lead an army. There is no single dramatic moment into which her achievement can be squeezed. She looked at something society had largely accepted and said that it wasn’t good enough. Children should not starve because adults had gone to war. They shouldn’t suffer because they were born on the wrong side of a border. Helping them should not depend on someone feeling charitable and their protection should not be regarded as a favour. It should be their right.

In 2026, 150 years after her birth, millions of people know the organisation she created. Millions more live in countries which have formally accepted the principle she helped to introduce to international politics: that children possess rights simply because they are children. Yet comparatively, few know her name.

So let’s fix that.

Eglantyne Jebb.

Shropshire woman. Failed teacher. Social researcher. Campaigner. Lawbreaker. Humanitarian.

And the woman who showed the world that its children were owed something better.

A Little Something You Can Do

Writing about Eglantyne Jebb feels particularly timely.

At Buxton for Books this year, I met author Zoe Sharp. Next month, she will be driving a truck carrying supplies and humanitarian aid to Ukraine.

Eglantyne believed that feeling sympathy for people in desperate circumstances wasn’t enough when there was something practical that could be done to help them. More than a century later, that seems like a pretty good principle to live by.

If you’d like to support Zoe and help towards the journey and the aid she is taking with her, you can find her JustGiving page here:

CONVOY4UKRAINE

Nobody is under any obligation to donate, obviously. But if this article has left you wondering what you can do today, here’s one small answer.

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