Social Reformer
Marie Stopes
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Louisa Stevenson
Mary Lily Walker
Mary Lily Walker was one of Dundee University College's first woman entrants, studying Latin, Maths, Biology and Chemistry.
She became aware of the appalling living conditions of Dundee's poor. She joined the Dundee Social Union.
She founded Grey Lodge Settlement as part of the University Settlement movement. She set up baby clinics, health visitors, school dinners and children’s convalescent holidays.
She died days before her 50th birthday.
Mrs Bramwell Booth
Florence was born in Blaina, Monmouthshire, South Wales on 12th September 1861. Her parents were Isobel Soper, a Doctor, and Jenny Levick. She had two sisters and a brother, all younger. When she was 9 years old her mother died and she lived with one of her aunts until her father remarried. She was a gifted musician and had an active childhood.
Florence joined the Salvation Army in 1880 and worked alongside Bramwell's sister Catherine in France.
Millicent Fanny St Clair Erskine
Founder of the Sutherland Benefit Nursing Association, the Sutherland Technical School and the Sutherland Gaelic Association. During the First World War she established and ran the Millicent Sutherland Ambulance, for which she was awarded the French Croix de Guerre and Belgian Royal Red Cross.
Josephine Butler
Josephine Elizabeth Grey was born on 13 April 1828 in Milfield, Northumberland, to John Grey (a cousin of Earl Grey) and his wife Hannah Annett. Educated at home, she was strongly influenced by her father’s passion for social reform and hatred of injustice. She married George Butler, then a tutor at Oxford, in 1852 with whom she shared many concerns, including the need for the abolition of slavery, and better rights for marginalised women.
Flora Stevenson
Flora Stevenson was born in Glasgow...
In 1899 a new school at Comely Bank in Edinburgh was named the Flora Stevenson Primary School in her memory, now also home to the City of Edinburgh Music School.
Mary Crudelius
Mary Crudelius was the daughter of Mary Alexander and William M’Lean from Dumfriesshire, merchant. She was born in Bury, Lancashire, and educated partly at Miss Turnbull’s boarding school in Edinburgh. In 1861, she married Rudolph Crudelius, a German wool merchant who was working in Leith, and they had two daughters, Maud and Mary.
Catherine Spence
Catherine Helen Spence was born in Melrose, the daughter of Helen Brodie, and David Spence, banker, lawyer and clerk. The fifth of eight children, she began her education in Melrose, then, due to her father’s ruinous investments the family emigrating to South Australia in 1839. There she worked as a governess, and later ran her own school.
She wrote several novels, the first of which, Clara Morison (1854), tells the story of a young Scottish orphan making her way in South Australia.
Mary Burton
Mary Burton was born in Aberdeen but moved to Edinburgh in 1832 with her widowed mother and brother. She never married, but raised her orphaned nephews and nieces, and was educated by her mother. She persuaded the Watt Institution and School of Arts (forerunner of Heriot-Watt University) to open its classes to female students in 1869, and became its first woman director in 1874.