Alice Caroline Franklin OBE was a British feminist, secretary of the Jewish League for Woman Suffrage and The Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women, and a key figure in the running of the Townswomen's Guild.
12 Facts About Alice Franklin
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Alice Franklin was born to Arthur Ellis Franklin and Caroline Franklin, the second of six children.
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The Franklin family was a prominent member of the Anglo-Jewish "cousinhood", and the family was well-off and well-connected.
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Alice Franklin was educated at Notting Hill and Ealing High School, a private girls' school, and upon leaving school joined her mother at the Care Committee.
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Caroline Franklin was a member of the Jewish League for Woman Suffrage, and Alice followed her mother here too: in the 1913 Suffrage Annual and Women's Who's Who, she is recorded as the group's secretary.
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In 1916, Alice Franklin rose to the role of Head of Section.
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The Society for the Oversea Settlement of British Women was set up in 1919 in the wake of World War I to solve the problem of these "surplus women", and Alice Franklin became the secretary of the society.
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Alice Franklin was friends with her cousin Eva Hubback, Parliamentary Secretary and later President of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, and began to campaign for the organization.
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Alice Franklin's siblings were; in order, Jacob, Cecil, Hugh, Helen and Ellis.
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Alice Franklin never married, and according to Mary Stott was known in the organization for her masculine dress and appearance and for making cheeky comments to married women about the nuisance posed by their husbands.
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Some biographers have said that Alice Franklin was a lesbian and was, for the era, relatively open about her orientation and dislike of men, although the evidence for this claim has been criticized.
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Brian Harrison recorded 3 oral history interviews about Alice Franklin, including some conversation about her brother Hugh, as part of the Suffrage Interviews project, titled Oral evidence on the suffragette and suffragist movements: the Brian Harrison interviews.