1. Alice Vickery was an English physician, campaigner for women's rights, and the first British woman to qualify as a chemist and pharmacist.
21 Facts About Alice Vickery
1. 2.
Alice Vickery joined her family in London in 1861 and founded employment as a pupil teacher.
3.
Alice Vickery began her medical career at the Ladies' Medical College in 1869.
4.
In 1873, Alice Vickery obtained a midwife's degree from the Obstetrical Society.
5.
Alice Vickery became fluent in French, later publishing translations of important French works through organisations such as the National British Women's Temperance Association's magazine Woman's Signal.
6.
Alice Vickery returned to England in 1877, after the King and Queen's College of Physicians, Ireland, refused to recognise her previous qualifications.
7.
Alice Vickery became an early member of the Malthusian League and an outspoken supporter of birth control after the trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, who were arrested for publishing a book about contraception in 1877.
8.
Alice Vickery had to temporarily withdraw from the League because the London Medical School for Women did not approve of her activities.
9.
Alice Vickery resumed membership in 1880, when she obtained her degree, and spent the following decades lecturing about birth control as a key element to the emancipation of women.
10.
Alice Vickery felt that the organisation "did not go far enough" until it started advocating free love.
11.
Alice Vickery delivered a talk to the Actresses Franchise League on "The Injustices and Inequalities of Marriage Laws", sharing a platform with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
12.
Alice Vickery was successively a member of the National Society for Women's Suffrage, the Women's Social and Political Union, and the Women's Freedom League, and was president of the Herne Hill and West Norwood WFL branch.
13.
Alice Vickery participated in demonstrations, wrote for the feminist periodical Shafts, was a WFL delegate to the Congress of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance in Amsterdam in 1908, boycotted the 1911 census and donated generously to suffrage causes, but the main focus of her political campaigning continued to be birth control.
14.
Alice Vickery's son Charles Vickery Drysdale was a founding member of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage in 1907.
15.
Alice Vickery founded the Women's branch of the International Malthusian League in 1904.
16.
Alice Vickery instructed the working class women of south-east London in birth control methods, after an invitation by Rotherhithe social worker Anna Martin.
17.
In 1921 Alice Vickery resigned from her position as president of the Malthusian League due to ill health.
18.
Alice Vickery moved to Brighton in 1923 to be near her elder son.
19.
Alice Vickery regularly addressed meetings of the local branch of the Women's Freedom League and became president.
20.
Alice Vickery died of pneumonia on 12 January 1929, a few days after delivering an address that became her final public presentation.
21.
Alice Vickery was buried with Charles Robert Drysdale in Brookwood Cemetery.