Bessie Drysdale was a British teacher, suffragette activist, birth control campaigner, eugenicist and writer.
18 Facts About Bessie Drysdale
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Bessie Drysdale was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union's National Executive Committee and secretary of the Malthusian League.
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Bessie Drysdale worked as a teacher at Stockwell College in South London.
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Bessie Drysdale married Charles Vickery Drysdale in 1898, whose parents were Charles Robert Drysdale and Alice Vickery.
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Bessie Drysdale was an electrical engineer, fellow eugenicist, and social reformer, and was a founder member of the Men's League for Women's Suffrage.
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The couple had one daughter called Eva Drysdale who died in 1914, aged 13, and an adopted son.
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Bessie Drysdale was a member of the Women's Social and Political Union.
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Bessie Drysdale 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.
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Bessie Drysdale left the WFL in April 1912 to campaign for women's enfranchisement independently.
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Bessie 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.
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Bessie Drysdale became a leader of the British birth control movement, advocating for women's access to abortion.
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From 1911 to 1923 Bessie Drysdale was secretary of the British eugenics and family planning organisation, the Malthusian League.
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Bessie 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.
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Bessie Drysdale continued writing after the war, and attacked collectivism and socialism in her 1920 pamphlet "Labour Troubles and Birth Control".
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Bessie Drysdale 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.
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Bessie Drysdale wondered how long parents of small families would be expected to allow the poor to "solve their endless crises at the public expense".
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Also after the war, Bessie Drysdale personally campaigned about family planning on a motor car tour, and arranged meetings across Britain held by the American birth control campaigner Margaret Sanger.
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Bessie Drysdale gave Margaret advice about how to dress, telling her that the more radical a persons ideas the more conservatively they should dress.