11 Facts About Isabella Tod

Isabella Maria Susan Tod was a Scottish-born campaigner in Ireland for women's civil and political equality.

Isabella Tod's father was James Banks Tod, a merchant from Edinburgh.

Isabella Tod was a contributor to the Dublin University Magazine, an independent literary and political magazine; the Presbyterian newspaper, The Banner of Ulster ; and, in the 1880s, the Northern Whig, the liberal rival to the Belfast News Letter.

In 1868, Tod was the only woman to give evidence to a select committee inquiry on the reform of the married women's property law in 1868.

In 1874, Margaret Byers Isabella Tod formed the Belfast Women's Temperance Association, and together they campaigned for secondary and tertiary education for girls.

Isabella Tod had helped Byers establish The Ladies' Collegiate School Belfast, and was instrumental in the foundation of the Queen's Institute Dublin, Alexandra College Dublin, and the Belfast Ladies' Institute.

Advancing, in The Education of Girls of the Middle Classes, a programme of education to prepare women for gainful employment, Isabella Tod lobbied for the inclusion of girls within the terms of the Intermediate Education act of 1878.

When, in 1888 the Women's Liberal Federation split on the issue of Irish Home Rule, Isabella Tod, citing the threat of a socially-conservative majority in an Irish parliament, co-founded the Irish Women's Liberal Unionist Association.

Isabella Tod believed "that petty legislature of the character which would be inevitable" under home rule would block further advances for women: "I perceived that [it] would be the stoppage of the whole work of social reform for which we had laboured so hard".

Isabella Tod died at 71 Botanic Avenue, Belfast on 8 December 1896 from pulmonary tuberculosis.

Isabella Tod is buried in Balmoral Cemetery in South Belfast.