Eleanor Rathbone

12 May 1872 – 2 January 1946

British women's right campaigner, social scientist, politician and humanitarian.

 

All suffering is individual suffering; there is no such thing as collective suffering. All responsibility is individual responsibility; everyone in the world is responsible for every calamity that happens in the world if he or she has left undone anything he could have done.

 

In my view, militancy… came within an inch of wrecking the suffrage movement, perhaps for a generation.

Quoted in R. Strachey, Our Freedom, 1924

 

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