Name Ray Strachey Role Politician | ||
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Died July 16, 1940, London, United Kingdom Parents Mary Berenson, Benjamin Francis Conn Costelloe Grandparents Hannah Whitall Smith, Robert Pearsall Smith Books Frances Willard - her life and w, Keigwin's Rebellion (1683‑4, Keigwin's Rebellion 1683‑4: A, "The Cause": A Short Hist | ||
Great-grandparents John M. Whitall | ||
Ray Strachey, born Rachel Pearsall Conn Costelloe (4 June 1887 London – 16 July 1940), was a British feminist politician and writer.
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Early life
She was the elder of the two girls in her family. Her younger sister was Karin Stephen, née Costelloe, who married Adrian Stephen, Virginia Woolf's younger brother, in 1914. Ray was educated at Kensington high school and at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she achieved third class in part one of the mathematical tripos (1908).
Career
For most of her life, Strachey worked for women's suffrage organisations. Most of her publications are non-fiction and deal with suffrage issues. She is most often remembered for her book The Cause (1928). Papers of Rachel Pearsall Conn Strachey (also known as Ray Strachey, née Costelloe) (1887–1940) are held at The Women's Library at London Metropolitan University. She worked closely with Millicent Fawcett, sharing her Liberal feminist values and opposing any attempt to integrate the suffrage movement with the Labour Party. In 1915 she became parliamentary secretary of the NUWSS, serving in this role until 1920. After the Great War when women were granted the vote and permitted to stand for parliament, she stood as an Independent parliamentary candidate at Brentford and Chiswick on the General Elections in 1918, 1922 and 1923, without success.
She rejected the attempt by Eleanor Rathbone to establish a broad-based feminist programme in the 1920s. In 1931 she became parliamentary secretary to Britain's first woman MP, Lady Astor, and in 1935 the head of the Women's Employment Federation. She also made regular radio broadcasts for the BBC.
Family
She married at Cambridge on 31 May 1911 the civil servant Oliver Strachey, with whom she had two children, Barbara (born 1912, later a writer) and Christopher (born 1916, later a pioneer computer scientist). Oliver Strachey was the elder brother of the biographer Lytton Strachey of the Bloomsbury group; other siblings in the Strachey family included psychoanalyst James Strachey, novelist Dorothy Bussy, educationist Pernel Strachey. Ray's mother-in-law was Jane Maria Strachey, a well-known author and supporter of women's suffrage who co-led the suffragist Mud March of 1907 in London.
Death
She died in the Royal Free Hospital in London in her early fifties of heart failure, following an operation to remove a fibroid tumor.