The first payments were made under the Family Allowances Act on this date, which would've come as a great relief to Eleanor Rathbone MP if she hadn't died in January - she'd been campaigning for what is now called child benefit since 1918. But then, she was used to being ahead of her time: one of her first speeches in parliament was about Female Genital Mutilation, and in 1942 she tried to get the British government to admit what it knew about the extermination of Jews in occupied Europe.
At her death, obituaries around the globe described her as one of the most effective politicians, and amongst the most significant feminists, of her era. Why is she almost forgotten today?
Eleanor Florence Rathbone was born in 1872 into an extended Liverpool family of social reformers, philanthropists and intellectuals. Her dad was a businessman and a Liberal MP. She had ten siblings, which sounds like a sufficiency but in fact her childhood was rather solitary; Eleanor's sisters were older, and her brothers were away at boarding school.
Her mother wanted her to be a debutante, but with her father's approval she went to Cambridge University to study classics. There she joined with other young feminists to form a discussion circle calling itself the Associated Prigs.
After college, Eleanor's options proved to be disappointingly limited. She became active in women's suffrage groups, took up voluntary social work, and investigated the notorious dock labour scheme along with her father. He died when she was 30, and his will left her financially independent - in itself a somewhat radical and controversial thing for a father to do.
Eleanor became her father's political heir - sort of. Breaking with Rathbone tradition, she refused to identify as a Liberal, partly because of that party's hypocritical opposition to votes for women. So it was as a lifelong independent (a political label which for once actually meant what it said) that she became prominent, and gradually pre-eminent, in Liverpudlian public life.
One of her chief obsessions from that time onwards was the idea, born from methodical real-life study, that much child poverty could be avoided if some way were found to put money directly into the hands of poor mothers. She won the support of the seamen's union for a pioneering scheme in which part of the men's wages could be paid direct to their wives, but this distinctly non-Liberal Rathbone was increasingly looking towards state intervention. Even before the Great War, she was arguing for state pensions for widowed mothers.
She became the first woman elected to Liverpool City Council, holding her seat from 1910 to 1935. She entered parliament in 1929, as the member for Combined English Universities - a bizarre notional constituency, made up of the graduates of every English university other than Oxford, Cambridge and London (which had their own MPs.) It wasn't abolished until 1950.
Standing as an independent and "as a woman," Rathbone took the seat easily and held it comfortably until her death. She was enormously skilled at parliamentary work, achieving reforms in many areas of policy, despite her positions often being controversial and out of step with the political consensus. She took up the cause of anti-fascism early on, making enemies on the government benches by opposing appeasement and urging Britain to be open to refugees and to support the Spanish government against Franco.
Admirers and opponents alike considered her the cleverest person in the Commons, and lived in fear of receiving a "maternal spanking" from her; most of the senior political figures of the time suffered that fate eventually, being on the end of a verbal evisceration in the chamber. She never held office, because she never joined a party, but she probably had more impact on the laws of the nation than most government ministers ever manage.
Eleanor doesn't seem to have had anything much that might be described as a private life. Her only hobby was chain-smoking. She never married, or ever had a romantic relationship with anyone as far as is known. She had no interest in sex. Nor was she much of a one for letting her hair down with the girls. But she did spend her last decades sharing a house in London with her one close friend, a fellow campaigner, in what has sometimes been described as a kind of platonic marriage, and a happy and successful one.
Eleanor Rathbone hated personal publicity, preferring to work anonymously behind the scenes wherever possible. She was horribly embarrassed when, on the day the child benefit legislation finally passed into law, the House of Commons rose to cheer her. She always declined honours, and was appalled at the suggestion that she should have her portrait painted. She died suddenly of a heart attack, just a few months after seeing her final victory in the child benefit struggle.
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Sources:
https://eleanorrathbonetrust.org.uk/
www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/parliamentary-collections/eleanor-rathbone/eleanor-rathbone/
www.some.ox.ac.uk/news/changing-our-world-for-the-better-eleanor-rathbone-at-150/
www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n13/r.w.-johnson/associated-prigs
https://revenuebenefits.org.uk/child-benefit/policy/where_it_all_started/