International Women’s Day (IWD) on March 8 is a global day celebrating the social, economic, cultural, and political achievements of women. The day also marks a call to action for accelerating women’s equality.
The theme of IWD 2021 is ‘Choosing to Challenge’. We can all choose to challenge and call out gender bias and inequality, and can all choose to seek out and celebrate women’s achievements. From challenge comes change, so let’s all choose to challenge.
We pay tribute to and celebrate inspirational Islington women who, over many centuries and across a variety of professions, have ‘Chosen to Challenge’. The contribution from Islington women in international affairs and influence been immense. From Caroline Chisholm to Zaha Hadid, each has accelerated women’s equality and helped towards creating a better and inclusive world.
[Part 4 of 5 of Choosing to Challenge: Islington’s Inspirational Women (1547-2021)]
Mary Tealby (1801-1865)
Founder of the Home for Lost and Starving Dogs (later Battersea Dogs and Cats Home)
Mary Tealby (née Bates) was born in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire and moved to Hull with her husband Robert after their marriage in 1829. She moved to London to nurse her ill mother in the early 1850s, leaving her husband Robert in Hull, and remained with her father and her brother at 20 Victoria Road (now Chillingworth Street), Holloway, after her mother’s death.
Mary founded the Home for Lost and Starving Dogs after becoming distressed at the number of stray and abandoned dogs in London. The home was located in stables behind 15 and 16 Hollingsworth Street (now occupied by Freightliners Farm and Paradise Park) and was opened on 2 October 1860.
Mary died 3 October 1865 leaving the management of the home to her younger brother Edward, who relocated the home to Battersea, south London in 1871. The home still operates today under the name of Battersea Dogs and Cats Home.
An Islington Heritage plaque to Mary Tealby can be seen at Freightliners Farm in Holloway, the former site of the Home for Lost and Starving Dogs.
Caroline Chisholm (1808-1877)
The ’emigrants’ friend’
Caroline Chisholm (née Jones) was born in 1808 at Wooton, Northamptonshire. Caroline married Captain Archibald Chisholm in 1828 and accompanied him to Madras in India, where she set up a school of industry for the daughters of soldiers.
In 1838, Caroline went to Australia where her concern for the welfare of emigrants was such that she promoted a variety of projects to assist them. These included providing housing for single women who travelled to Australia under the bounty system, as well as lending money to assist in setting up businesses.
Through dedication and persistence she established a hostel in a derelict building provided by the governor of New South Wales. This served as an employment agency as well as being her headquarters. By the time she left Australia in 1846 she is said to have assisted 11,000 emigrants.
Upon her return from Australia, Caroline settled in Islington. Her house at 3 Charlton Crescent, now 32 Charlton Place, became her headquarters in England. She set up the Family Colonisation Loan Society to provide assistance to settlers. The Society’s aim was to support emigration by lending half the cost of the fare (the emigrant to provide the other half). After living two years in Australia, an emigrant would be expected to repay the loan. She also held regular meetings at Charlton Crescent to give practical advice to emigrants. In 1847, she gave evidence to the House of Lords Committee investigating the reform of the emigration systems.
A mother of six children, Caroline was a determined, generous and altruistic woman with insight into the the problems of those around her, and skilled in devising practical solutions. She died in Fulham, London in 1877.
- An English Heritage blue plaque to Caroline Chisholm can be seen outside her home at 32 Charlton Place, near the Angel, Islington.
Amelia Edwards (1831-1892)
Egyptologist and writer
Amelia Edwards was born in Colebrook Row, Islington, in 1831. She was the only child of Thomas Edwards , an army officer who later worked for the Provincial Bank of Ireland in London, and Alicia Walpole, eldest daughter of Robert Walpole, an Irish barrister.
Amelia was a quiet child who, until eight years old, was educated at home by her mother and then by private tutors. From an early age, she was an avid reader, while writing stories and poems and developing into a proficient artist. By the age of 14 her stories were being published in periodicals. By this time she lived with her family at 19 Wharton Street, Clerkenwell (now Islington). It was here that she wrote Hand and Glove, reckoned the best of her early novels, alongside a concise history of France and short travelogues based on her later visits to the continent.
During the 1850s and 1860s Amelia travelled extensively throughout Europe, published many accounts of her journeys, as well as several novels and journal articles. She was fluent in French and Italian and described herself as ‘an insatiable traveller’. In 1873, disappointed with the weather in central France, Amelia set off for Egypt. It was a journey that changed the course of her life. She became fascinated with Egypt and this was to dominate her work for the next two decades.
Travelling up the Nile from Cairo to Abu Simbel, she was appalled by the increasing threat directed towards the ancient monuments and artifacts by tourism and modern development. So much so that Amelia became a tireless campaigner for both the preservation and research of ancient Egypt.
She was co-founder of the influential Egypt Exploration Fund (later Egypt Exploration Society). She worked tirelessly for the society, raising funds, lecturing throughout England, and writing about the progress of the fund’s work. She raised sponsorship for the Egyptologist Francis Llewellyn Griffith to join Archaeologist Flinders Petrie in Egypt. The American branch of the Egypt Exploration Society gained momentum and, in 1886, Smith College in Massachusetts awarded Amelia an honorary LLD, ‘the first distinction of the kind ever bestowed on a woman. Amelia was also active in other areas of both classical and biblical study, and was vice-president of the Society for the Promotion of Women’s Suffrage.
In 1891, while overseeing antiquities arriving at London docks, she developed a lung infection which led to her death. Amelia died six-months later in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, aged 60, and was buried at Henbury, near Bristol. Her grave is marked by an obelisk.
- An English Heritage blue plaque to Amelia Edwards can be seen outside her home at 19 Wharton Street, Islington.
Mary Kingsley (1862-1900)
Ethnologist and writer
Mary Kingsley was born in Tavistock Terrace, Upper Holloway, Islington in 1862. She was the eldest child of George Kingsley, a physician and traveller, and his wife Mary Bailey. The novelists Charles Kingsley and Henry Kingsley were her uncles.
As a young woman she supported her mother in household duties and assisted in her father’s anthropological work, for which she learned German. She did not attend school and read voraciously, creating her own world among the travel, natural history, and science books from her father’s library.
Despite managing to occasionally travel to Europe, Mary spend much of her early adult years nursing her sick parents. Mary was 30-years-old when both parents died and this gave her the release to see the world. Following a trip to the Canary Islands, she decided upon exploration of West Africa to further enhance her own anthropological studies. Mary reached Freetown, Sierra Leone in August 1893.
After fours months of exploration and collecting specimens, she returned to England. The following year, she sailed again to West Africa. In order to pay her way and make contact with African people, Mary learned to trade in rubber, ivory, tobacco, and other goods. She brought home a collection of insects, shells, and plants, including 18 species of reptiles and 65 species of fish, of which three were entirely new and named after her. Mary’s experiences were to inform her lectures, articles and books; Mary’s first book, Travels in West Africa, Congo Français, Corisco and Cameroons was published in 1897.
For the next two years Mary and her work were in much demand until, in 1899, the South African War (Second |Boer War) thoughts turned again to the Continent. On one last voyage, she arrived in Cape Town in 1900 where she offered her services as a nurse. She was sent to a hospital to look after Boer prisoners of war. Sadly, she contracted the typhoid that was killing her patients and, on 3 June, she died. Mary was buried at sea, in keeping with her wishes. Her coffin was conveyed from Simon’s Town harbour on a torpedo boat with full military honours.
- A Greater London Council blue plaque to Mary Kingsley can be seen outside a former home at 22 Southwood Lane, Highgate.
Dorothy Lawrence (1896-1964)
English journalist (and ‘male’ soldier)
Dorothy Lawrence was born in Hendon, London and was of unknown parentage. A budding journalist in her late teens, and with a few published articles in The Times, at the outbreak of the First World War she had hoped to be able to report for the Front Line. Dorothy was unsuccessful in obtaining an assignment but, undeterred, she travelled to France as a freelance war correspondent but was arrested by French Police near the Front Line and left for Paris.
Dorothy concluded that only in disguise could she get the story that she wanted to write, and persuaded two British Army soldiers that she met in a Parisian café to help her acquire a uniform and equipment, after which she began to transform herself into a male soldier. She changed her physical appearance by cutting her long hair, wearing a corset and darkening her face. Dorothy then learnt how to drill and march. Lastly, she obtained false identity papers and, becoming Private Denis Smith of the 1st Bn, Leicestershire Regiment, headed for the front lines.
She was befriended by coalminer-turned-soldier Tom Dunn who, with army colleagues, took her under his wing for protection and rations. In her book, she writes that Dunn found her work as a sapper with the 179 Tunnelling Company, 51st Division, Royal Engineers, specialist mine-layers involved in the digging of tunnels. However, evidence suggests that she did not undertake digging work but was free to work within the trenches.
Unfortunately, the rigours of the job and the Front Line caused Dorothy’s health to suffer. She worried that if she needed medical attention her true identity would be discovered and her colleagues would be in danger. So, after 10 days of service, she presented herself to the commanding sergeant, who placed her under military arrest. Initially, Dorothy was interrogated as a spy and declared a prisoner of war. The Army was embarrassed that a woman had breached security and, if her story was revealed, was fearful of more women taking on male roles during the war. Swearing not to write about her experiences or risk imprisonment, Dorothy sailed from Calais back to England. She took the same ferry as Emmeline Pankhurst, who asked her to speak at a suffragette meeting. Dorothy attempted to write articles about her experience but fell foul of the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act (1914), which could be used against her for treason.
In 1919, Dorothy moved to Canonbury, Islington, and finally published her story, Sapper Dorothy Lawrence: The Only English Woman Soldier. Although, heavily censored by the War Office, it was generally well received but, sadly, not the commercial success she had hoped. Her writing career was effectively over and, by 1925, her increasingly erratic behaviour was brought to the attention of the authorities. Upon examination, and with no family to look after her, she was taken into care and later deemed insane.
Dorothy was institutionalised at the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum (later Friern Hospital) in north London, where she died nearly forty years later. She was buried in a pauper’s grave in New Southgate Cemetery.
Many years later her story was featured in an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum on women at war, and famous for being the only known English woman soldier on the Front Line during the First World War.
Zaha Hadid (1950-2016)
Architect
Zaha Hadid was born in 1950 in Baghdad, Iraq. Her father, Muhammad al-Hajj Husayn Hadid, was a wealthy industrialist and liberal politician from Mosul, and her mother was an artist also from Mosul. In the 1960s Zaha attended boarding schools in England and Switzerland. She later gained a maths degree at the American University of Beirut and, then in 1972, more importantly, studied at the Architectural Association school in London, going on to become recognised as a major figure in architecture of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Zaha first opened her own office in a small room in a former Victorian school at 10 Bowling Green Lane in Clerkenwell, Islington. With her architectural partner Patrik Schumacher, she eventually built a practice of 400 staff, taking over the entire school building, as well as spreading into a second building. It was to become one of the world’s most important architectural practices. Zaha also made Clerkenwell her home, living in a penthouse apartment in Dallington Street.
From her Clerkenwell base, Zaha built an extraordinary range and scope of buildings. These included the Olympic Aquatics Centre in London, the Maxxi art museum in Rome (the RIBA Stirling prize winner in 2010), a car factory for BMW in Leipzig, Germany, a skyscraper complex in Beijing, an opera house in Guangzhou, and an exhibition centre in the middle of Seoul.
In 2004 Zaha became the first woman to win the Pritzker prize for architecture and this year the first to be awarded the RIBA royal gold medal in her own right. She was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 2002 and, in 2012, she was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE). At the time of her death, several of Zaha’s buildings were still under construction, such as the Daxing International Airport in Beijing, and the Al Wakrah Stadium in Qatar, a venue for the 2022 FIFA World Cup. She was also was working in China, the Middle East, America and Russia.
An extraordinary architect, Zaha was described by the Guardian newspaper (26 November 2016) as the ‘Queen of the curve’, who “liberated architectural geometry, giving it a whole new expressive identity.”
Choosing to Challenge: Islington’s Inspirational Women (1547-2021)
- Choosing to Challenge: Islington Women and Arts and Entertainment
- Choosing to Challenge: Islington Women and Education
- Choosing to Challenge: Islington Women and Health Care
- Choosing to Challenge: Islington Women and Politics
Back to Choosing to Challenge: Islington’s Inspirational Women (1547-2021) main page
Compiled by the Friends of Islington Museum / Islington Heritage Service (March 2021)
Friends of Islington Museum 