Eleanor Florence Rathbone (12 May 1872 – 2 January 1946) was an independent British Member of Parliament (MP) and long-term campaigner for family allowance and for women's rights.

[2] She went on to attend Somerville College, Oxford, against the protests of her mother, and received Classics coaching from Lucy Mary Silcox.

After Oxford, Rathbone worked alongside her father to investigate social and industrial conditions in Liverpool, until he died in 1902.

[10] The following year she succeeded Millicent Garrett Fawcett as President of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship (the renamed National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies) and led successful campaigns for universal women's suffrage, equal guardianship of children, divorce law reform and widow's pensions.

[2] Rathbone was elected as an independent member of Liverpool City Council in 1910 for the seat of Granby Ward, a position she retained until 1935.

[10] Rathbone campaigned for a number of social and political issues at the local level and was involved in establishing various groups and charitable organisations.

A believer that the Raj authorities were not getting to grips with Indian social issues, she used figures from the 1931 census to support her misguided claim that child marriages were not in decline and that the act had caused a significant spike in the numbers.

[13] She contested the 1922 General Election as an Independent candidate at Liverpool East Toxteth against the sitting Unionist MP and was defeated.

Rathbone realised the nature of Nazi Germany and in the 1930s joined the British Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi Council to support human rights.

[20] Her determination was such that junior ministers and civil servants of the Foreign Office would reputedly duck behind pillars when they saw her coming.

She observed: "I am no admirer of any dictatorship, certainly not that of Stalin, but it is only fair to recognise in the sordid history of the Non-Intervention Agreement the one bright spot was the part played by the USSR"[20] In 1936, Rathbone was one of several people who supported the British Provisional Committee for the Defence of Leon Trotsky, and signed a letter to the Manchester Guardian defending Trotsky's right to asylum and calling for an international inquiry into the Moscow Trials.

During World War II she regularly chastised Osbert Peake, undersecretary at the Home Office[17]:283, and in 1942 pressured the government to publicise the evidence of the Holocaust.

At the height of the battle of Britain on 10 July 1940, she complained of the harsh treatment of internees, many of which were Germans who had fled from Germany because they were anti Hitler.

[23] In a speech to the House of Commons on 15 October 1945, she was one of few Britons prepared to criticise the expulsion of 2,500,000 people of German origin from Czechoslovakia during the winter months of 1946 because it might create large-scale starvation.

Later, Eleanor Rathbone achieved limited success when the minister agreed not to allow the deportation of pregnant women or young children during the winter months[24]320.

At the end of the First World War, Rathbone and the social work campaigner Elizabeth Macadam bought a house in London together.

Rathbone's studies in Classics and Philosophy, as well as her experience of social work led her to reject religion and adopt a rationalist perspective.

Cox and Soper describe Rathbone's personality, her secretarial arrangements and her home, her Parliamentary speeches and relationships with politicians.

[27] Her name and picture (and those of 58 other women's suffrage supporters) are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, unveiled in 2018.

Edge Hill University has a hall of residence called Eleanor Rathbone in honour of her work as a social reformer.