Dame Margaret Isabel Cole DBE (née Postgate; 6 May 1893 – 7 May 1980) was an English socialist politician, writer and poet.

[1] Having completed her course (Cambridge did not allow women to graduate formally until 1947), Margaret became a classics teacher at St Paul's Girls' School.

Her poem The Falling Leaves, a response to the First World War, and currently on the OCR English Literature syllabus at GCSE, shows the influence of Latin poetry in its use of long and short syllables to create mimetic effects.

In the early 1930s, Margaret abandoned her pacifism in reaction to the suppression of socialist movements by governments in Germany and Austria and to events in the Spanish Civil War.

In the 1965 New Year Honours, she was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) "for political and public services".

[5] Cole talks about her family and upbringing, her involvement in the Labour Party, and of her dislike for Christabel Pankhurst's extreme suffragism.