The Politics of Penal Reform by Anne Logan

Author:Anne Logan [Logan, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781351708197
Google: aEpnDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-30T03:30:41+00:00

It is not clear why Margery was asked to contribute to this important work; but as she hinted in the letter to her mother, her proficiency in French, availability (notwithstanding her PRL commitments) and ability to fund herself must have been important factors. Then again, her prominence in the British women’s suffrage movement – which she tended to play down in letters to her mother – must have been an additional reason for her invitation, together with her experience, confidence and oratorical ability. In preparation for her departure, she hired a typist to look after her correspondence, made arrangements for her niece’s care and went shopping for new clothes, convinced that ‘the success of this mission depends on first impressions’.30

By the end of March, Margery had once more settled in the Hotel Britannique in Paris, where she had stayed a few years earlier during her time with the FEWVRC. The women’s delegation first met with the British politician Lord Robert Cecil, who planned to include their demands in the form of an amendment to the League’s covenant, which would state categorically that women were eligible to serve as delegates, Executive Council members and Secretariat employees in the proposed League of Nations.31 Margery made a short speech on what she called the ‘stale old subject of women’s suffrage’. She reported to her mother that the meeting with Cecil was ‘worthwhile’, although, with a characteristic effort to play down her role, wrote that she doubted her presence alongside Lady Aberdeen, leader of the ICW, and Margery Corbett Ashby of the IWSA was of ‘any particular value’.32

While in France, Margery took the opportunity to revisit the Meuse region (where the people appeared ‘less crushed’ than when she had last seen them) and made plans to visit French prisons.33 It is possible that she was already cultivating French penal reform contacts, as in later years she regularly corresponded with people interested in the administration of justice in France.

Finally, on 11 April, the international women’s delegation met the US President, Woodrow Wilson, and representatives of the other Allied powers, including Cecil, a single French representative, some Southern Europeans and ‘flocks of Orientals’. Margery recorded her impressions of the event during a train journey later that day. She informed her mother that eleven of the seventeen women in the delegation – three English, including Margery herself, two American, one Italian and five French – had made a speech. According to Margery,

the French ladies included 2 elderly dames who believed that nobody under 60 has experience, even though of the 2 younger ladies one was a practicing barrister [and] the other had been head of a military hospital on the front all through the war.

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