Margery Irene Corbett Ashby

Margery Corbett Ashby was born at Danehill, Sussex in 1882 to Charles Corbett, the future Liberal MP for Grinstead, and Marie Corbett. At the age of eighteen, she formed a society called the Younger Suffragists with a group of friends and her younger sister Cicely. The following year, in 1901, Margery won a place at Newnham College, Cambridge, to read Classics. Three years later, despite passing her examinations, Cambridge refused to grant her a degree on the grounds of her gender. Subsequently, she obtained a place at the Cambridge Teachers Training College, though she would later decide against teaching as a profession. That same year, in 1904, she and her sister attended the first meeting of the International Women Suffrage Alliance in Berlin with their mother.

She had been involved in the women s suffrage movement since Cambridge, where she had joined the local branch of the National Union of Women s Suffrage Societies. In 1907 Corbett was appointed Secretary of that same organisation and editor of the journal, The Common Cause, positions that she held until she was elected to the executive committee two years later. It was in 1909 that she also became a member of the Cambridge Women s Suffrage Association as well as becoming involved in the International Woman Suffrage Alliance as a speaker at their conferences in Berlin and Stockholm. The following year, she married the barrister, Brian Ashby, giving birth to their only child four years later. In 1912 she became a poor law guardian in Wandsworth and in 1914 was the chairperson of the Barnes, Mortlake and East Sheen branch of the London Society for Women s Suffrage. However, when that year the NUWSS launched the Election Fighting Fund policy, which promised support to any party officially supporting suffrage in an election where the candidate was challenging an anti-suffrage Liberal, Corbett Ashby felt compelled to resign form the organisation.

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