Helena Swanwick

Helena Maria Lucy Swanwick CH (née Sickert; 30 January 1864 – 16 November 1939) was a Bavarian-born British suffragist, pacifist, internationalist and writer. Her autobiography, I Have Been Young (1935), gives an account of the non-militant women's suffrage campaign in the UK and of anti-war campaigning during the First World War, together with philosophical discussions of non-violence.

Swanwick's name and picture, along with 58 other women's suffrage supporters, are on the plinth of the statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, London, unveiled in April 2018.^{[dead link]}

Born in Munich, Swanwick was the only daughter of Eleanor Louisa Moravia Henry and the Danish painter Oswald Sickert. Swanwick had five brothers including the painter Walter Sickert. Her maternal grandmother was an Irish dancer who became pregnant by the astronomer Richard Sheepshanks, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. When she was four, the family moved to Britain.

She was educated the Notting Hill High School, then attended a boarding school in France. She studied at Girton College, Cambridge, which was financed by a partial scholarship from her sympathetic godmother, as her parents did not see the point in a girl gaining a higher education and did not contribute to the cost.

Reading John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women (1869) during her studies influenced Swanwick to become a feminist. She was furious when her mother would not allow her to go out unchaperoned and how she was treated differently to her brothers.

Swanwick was appointed lecturer in psychology at Westfield College in 1885. She married the Manchester University lecturer and mathematician Frederick Swanwick in 1888. He had decided not to marry until he met her, and supported her in her activism.

Swanwick worked as a journalist, initially as a protégée of C. P. Scott, and wrote articles for the liberal paper the Manchester Guardian. She covered topics including book reviews and domestic matters, and wrote for the Country Diary column.

After reading about Christabel Pankhurst and Annie Kenney's protest and unfurling a banner declaring "Votes for Women" at the Manchester Free Trade Hall in October 1905, Swanwick joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and later wrote that her "heart rose up in support of their revolt." In 1906, Swanwick left the WSPU and joined the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), because of her belief in non-violence and as she found that she could not work with the Pankhurts.