Stacy (after her marriage) on a postcard
Enid Stacy was a leading late nineteenth century socialist. She came from Bristol, attended university in Cardiff, became a teacher, was a founder member of the Independent Labour Party, and made a living as an itinerant public speaker. Margaret Cole remembered her as ‘one of the most effective women speakers and lecturers in the nineties’. Stacy took a firm view on equality between the genders, and supported universal adult suffrage, embracing all adults – women and men – on an equal basis. The last months of her life were spent campaigning against the Boer Wars.
Stacy is hardly unknown – she has her own blue plaque, and a London council named a housing scheme after her – but she is not a familiar figure, even among historians of the labour and women’s movements. I have vague memories of Ruth Frow telling me of an unpublished biography by her niece.
From: openplaques.org
Ruth, who with her husband Eddie founded and curated the marvellous Manchester Working Class Movement Library, was a generous host, and I was an enthusiastic doctoral student, so I must have taken in what she’d said, but this wasn’t my field. I didn’t pay much as much attention to the Stacy story as I did to the tea and sandwiches that she offered me.
Much later on, I encountered Stacy as a member of the Starnthwaite Colony, one of several late nineteenth century utopian settlements that crop up in my study of British work camps. Stacy was as prickly and challenging as a land settler as she was in every other area of her life, but it was hard to find out much about her. So I was delighted to learn from the Lipstick Socialist blog that Stacy’s biography is finally to see the light of day.
For me, Stacy entered the work camps story in 1893. Aged 25, she had been dismissed from her teaching post for her role in supporting local strikers. Together with Katherine St John Conway (later Glasier Conway) she made her way to Starnthwaite, near Kendal, where a Unitarian minister and socialist called Herbert V. Mills had founded a utopian socialist colony, attracting a small number of local unemployed men and committed socialists, among them Dan Irving, the one-legged trade unionist, acquaintance of James Connolly, and subsequently Labour MP.
Like several similar utopian colonies, the Starnthwaite settlers found life hard. The practical challenges of self-sufficiency were hard enough, but there were also ideological and personality differences, with Stacy and Irving among a group of socialists who accused Mills of authoritarianism. Mills, for his part, accused the socialists of being keener on preaching than working, and had the police charge six of them for breaking down a door.
Stacy was expelled within months of joining the colony, along with thirteen others, and proceeded to make her criticisms of Starnthwaite a theme for her public lectures in Lancashire. Starnthwaite struggled on for a time before Mills handed it over to the Christian Union for Social Service, and then withdrew from an active role in the land settlement movement. His reputation was briefly revived by the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, who in 1908 justified Mills’ stern government of the colony as unavoidable if it were to survive its early challenges in a disciplined way.
Stacy moved on, speaking at dozens of open-air meetings, often from the back of a Clarion van. She married, writing a short play exploring her socialist approach to marriage, and she continued to advocate the ‘co-operative home’ or settlement as a way of tackling the unequal distribution of domestic labour. And if you want to find out more, then like me you will have to buy the biography.
Stacy’s biography is available, for a mere fiver – yes, less than two pints – here.
thelearningprofessor 