Dame Margery Corbett Ashby

Dame Margery Corbett Ashby (born April 19, 1882, Danehill, Sussex, England—died May 15, 1981, Horsted Keynes, Sussex) was a British women’s rights pioneer who in 1904 was a founding member of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (renamed International Alliance of Women in 1926).

Corbett was the daughter of C.H. Corbett, a classical scholar and a Liberal member of the British Parliament. She was educated at home and then studied classics at Newnham College, Cambridge, before becoming a women’s rights activist. She was secretary of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (1907–09) and a member of its executive committee (1909–14). In 1910 she married Arthur Brian Ashby, a barrister. After World War I she helped to form a women’s police service in Germany and to found the British Townswomen’s Guilds. In 1923 Corbett Ashby was elected president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, a position she held until she retired in 1946 and was made its honorary president. She also served (1932–35) as an alternate delegate to the Disarmament Conference convened in Geneva by the League of Nations.

Though never elected to Parliament, she ran as a Liberal candidate in 1918 and in all other interwar elections except that of 1931, and she served as president of the Women’s Liberal Federation. She also gave voice to women’s rights and to liberal ideas as the editor of International Women’s News from 1952 to 1961. Corbett Ashby was made Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE) in 1967.