Quick Facts
Biography
Margery Spring Rice (10 June 1887 – 21 April 1970) was a British social reformer. She was Secretary of the League of Nations Society and a founding member of the National Birth Control Association (later Family Planning Association). She authored the book Working-Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions in 1939.
Early life
Spring Rice was born in London, the daughter of Clara Thornbury and Samuel Garrett (solicitor and president of the Law Society). She was niece to Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Dame Millicent Garret Fawcett.
Her education lead to an M.A. in Moral Sciences from Cambridge. She married Edward Spring Rice in 1919 after her first husband Captain Charles Edward Coursolles Jones was killed during WW1. Edward and Margery divorced in 1936.
After WW1, Spring Rice became involved with the inception of the League of Nations working as first Secretary to the Legaue of Nations Society (later to become the League of Nations Union). Later she would work as Hon. Treasurer of the Women's National Liberal Federation.
Women's health
In 1924 Spring Rice became involved with the issues of poverty and access to birth control within the borough of North Kensington through the instigation of a friend Margaret Pyke (then Pollock). Spring Rice would set up and become chair of the North Kensington birth control clinic (later North Kensington Women's Welfare Centre). Using her contacts at the Women's National Liberal Federation, Spring Rice convinced Lady Gertrude Denman in 1930 to become the founding chair of the National Birth Control Association (later Family Planning Association). Spring Rice would serve on the executive body until 1958
In 1933, Spring Rice became a member of the Women's Health Enquiry Committee which collected a survey of 1250 married working women. Spring Rice would use this information as the basis for her 1939 book Working-Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions.
Later life
During World War II, she ran a residential nursery for pre-school children evacuated from London at her home Iken Hall in Woodbridge, near Aldeburgh. She became a founder member of the Aldeburgh Festival, providing financial support in the early years of the Festival. Her home, Iken Hall, was the location of Benjamin Britten's The Little Sweep, part of his Let's Make an Opera of 1949. Spring Rice died at Aldeburgh Cottage Hospital in 1970.