Ray Strachey

Ray Strachey, née Costelloe (4 June 1887 – 16 July 1940), was a British feminist politician and writer, born Rachel Pearsall Conn Costelloe in London, England.

She was the elder of the two girls in her family. Her younger sister was Karin Elizabeth Conn Costelloe, who married Virginia Woolf's younger brother Adrian Stephen in 1914 (see Karin Stephen). Ray was educated at Kensington high school and at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she achieved third class in part one of the mathematical tripos (1908).

For most of her life Strachey worked for women's suffrage organisations. Most of her publications are non-fiction and deal with suffrage issues. She is most often remembered for her book The Cause. Papers of Rachel Pearsall Conn Strachey (also known as Ray Strachey, née Costelloe) (1887–1940) are held at The Women's Library at London Metropolitan University. She worked closely with Millicent Fawcett, sharing her Liberal feminist values and opposing any attempt to integrate the suffrage movement with the Labour Party. In 1915 she became parliamentary secretary of the NUWSS, serving in this role until 1920. After the Great War when women were granted the vote and permitted to stand for parliament, she stood as an Independent parliamentary candidate at Brentford and Chiswick on a number of occasions without success.

Brentford & Chiswick within the Middlesex, showing boundaries used from 1918–1923

She rejected the attempt by Eleanor Rathbone to establish a broad-based feminist programme in the 1920s. In 1931 she became parliamentary secretary to Britain's first woman MP, Lady Astor, and in 1935 the head of the Women's Employment Federation. She also made regular radio broadcasts for the BBC.

She married at Cambridge on 31 May 1911 the civil servant Oliver Strachey, with whom she had two children, Barbara (born 1912, later a writer) and Christopher (born 1916, later a pioneer computer scientist). Oliver Strachey was the elder brother of the biographer Lytton Strachey of the Bloomsbury group; other siblings in the Strachey family included psychoanalyst James Strachey and novelist Dorothy Bussy née Strachey. Ray's mother-in-law was Jane, Lady Strachey, a well-known author and supporter of women's suffrage who co-led the Mud March of 1907 in London.

She died in the Royal Free Hospital in London in her early fifties of heart failure, following an operation to remove a fibroid tumor.

• The World at Eighteen
• Marching On
• Shaken By The Wind

Biographies

• Frances Willard
• Hannah Whitall Smith; Ray Strachey,*A Quaker Grandmother: Hannah Whitall Smith*(1914)
• Millicent Garrett Fawcett

Non-fiction about women's roles

• Women's Suffrage and Women's Service
• The Cause
• Careers and Openings for Women
• Our Freedom and Its Results