Margery Spring Rice

This biography reveals the complex and unconventional life of the social campaigner Margery Spring Rice in fascinating detail. Spring Rice is known as a pioneer in the women’s health and family planning movement, and author of Working Class Wives, an important insight into inter-war social conditions. This biography weaves her many professional achievements and occasional set-backs into her often tumultuous and sometimes tragic private life, informed by the backdrop of the first and second world wars and the considerable social changes across the period. It is impossible not to become captivated by the story of this obstinate but remarkable woman.

Here all is drama – love, death, affairs, court cases, divorce, blighted lives – set alongside the achievements of a life spent working to improve the lot of working-class women [...] This [contraception] was a subject shunned by the medical profession but one which she recognised as an imperative if poor women were to retain their health and any ability to care properly for the children they did bear.