Changing Faces of St Marylebone

Davies, who lived in Marylebone, is famous as a suffragist and co-founder of Girton College, Cambridge. Originally however she was interested in becoming a doctor and wrote several articles on women doctors for the feminist English Woman’s Journal. She then moved to London to edit the magazine and became part of a circle of women who included Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, another Marylebone resident and the first woman in the United Kingdom to become a medical doctor.

Davies was heavily involved in the suffrage movement; suffragists believed that women should have the right to vote. In 1906 she headed a delegation to Parliament. She opposed the militant and violent approach of the Suffragette branch of the suffrage movement.

Davies began to campaign for women’s rights to further education, degrees and teaching qualifications. It was partly due to her that girls were allowed access to official secondary school examinations. Davies also believed that women should be admitted to the universities of London, Oxford and Cambridge and in 1869 led the campaign to found Britain’s first women’s college which became Girton College. It was first located in Hitchin but moved to Cambridge in 1873.

Davies didn’t live to see Girton College become part of the University of Cambridge in 1948, but she was one of the few original suffragists alive to cast her vote in the first election where women were allowed to do so – the general election of 1918.