Alice Instone Private View

To brilliantly round off IWD 2016 was the Private View of ‘The Pram in the Hall’ from artist Alice Instone, the title taken from the Cyril Connolly quote.

Alice highlighted the pressures and juggling of women’s lives by using women’s ‘To Do’ lists to create fabulous art.

The concept came from Alice’s own experiences and she has created a series of seven prints, overlaying her personal lists and using lists from many well-known women, showing just what a diverse range of tasks women carry out - from the mundane to the marvellous!

It was inspiring to see too the lists brought along by a variety of women and pegged onto ‘washing lines’. 

International Women's Day Afternoon Tea

Ambassador members enjoyed a delightful and very special afternoon tea in the Peers’ Dining Room of the House of Lords, hosted by our friend Baroness Burt of Solihull. 

Lorely was a wonderful host and conversation ranged from our collective work on the first UK Economic Blueprint to our #pledgeforparity promises in line with this year’s IWD theme.

Annual IWD Lecture

A Most Independent Member’: Eleanor Rathbone MP (1872-1946), by Dr Susan Cohen

The subject of this year’s Speaker’s Advisory Committee on Works of Art’s International Women’s Day Lecture was the fabulously feisty Eleanor Rathbone. A pioneer of the women’s suffrage movement and a lifelong campaigner for women’s rights.

Rathbone is an unsung heroine of the twentieth century and this year marks the 70th anniversary of her death.

We enjoyed a fascinating lecture from Dr Susan Cohen, historian and author of ‘Rescue the Perishing: Eleanor Rathbone and the Refugees’ (2010) and co-founder of the Remembering Eleanor Rathbone Group. 

Dr Cohen's talk revealed a most remarkable woman, celebrating Eleanor Rathbone's life and embracing her diverse humanitarian activism.

As an independent MP Eleanor Rathbone argued tirelessly for a family allowance paid direct to mothers and saw this become law in 1945.