Edith Summerskill

Edith Summerskill (born April 19, 1901, London, England—died February 4, 1980, London) was a British politician and physician who was one of the longest serving female MPs.

Following in the footsteps of her father, Edith Summerskill studied medicine at Charing Cross Hospital, a highly unusual career path for women at the time. She qualified as a doctor in 1924 and the following year married a fellow doctor, with whom she set up a London practice (1928–45). She ran unsuccessfully as a Labour Party candidate in the 1934 by-election for Putney and the 1935 general election for Bury, but she was elected to Parliament for West Fulham in 1938 (after 1955 for Warrington) and sat in the House of Commons continuously until 1961, when she was created a life peer.

In Clement Attlee’s Labour government of 1945–50, Summerskill served as parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Food with great efficiency at a time when rationing was still in force. In her brief term as minister of national insurance (1950–51), she worked to improve state insurance plans and workers’ compensation. She was also a member of Labour’s shadow cabinet until 1957 and was chairman of the Labour Party in 1954–55. She championed such causes as equal rights and equal pay for women, birth control and availability of painless childbirth methods, and a wife’s fair share of her husband’s property (secured with the Married Women’s Property Act, 1964). She was made a member of the Privy Council in 1949 and a Companion of Honour in 1966.

In addition to her medical and political activities, Summerskill wrote a number of books on topics that concerned her. She argued for the use of analgesia in obstetrics in Babies Without Tears (1941) and expressed her negative medical views on the sport of boxing in The Ignoble Art (1956). Among her other publications are Letters to My Daughter (1957) and A Woman’s World (1967).