Eleanor Rathbone, the Women Churchillians and Anti-Appeasement

This article examines Eleanor Rathbone's transition from domestic, feminist and welfare issues to international affairs by the mid- to late-1930s. It explores her teamwork with other leading women politicians, each renegades in their own way, in opposition to Britain's foreign policy and especially appeasement. Rathbone worked closely with the MPs Ellen Wilkinson and the Duchess of Atholl. They demonstrated how women could work together, across party lines, when passionately united by a cause, and became known as the 'Glamour Girls', working in parallel to the Edenite and Churchillian appeasement dissidents. Rathbone became one of the public figures who redefined 'appeasement' from a positive to a pejorative term.