Few people realise how important a group of University of Cambridge wives were to voting equality and education

Active between 1890 and 1914, the Ladies Dining Society was a discussion club formed by twelve Cambridge women, some of whom were connected with Newnham College.

Members of the Society included Ellen Darwin, Ida Darwin, Maud Darwin, Caroline Jebb, Mary Paley Marshall, Fanny Prothero, Eleanor Sidgwick, Margaret Verrall, Eliza Von Hügel and Mary Ward as well as founders Louise Creighton and Kathleen Lyttelton.

Join Dr Ann Kennedy Smith in the Enid Porter Room on Thursday 4 October and learn more about the importance of this notable group of women and most especially Mary Ward, author of the play Man and Woman: the Question of the Day and for many years the Honorary Secretary of the Cambridge Women’s Suffrage Association.

Tickets are available at £8.50 each, from Eventbrite.

Ticket fee includes admission to the Museum, after the talk, to view our current exhibition At Last! Votes for Women

Ann Kennedy Smith

Dr Ann Kennedy Smith is a freelance writer, researcher and literature tutor, she was awarded an MA in Creative Writing (Biography and Creative Nonfiction) at the University of East Anglia in 2015. Her book proposal Cambridge Wives was shortlisted for the Biographers Club Tony Lothian Prize for best uncommissioned biography. She has published articles and reviews in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, The Times Literary Supplement, Slightly Foxed and The Dublin Review of Books.

Ann is the author of a monograph, Painted Poetry: Colour in Baudelaire’s Art Criticism  (Peter Lang, 2011) and a chapter in The Reception of Alfred Tennyson in Europe  (ed. Leonee Ormond, Bloomsbury, 2017).

• Cambridge Banners and Suffrage – a talk by Carolyn Ferguson, 7:30pm-9:30pm, Wednesday 10 October
• Newnham Ladies Walking Tour – a street tour of Cambridge locations associated with the suffrage movement 10:30am-12:00pm, Thursday 11 October