Alice Zimmern - advocate for women's education and suffrage

Buried: 25/03/1939, aged 83
Plot no: 80669 | Section: H05 / E8

Alice Zimmern was a pioneer educationist and writer of numerous books, and a suffragist with a strong interest in the rights and education of women.

Blue plaque for Alice Zimmern, located at Lissern Gardens.
(© unknown - no copyright infringement intended)

Alice Zimmern was born in Nottingham, but grew up in Islington in London.  Her father Hermann Theodor Zimmern was a lace-merchant of German-Jewish origin who died in 1893 aged 77.  Her mother Antonie Marie Terese Zimmern (née Leo) died earlier, in 1887 aged 60.  Both are buried in the same grave as Alice.  (Also buried in the grave is Eliza Mabbett, her father’s widowed housekeeper after her mother died.)

She was educated privately, and then attended Bedford College in London, before being admitted to read Classics at Girton College in Cambridge (where a memorial prize is named after her).  After graduating with honours in 1885, she became a teacher of classics and English at several girls’ schools.  She wrote books for children on ancient Greece and Rome, and produced new editions or translations into English of various works. 

Then in 1893 she was awarded a scholarship to study methods of education in the United States, particularly relating to the education of girls.  Her book on Methods of Education in America was published in 1894.  After this, she gave up teaching in schools, and devoted herself to writing and other independent activities.  Much of her research was carried out in the Reading Room of the British Museum, where she would have associated with women such as Eleanor Marx, Annie Besant and Olive Schreiner. 

Image © Wellcome collection

 Her next book, The Renaissance of Girls’ Education, was published in 1898, and she wrote articles on a wide range of topical issues with a particular focus on the practical lives of independent educated women.  These included writings on such topics as “Ladies Clubs in London”, and “Ladies’ Dwellings”, which she saw, as with Girton College and the University Women’s Club, to be examples of spaces in which women could exercise their talents and live freely, away from pressures of marriage and family life. At this time she was herself living in York Street Ladies Chambers, a purpose-built block in St Marylebone, which was occupied exclusively by single women.

After the turn of the century, she turned her attention increasingly to the suffrage issue and women’s rights.  In her book, Women’s Suffrage in Many Lands (1909), she documented numerous examples, and argued that enfranchisement in Britain would merely restore to women a historical right.  Although she does not seem to have been herself an active member of the suffragette movement, she recognised that their militant methods were successful in drawing public attention to the issues of suffrage and the situation of women generally.

Alice Zimmern - 1936. Portrait © Kenneth Green, Photo of portrait © Girton College

In her later years, health problems limited her range of activities, though she continued to engage with issues around feminism and pacifism.  She never married, and lived from 1913 onwards in a flat (now marked by a blue plaque) in Lissenden Gardens, just off the Highgate Road by Parliament Hill Fields in north London, where she died on March 22nd 1939. 

The epitaph for Alice Zimmern, also above, Eliza Mabbett © Abney Unearthed

This article was kindly supplied by Robin Oakley. The main source is the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, supplemented by additional research by the author. Further information has been added by Abney Unearthed.