Mary Neal

Template:Use dmy dates Template:Wikidata image Mary Neal Template:Postnominals (born Clara Sophia Neal; 5 June 1860 – 22 June 1944) was an English social worker, suffragette and collector of English folk dances.

Neal was born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, to a prosperous family. Her father was David Neal, a button manufacturer.Template:Sfn In 1888, she began voluntary social work with the West London Methodist Mission of Hugh Price Hughes, helping the poor of Soho, Fitzrovia, and Marylebone in London, taking the name "Sister Mary". Neal set up and ran a "Club for Working Girls" at the mission's Cleveland Hall, and also wrote for the Mission Magazine.Template:Sfn According to Emmeline Pethick, who worked with her in the Girls' Club, Neal had "a strong sense of humour and a profound aversion from unreality; she had also a sharp tongue".Template:Sfn

Neal said of the Girls' Club,

No words can express the passionate longing which I have to bring some of the beautiful things of life within easy reach of the girls who earn their living by the sweat of their brow... If these Clubs are up to the ideal which we have in view, they will be living schools for working women, who will be instrumental in the near future, in altering the conditions of the class they represent.Template:Sfn

The Girls' Club was a great success, but in the autumn of 1895, Neal and Pethick left the mission to set up their own Espérance Club for girls in Cumberland Market, as they wanted to escape from the mission's institutional constraints and to experiment with dance and drama.Template:Sfn They also started the Maison Espérance tailoring establishment to provide employment.Template:Sfn

In 1905, Neal met Cecil Sharp at the Hampstead Conservatoire.Template:Sfn She and Sharp began to collaborate during a revival of English folk music, in which Neal felt that the working girls of London would be able to reclaim their heritage.Template:Sfn The girls of the Espérance Club became in demand as teachers of folk music in London and further afieldTemplate:Sfn and they also put on several public performances in London.Template:Sfn

Neal and Lily Montagu, who sponsored a club for Jewish working girls, bought a house in Littlehampton, Sussex, in 1925 and called it "Green Bushes", and it became a holiday home for girls. She also went to the United States between 1910 and early 1912 to promote folk dancing.Template:Sfn

Neal became a socialist, following Keir Hardie and Edward Carpenter. In 1899, she attended the London International Congress of Women. In 1906, Neal and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence went to a meeting in the Chelsea home of Sylvia Pankhurst, where the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) was established. Neal joined the WSPU, and later she joined a group for women and men, militants and non-militants started with Agnes Harben and others, the United Suffragists.Template:Sfn

Neal was a leading member of the Kibbo Kift youth organisation.Template:Sfn She was a justice of the peace in West Sussex in 1934, dealing with child delinquency, and also became a member of the Howard League for Penal Reform.Template:Sfn Her services to the English folk song and dance movement led to her being appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in 1937.Template:Sfn

Bibliography

• Kathryn Atherton: Mary Neal and the suffragettes who saved morris dancing, Barnsley ; Yorkshire, PA : Pen & Sword History, 2024, Template:ISBN

References

Citations

Sources

External links

• "The Mary Neal Project", Mary Neal's grandniece recently unearthed Mary Neal's autobiography, Mary Neal Project documents Mary's life and donated her autobiography to the Cecil Sharp House
• "So who was Mary Neal anyway?", article by Janet Dowling
• Emmeline Pethick, Mary Neal and their work with young women
• Article on Mary Neal and morris dancing in America Template:Webarchive
• New Esperance Morris, Women's Morris Side in London, continuing the tradition of Mary Neal