Lettice Fisher Information

Lettice Fisher (14 June 1875 – 14 February 1956) was the founder of the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child, now known as Gingerbread. She was also an economist and a historian.

Lettice Fisher (née Ilbert) was born on 14 June 1875 in Kensington, London to Sir Courtenay Peregrine Ilbert and his wife Jessie.

She was educated at Francis Holland School, London and Somerville College, Oxford, where she was awarded a first in modern history in 1897. She worked as a researcher at the London School of Economics from 1897 to 1898. From 1902 to 1913, she taught history at St Hughs College, Oxford, and she also taught economics for the Association for the Higher Education of Women in Oxford.

Whilst at Oxford, Fisher was also involved in voluntary work in housing, public health and child welfare. She was an active suffragist, chairing the national executive of the National Union of Womens Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) from 1916 to 1918. She ran to become President of the NUWSS in 1919, following Millicent Fawcett‘s post-war resignation, but was defeated by Eleanor Rathbone.

During World War I, Fisher undertook welfare work among women munitions workers in Sheffield. It was the wartime scale of illegitimacy and its resulting hardships that led her, in 1918, to found the National Council for the Unmarried Mother and her Child, in order to challenge the stigma associated with single parent families, and to provide them with the support they needed.

The Council aimed to reform the Bastardy Acts and Affiliation Orders Acts, which discriminated against illegitimate children, and also to address the higher death rates of children born outside marriage, by providing accommodation for single mothers and their babies. They also provided practical advice and assistance to single parents, and helped with their inquiries.

Lettice Fisher was the first chair of the Council (from 1918 to 1950), with Sybil Neville-Rolfe acting as the deputy chair.

In July 1899, she married Herbert Albert Laurens Fisher, a tutor at New College, Oxford, who had taught her as an undergraduate. He became Warden of New College in 1925.

In 1913, they had one daughter, Mary Bennett, who became principal of St Hildas College, Oxford, from 1965 to 1980.

After her husbands death in 1940, she moved to Thursley in Surrey. She died there on 14 February 1956 after suffering a stroke. After cremation her ashes were interred at New College, Oxford.

Complete article available at this page.