Katharine Glasier

Katharine Glasier (25 September 1867 - 14 June 1950) was a British socialist journalist.

Glasier was born in Stoke Newington as Katharine St John Conway, the second of seven children. Her older brother was Robert Seymour Conway. Their father, Samuel Conway, was a Congregationalist minister based at Chipping Ongar, Essex; his wife, Amy ("née" Curling) came from a well-off family from Stoke Newington. The family moved to Walthamstow while she was young. She attended Hackney High School for Girls and studied classics at Newnham College, Cambridge with a scholarship, graduating with a degree in the second class. Notwithstanding the practice of Cambridge University, which did not award degrees to women at that time, she appended the usual BA to her name.

Conway became a teacher at Redland High School in Bristol, where she was inspired to join the Bristol Socialist Society after seeing a demonstration by striking female cottonworkers. She lost her job and moved in with Dan Irving to care for his wife, also joining the Fabian Society. She began lecturing for the organisation, and in 1893 became a founding member of the Independent Labour Party (ILP). She was one of the fifteen members elected to the ILP's first national administrative council in January 1893.

She married John Bruce Glasier later that year, on 21 June 1893, but continued to undertake lecture tours. They had three children: Jeannie, Malcolm, and John Glendower (known as Glen).

In the early years of the twentieth century, Glasier wrote for a number of publication. She published three novels - "Husband and Brother" (1894), "Aimee Furniss, Scholar" (1896), and "Marget" (1902–3) - and a collection of short stories, "Tales from the Derbyshire Hills" (1907).

She remained prominent in the ILP, and in 1916 took over from Fenner Brockway as editor of its newspaper, the "Labour Leader". Initially a highly successful editor, disputes about her support for the Bolsheviks led to a decline in sales. She was also nursing her terminally ill husband, who died in 1920, and she suffered a nervous breakdown in April 1921. The editorship was taken over by H. N. Brailsford. Her younger son, Glen, also died in 1928.

In the 1920s, Glasier joined the Society of Friends and the Theosophical Society. She became the ILP's National Organiser, but resigned in 1931 when the ILP left the Labour Party, continuing to work for the Labour Party.

She lived in Glen Cottage, in Earby in Lancashire, from 1922 until her death.

References

*Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
* [http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Wglasier.htm Katharine Glasier] , Spartacus Educational