The life story of Enid Stacy, a pioneering feminist, socialist and founding member of the ILP, has been published for the first time by the Working Class Movement Library in Salford.
Our Enid – the life and work of Enid Stacy, 1868-1903 was written by her niece Angela Tuckett and is available from the Library for £5.00.
Stacy was an inspiring public speaker who won over tens of thousands of working class men and women to the cause of socialism in the late 19th century. She toured the country – sometimes with the Clarion Van in Scotland and the north of England – to speak to large crowds. As a feminist, she also argued for women’s suffrage as central to socialism.
For the early ILP there was “no clearer [nor] more convincing exponent” of socialist principles, while the Fabians promoted her lecturing tours in America. She shared platforms with contemporaries such as Keir Hardie, Eleanor Marx and Tom Mann who said of Stacy, she “could speak to thousands in the open air as though she was talking with each one in their own home”.
She was known affectionately as “our Enid” and remembered for years after her early death by many who heard her. Yet there has never been a full-length biography of Stacy until this one.
The author Angela Tuckett died in 1994 leaving the manuscript unpublished. WCML founders, Ruth and Eddie Frow, always hoped that one day the biography would see the light of day and now, after a lot of hard work bringing it up to a publishable standard, Enid’s story can finally be read.
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See also: ‘Enid Stacy – Bristol Pioneer of Peace and Socialism’, by Rae Street, one of the ILP profiles published to mark our 120th anniversary in 2013.
Click here to read more about the Working Class Movement Library.
