ABSTRACT
Margery Spring Rice was born Margaret Lois Garrett in 1887 to progressive London parents who took careers for women as the natural order of things. She studied first at Bedford College and then, from 1907 to 1910, at Girton College, Cambridge, where she read moral sciences. Spring Rice threw herself into public life and by the 1920s, was honorary treasurer of the Women's National Liberal Federation. It was this connection that alerted her to terrible conditions of poverty and overcrowding in North Kensington and resulted in her decision to set up a birth control clinic, the North Kensington Women's Welfare Clinic, in 1924. The Women's Health Enquiry Committee (WHEC) was set up in 1933 as a voluntary and non-political committee to investigate the state of health of women in Great Britain, in particular married working-class women. Spring Rice was elected honorary secretary.
