ABSTRACT
Winifred (freda) utley (1899–1978) was the second child of Willie Herbert Utley (1866–1918) and Emily Williamson (1865–1945). Her father was a socialist journalist and her maternal grandfather a freethinker, a republican and a manufacturer in Manchester. Plain-featured, short-sighted and hard of hearing, Freda was a passionate and convinced believer in the causes she espoused. Educated in a rationalist and humanist mode, she was brought up to be a conscientious atheist and to see religion as only the shield of tyranny, intolerance and cruelty. Hot for certainties in life, she became imbued with an abiding passion for freedom and justice, which proved as strong as any religious fervour. She grew into a thoroughly modern woman, emancipated from the traditions of the past but retaining a tough Puritan core. From her education in Switzerland, she acquired an international outlook. She never believed in the particular wickedness or virtue of any one people, race or nation or in the intrinsic superiority of any race or nation to another. She never became much of a feminist and was saved from becoming ‘the type of unsexed, frustrated or embittered woman who provides dynamic energy to all movements for the regimentation of mankind’ such as Beatrice Webb or Eleanor Roosevelt. 1 Aspiring to liberate mankind from immemorial oppression, she sought to usher in, through political activity, a new era of human freedom.
