ABSTRACT
Bessie Ingham Edwards Drysdale served, along with her husband Charles Vickery Drysdale, as secretary of the Malthusian League from 1911 to 1923. After a career in teaching, Bessie joined Charles in working for the Malthusian League, which ‘promoted family limitation as a cure for social ills’. Drysdale assisted in editing the Malthusian, the League’s journal, from 1907 to 1923. In 1908 she contributed to it, writing ‘Specially for Women’. To make her case, Drysdale presents the arguments of others who share her views; she quotes an excerpt from John Stuart Mill’s Principles of Political Economy that argues for the diminishing ratio of population to capital and employment and for the opening of ‘industrial occupations’ to women. As ‘Specially for Women’ makes clear, Drysdale believed that the control of family size, or the ‘lever for individual and social betterment’ and the ‘progress of woman’s emancipation’ are inextricably linked.
