Beatrice Webb (1858–1943)

Beatrice Potter was born in the village of Standish, Gloucestershire, to the large family of Richard Potter, a wealthy businessman, and his wife Laurencina Heyworth. She educating herself by extensive reading and discussions with her father’s visitors, including the philosopher Herbert Spencer. While staying with distant relatives in a small Lancashire town, she became acquainted with the working class cooperative movement. In 1891, she published her first book, The Co-operative Movement in Great Britain, which later became a classic. In 1892, she married Sidney Webb and the two worked closely together for many years. Both were members of the Labour Party, co-founders of the Fabian Society, and supporters of the Soviet Union. They wrote several books together, including The History of Trade Unionism (1894) and Industrial Democracy (1897). Beatrice's several volumes of autobiographies, beginning with My Apprenticeship (1922), provide important background to the politics of her day. Her diaries, which spanned six decades of her life from 1873 to her death in 1943, include her politically-engaged thoughts and actions during World War I and in the early years of World War II. The diaries were published in four volumes from 1982 to 1985, and in a one-volume abridged edition in 2001.