{{Short description|English physician and activist (1844–1929)}} {{Use British English|date=August 2013}} {{Use dmy dates|date=February 2024}} {{Infobox person | name = Alice Vickery | image = Alice Vickery cropped.jpg | alt = | caption = Photograph of Vickery given by Rosika Schwimmer to the New York Public Library | birth_place = Swimbridge, Devon, England | baptised = 13 October 1844 | death_date = {{Death date and age|1929|01|12|1844|01|13|df=yes}} | death_place = Brighton, England | burial_place = Brookwood Cemetery, Surrey, England | occupation = Physician | known_for = Birth control activism and as the first British woman to qualify as a chemist and pharmacist | partner = Charles Robert Drysdale | education = Ladies' Medical College, University of Paris, Obstetrical Society, Royal Pharmaceutical Society | alma_mater = London School of Medicine for Women | movement = Malthusian League, Women's Freedom League | children = Charles Vickery Drysdale (1874)<br>George Vickery Drysdale (1881)<ref name=lrvickery/> }}
'''Alice Vickery''' (also known as '''A. Vickery Drysdale''' and '''A. Drysdale Vickery,''' ''c.'' 1844 – 12 January 1929)<ref name=":0">{{Cite ODNB |last=Hall |first=Lesley A. |date=27 May 2010 |orig-date=23 September 2004 |title=Vickery [Drysdale], Alice (1844–1929), physician and campaigner for women's rights |url=https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-39448 |access-date=2024-11-18 |language=en |doi=10.1093/ref:odnb/39448}}</ref> was an English physician, campaigner for women's rights, and the first British woman to qualify as a chemist and pharmacist. She and her life partner, Charles Robert Drysdale, also a physician, actively supported a number of causes, including free love, birth control, and destigmatisation of illegitimacy.
== Early life and education ==
Vickery was born in Swimbridge, Devon, in 1844, as the fifth child and second daughter of John Vickery, a piano maker and organ builder,<ref name="Bland"/> and his wife Frances Mary Vickery ''née'' Leah.<ref name=":0" /> By 1851, the family had moved to Peckham, South London, but Vickery remained in Devon at school.<ref name=":0" /> She joined her family in London in 1861 and founded employment as a pupil teacher.<ref name=":0" />
Vickery began her medical career at the Ladies' Medical College in 1869.<ref name=":1">{{Cite web |title=Alice Vickery (1844-1929) |url=https://heritage.humanists.uk/alice-vickery/ |access-date=2024-11-18 |website=Humanist Heritage |language=en}}</ref> There she met the lecturer Charles Robert Drysdale and started a relationship with him. They never married,<ref name="Bland" /><ref name="rpharms">{{citation |title=Alice Vickery |website= |url=http://www.rpharms.com/women-pharmacists-before-the-20th-century/alice-vickery.asp |access-date=25 July 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20160307083353/http://rpharms.com/women-pharmacists-before-the-20th-century/alice-vickery.asp |archive-date=7 March 2016 |url-status=dead |publisher=Royal Pharmaceutical Society}}</ref> as they both agreed that marriage was "legal prostitution" and opposed the institution.<ref name="Bland" /> Society, however, generally presumed that the pair were married, as had their contemporaries known that they were in a free union, their careers likely would have suffered. Vickery sometimes added Drysdale's name to her own, referring to herself both as "Dr. Vickery Drysdale" and as "Dr. Drysdale Vickery".<ref name="Bland" />
In 1873, Vickery obtained a midwife's degree from the Obstetrical Society.<ref name="Bland" /> On 18 June the same year, she passed the Royal Pharmaceutical Society's Minor exam,<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Rayner-Canham |first1=Marelene |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=-ExhEAAAQBAJ&dq=alice+vickery&pg=PA8 |title=Pioneers of the London School of Medicine for Women (1874-1947): Their Contributions and Interwoven Lives |last2=Rayner-Canham |first2=Geoff |date=2022-02-24 |publisher=Springer Nature |isbn=978-3-030-95439-0 |pages=8 |language=en}}</ref> becoming the first qualified female chemist and druggist.<ref name="rpharms" /> Afterward, Vickery went to study medicine at the University of Paris, as women were not allowed to attend any British medical school.<ref name="Bland" /><ref name="rpharms" /> There she gave birth to her first child, Charles Vickery Drysdale.<ref name="Bland" />
Vickery became fluent in French,<ref name=":0" /> later publishing translations of important French works through organisations such as the National British Women’s Temperance Association’s magazine ''Woman’s Signal''.<ref name=":2" /> Her translation of "On the Admission of Women to the Rights of Citizenship" by the philosopher and mathematician Marquis de Condorcet was published in 1912.
The UK Medical Act 1876 allowed women to obtain medical degrees. Vickery returned to England in 1877, after the King and Queen's College of Physicians, Ireland, refused to recognise her previous qualifications.<ref name=":0" /><ref name="Bland" /><ref name="rpharms" /> In 1880, she became one of five women who qualified as physicians in the kingdom, obtaining her degree from the London School of Medicine for Women, and started practising medicine.<ref name="Bland" /> In August 1881 her second son, George Vickery Drysdale was born.<ref name="lrvickery">{{cite web |url=http://lrvickery.home.comcast.net/~lrvickery/williamuk.htm |title=Descendants of William Vickery |work=Vickery Family Page |year=2008 |access-date=3 August 2013 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150930230736/http://lrvickery.home.comcast.net/~lrvickery/williamuk.htm |archive-date=30 September 2015 |url-status=dead }}</ref>{{Unreliable source?|date=November 2024}}
== Activism ==
Vickery became an early member of the Malthusian League and an outspoken supporter of birth control after the trial of Annie Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, who were arrested for publishing a book about contraception in 1877.<ref name=":3">{{Cite book |last=Chesler |first=Ellen |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=vNkTEWUQXIcC&dq=alice+vickery&pg=PA111 |title=Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America |date=2007-10-16 |publisher=Simon and Schuster |isbn=978-1-4165-5369-4 |pages=111 |language=en}}</ref> When she was called to testify at the trial, she spoke about the dangers of too frequent childbirths and of using over-lactation as a contraception method.<ref name="Bland">{{cite book|title=Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex and Morality|last=Bland|first=Lucy|publisher=Tauris Parke Paperbacks|isbn=1860646816|pages=202, 207|year=2002}}</ref>
Vickery had to temporarily withdraw from the League, however, because the London Medical School for Women did not approve of her activities. She resumed membership in 1880, when she obtained her degree, and spent the following decades lecturing about birth control as a key element to the emancipation of women. At the same time, she actively opposed the Contagious Diseases Acts.<ref name="rpharms" />
Both Vickery and Drysdale joined the Legitimation League, set up in 1893, and campaigned for equal rights for children born out of wedlock.<ref name="Bland" /><ref name="rpharms" /> Vickery felt that the organisation "did not go far enough" until it started advocating free love.<ref name="Bland" /> She delivered a talk to the Actresses Franchise League on "The Injustices and Inequalities of Marriage Laws", sharing a platform with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.<ref name=":0" />
Vickery was successively a member of the National Society for Women's Suffrage, the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), and the Women's Freedom League (WFL),<ref name="rpharms" /> and was president of the Herne Hill and West Norwood WFL branch.<ref name=":2" /> The Hendon Women’s Franchise Society, affiliated to the United Suffragists, was founded during a meeting at Vickery's house in Dulwich.<ref name=":2">{{Cite web |last=Stenlake |first=Frances |title=Alice Vickery (Dr.) |url=https://map.mappingwomenssuffrage.org.uk/items/show/346 |access-date=2024-11-18 |website=Mapping Women's Suffrage}}</ref> She participated in demonstrations, wrote for the feminist periodical ''Shafts'', was a WFL delegate to the Congress of the International Women’s Suffrage Alliance in Amsterdam in 1908,<ref name=":2" /> boycotted the 1911 census and donated generously to suffrage causes, but the main focus of her political campaigning continued to be birth control.<ref name=":0" /> Her son Charles Vickery Drysdale was a founding member of the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage in 1907.<ref>{{Cite ODNB |last=Mitchell |first=A. B. |date=8 October 2009 |orig-date=23 September 2004 |title=Drysdale, Charles Vickery (1874–1961), electrical engineer and social philosopher |url=https://www.oxforddnb.com/display/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-32908 |access-date=2024-11-18 |language=en |doi=10.1093/ref:odnb/32908}}</ref>
Vickery founded the Women's branch of the International Malthusian League in 1904.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Clark |first=Linda L. |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=NtitRt1uUXMC&dq=alice+vickery&pg=PA268 |title=Women and Achievement in Nineteenth-Century Europe |date=2008-04-17 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=978-0-521-65098-4 |pages=268 |language=en}}</ref> After Drysdale's death in 1907, she continued practising as a physician and succeeded him as president of the Malthusian League, while their elder son Charles and daughter-in-law Bessie Ingman became the new editors of the journal ''Malthusian''. When the American birth control activist Margaret Sanger visited Britain in 1915 she met with Vickery.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Rowbotham |first=Sheila |author-link=Sheila Rowbotham |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=xnXJUO6IG80C&dq=alice+vickery&pg=PA75 |title=Hidden From History: 300 Years of Women's Oppression and the Fight Against It |date=1977 |publisher=Pluto Press |isbn=978-0-904383-56-0 |pages=223 |language=en}}</ref><ref name=":3" /> Vickery also instructed the working class women of south-east London in birth control methods, after an invitation by Rotherhithe social worker Anna Martin.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Rowbotham |first=Sheila |author-link=Sheila Rowbotham |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=i2rnDwAAQBAJ&dq=alice+vickery&pg=RA1-PT49 |title=Dreamers of a New Day: Women Who Invented the Twentieth Century |date=2011-07-01 |publisher=Verso Books |isbn=978-1-78168-374-3 |language=en}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=5ep5DwAAQBAJ&dq=alice+vickery&pg=PA150 |title=Malthus, Medicine, & Morality: 'Malthusianism' after 1798 |date=2016-08-29 |publisher=BRILL |isbn=978-90-04-33333-8 |editor-last=Dolan |editor-first=Brian |pages=150 |language=en}}</ref>
Vickey also became one of the first members of the Eugenics Education Society,<ref name="Bland" /> but questioned their neglect of highlighting the relationship between family size and female emancipation.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Hasian |first=Marouf Arif |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=x1v3fN2Z89cC&dq=alice+vickery&pg=PA79 |title=The Rhetoric of Eugenics in Anglo-American Thought |date=1996 |publisher=University of Georgia Press |isbn=978-0-8203-1771-7 |pages=79 |language=en}}</ref> She also argued that the “true” sexual selection, of females selecting their mates, was inherently eugenic.<ref>{{Cite book |last1=Bland |first1=Lucy |url=https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195373141.013.0012 |title=The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics |last2=Hall |first2=Lesley |date=18 September 2012 |publisher=Oxford Academic |editor-last=Bashford |editor-first=Alison |chapter=Eugenics in Britain: The View from the Metropole |pages=212–227 |doi=10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195373141.013.0012 |isbn=978-0-19-537314-1 |editor-last2=Levine |editor-first2=Philippa}}</ref>
== Later years == [[File:Charles Drysdale Alice Vickery Grave.jpg|thumb|right|The grave of Alice Vickery in Brookwood Cemetery]] In 1921 Vickery resigned from her position as president of the Malthusian League due to ill health.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Soloway |first=Richard Allen |date=October 1978 |title=Neo-Malthusians, Eugenists, and the Declining Birth-Rate in England, 1900-1918 |url=https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/albion/article/abs/neomalthusians-eugenists-and-the-declining-birthrate-in-england-19001918/EF340B9BB6BA3701A1B7774FCB98D562 |journal=Albion |language=en |volume=10 |issue=3 |pages=264–286 |doi=10.2307/4048133 |jstor=4048133 |pmid=11614152 |issn=0095-1390|url-access=subscription }}</ref> She moved to Brighton in 1923 to be near her elder son. She regularly addressed meetings of the local branch of the Women's Freedom League and became president.<ref name=":0" />
== Death == She died of pneumonia on 12 January 1929,<ref name=":0" /> a few days after delivering an address that became her final public presentation.<ref name="rpharms" /> She was buried with Charles Robert Drysdale in Brookwood Cemetery.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Humanist Heritage: Power Partners: great loves of humanist history |url=https://heritage.humanists.uk/article/power-partners/ |access-date=2024-11-18 |website=Humanist Heritage |language=en}}</ref>
In an obiturary written by Edith How-Martyn for ''Women,'' and reprinted in the ''Ethical Record'', she was described as doing "spade work for the woman's side" in the Malthusian movement,<ref>{{Cite book |last=Lewis |first=Jane |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=QsL0EAAAQBAJ&dq=alice+vickery&pg=PT159 |title=The Politics of Motherhood: Child and Maternal Welfare in England, 1900-1939 |date=2024-05-01 |publisher=Taylor & Francis |isbn=978-1-040-02548-2 |language=en}}</ref> and "above all a feminist".<ref name=":1" />
== References == {{Reflist}}
==External links== * {{wikisource author-inline}} * {{Gutenberg author | id=35322| name=Alice Vickery}} * {{Internet Archive author |sname=Alice Vickery}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Vickery, Alice}} Category:1844 births Category:1929 deaths Category:Alumni of the London School of Medicine for Women Category:English eugenicists Category:English women medical doctors Category:British birth control activists Category:Deaths from pneumonia in England Category:Free love advocates Category:Burials at Brookwood Cemetery Category:Medical doctors from Devon Category:Women of the Victorian era Category:Activists from Devon Category:English suffragists Category:Women's Social and Political Union Category:English women civil rights activists