Annie Besant

She married the clergyman Frank Besant and had two children, but began to doubt her faith when her daughter fell gravely ill in 1871 and refused to attend Communion as her husband demanded. In 1873 she left him for London, taking her daughter under a legal separation. In 1874 she joined the National Secular Society and became Charles Bradlaugh’s close associate. In 1877 the two set up the Freethought Publishing Company and republished Fruits of Philosophy by the American Charles Knowlton, which argued that working-class families could not be happy until they could decide how many children to have and described methods of limiting them. They were arrested and convicted, but the verdict was overturned on appeal on a technical point.

After the trial she led the founding of the Malthusian League, reviving a name Bradlaugh had coined, became its secretary and called for abolishing penalties for promoting contraception; her pamphlet The Law of Population (1878) sold well. That same year her husband argued that her campaigning on contraception made her unfit, and won custody of both children. The League gradually veered towards eugenics. In 1885 she broke with the individualist Bradlaugh and joined the Fabian Society on Shaw’s sponsorship; she was involved in the Bloody Sunday demonstration of 1887 and the matchgirls’ strike of 1888 and was elected to the London School Board.

Meeting Helena Blavatsky in 1890, she turned to theosophy and in 1907 became president of the Theosophical Society, with its headquarters at Adyar, Madras. She attacked caste and child marriage in India and worked for Indian education, and when the First World War broke out she declared that “England’s need is India’s opportunity”, founding the All India Home Rule League with Tilak in 1916. Interned in June 1917 and released, she became that December the first woman president of the Indian National Congress. She later kept her distance from Gandhi’s new leadership, and died at Adyar in 1933.