September 2nd, 2008
Inspiring Women: Eglantyne Jebb
Eglantyne Jebb was born in 1876 and was one of six children. Forty-three years later she and her sister Dorothy, co-founded the Save the Children charity. In between these times she went to study at Oxford, which was quite unusual for women in 1895. She not only enjoyed political science lectures from A.L. Smith, but also became friendly with the great niece of the poet Wordsworth, who was the principal of Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford University.
Eglantyne came from a talented, influential and well-off family. As a child she was a tomboy and entertained her siblings by telling stories. Later she edited the family newspaper.
After attending University in Oxford she became a teacher following Froebel’s theories in a school in Marlborough in Wiltshire. This was very progressive teaching at the time and Eglantyne became popular with the children because she took them out of the classroom.
In 1903 Eglantyne began to work for a charity in Cambridgeshire. Charity work at this time was largely centred within individual countries. Eglantyne, a pacifist, realized that the effects of the First World War were causing extreme hardship to children, particularly in places like Austria and Serbia. In 1919 she and Dorothy started the Save the Children Charity and were met with some resistance from the allied countries, who were reluctant to help children from countries they had fought in the war. In response Jebb said that, “ A child is a child whether red or white, brown or black.” (Jebb quoted in Wilson 1967 – Rebel Daughter of a Country House: the life of Eglantyne Jebb, founder of the Save the Children Fund, published by Allen and Unwin – currently out of print.) Eglantyne recognised that war and poverty were the enemies of children and did all she could to halt the effects.
Eglantyne helped to establish that children had basic human rights in the same way as adults. They had the right to be fed and sheltered and this was the basis of the early interventions of her charity. Her work led directly to the Declaration of Geneva, which was about giving children rights of provision, shelter, the right to receive relief in times of distress and to protection against exploitation.
The Declaration of Geneva led to the United Nations Convention of the Rights of the Child. All countries of the world have signed this except America and Somalia, presumably because these countries have their own legislation for children’s rights.
Nowadays most charities, including the Save the Children Fund, have moved on from merely rescuing children, where children are seen as ineffectual, to helping children participate in decisions about their futures, where children are seen as powerful. It is Eglantyne Jebb’s work that has been the force in establishing that children, like adults, have basic human rights.
Eglantyne Jebb had a vision that poverty and war were particularly detrimental to the children of the world and that as human beings we have duties to the next generation, wherever they live. She was a leader whose ideas were way ahead of her time.
You can find more about Eglantine Jebb and the Save the Children Fund by visiting their website. http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/
