Webb, (Martha) Beatrice, Baroness Passfield

Abstract

Beatrice Webb (1858-1943) was a British writer, social investigator, and reformer who played a prominent role in her cousin Charles Booth's groundbreaking study of the London poor, Life and Labour of the People in London (1889). With her husband, the writer, politician, and fellow social reformer, Sidney Webb, later 1st Baron Passfield (1859-1947), the two formed a powerful intellectual duo whose drive for effective social reform revolutionized the British welfare system. Together, they published over thirteen books and, with George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) and Graham Wallace (1858-1932) founded the London School of Economics in 1895. Beatrice Webb was also a keen diarist and her diaries and autobiography My Apprenticeship, first published in 1926, are important accounts of late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century attempts to understand the root causes of poverty in London and to establish appropriate efforts to alleviate the troubles of the London poor. Beatrice Webb was awarded an honorary doctorate from The University of Manchester in 1909 and was the first woman to be elected a fellow of the British Academy.