Alice Abadam

Alice Abadam (2 January 1856 – 31 March 1940) was a Welsh suffragist, women’s rights campaigner and feminist.

Early life Alice Abadam was born on 2 January 1856 in St John's Wood, London to Edward Abadam (; 1810–1875), the former High Sheriff of Carmarthenshire, and Louisa Abadam (née Taylor; 1828–1886). The paternal granddaughter of Edward Hamlyn Adams, a lawyer, slave contractor and politician, Abadam's father inherited Middleton Hall (the site of the National Botanic Garden of Wales) in 1842 and subsequently added the Welsh Patronymic "Ab" to the family name.

The youngest of seven children, Abadam grew up at Middleton Hall in Llanarthne.

Abadam, by her own account, had a happy childhood and was educated by a governess at Middleton Hall. She saw little of her mother who suffered ill-health brought about by post-natal depression. By 1861 her mother was living away from the family in Brighton, and in 1871 was living back at her paternal home in Dorset. Despite living apart, her parents remained married until the death of Edward in 1875.

Her father held anti-clerical views, but Abadam converted to Catholicism in 1880 as a result of the Oxford Movement.

A musical upbringing led her to becoming the organist and choir master at St Mary's Church on Union Street, in Carmarthen. Abadam met Dr. Alice Vowe Johnson (1869–1938), a doctor and surgeon, when she was medical officer at Carmarthen's Asylum and they were companions for the rest of their lives. She became a well known speaker and she addressed a number of suffrage societies, Women's Freedom League (WFL) colours and motto 1908. Original in LSE Library Abadam had subscribed as an "independent socialist" to the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and Independent Labour Party manifesto in the 1906 elections, and in 1911, the WSPU newspaper Votes for Women called Abadam "that well known speaker on social issues". and establishing the alternative Women's Freedom League (WFL).

Abadam took part in a suffragist cycle tour of the north in 1908 and recorded it in watercolour drawings including one of a policeman stating "you are free to hold your meeting... but the last lady to speak in Carlisle was Mary Queen of Scots, and then she went south and was beheaded!".

In Norwich in August 1912, speaking for an hour and quarter, Adadam appealed directly to the Catholic clergy not to abuse their power by promoting 'indifference and uninformed opposition' to women's suffrage,

In Plymouth in 1913, Adadam placed a motion at the Catholic Women's Suffrage Society, that this meeting "calls upon the Government to extend the Parliamentary franchise to women in the interests of justice, morality and religion".

In a 1913 pamphlet, "The Feminist Vote, Enfranchised or Emancipated?”, Abadam wrote more generally on women's rights, that "The Constructive Feminist has to be no man's shadow. She must be herself – free to the very soul of sex servility. So, and only so, can she save a stricken world". but also including freemasonry, embryology and witches.

In the 1920s the Catholic Women's Suffrage Society (which had become the St. Joan's International Alliance) promoted the Equal Franchise Bill and celebrated its passing into law in 1928, with a Mass in Westminster Cathedral and a procession of Protestant and Catholic suffragists including Millicent Fawcett, Charlotte Despard, Virginia Crawford, Elisabeth Christitch, Leonara di Alberti, and Abadam (then aged 72). She died there on 31 March 1940 Abadam left her money to her niece, Mary Edith Morris. Abadam also left an education legacy to pay for boarding school for her great niece Margaret Vaughan, who was four years old at her death.

At the centenary of some women gaining the right to vote under the Representation of the People Act 1918, Vaughan described her family's admiration for Abadam, stating that she regarded her as incredibly clever and considered her a major personal benefactor. Vaughan also said that she owns a collection of Abadam's paintings. She further noted that her daughter possesses a glass inscribed with the slogan Votes for Women. and at the National Botanical Garden of Wales Llanarthney on the site of her childhood home, the former Middleton Hall, who ensures that her family's memories of suffragist Abadam lives on. The commemoration formed part of a conference A Celebration of the Women of Middleton and the estates of Wales.

Abadam's papers are held at the Women's Library at the London School of Economics, donated by Vaughan in 2006.