Alice Vickery

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, There she met the lecturer Charles Robert Drysdale and started a relationship with him. They never married, as they both agreed that marriage was "legal prostitution" and opposed the institution. becoming the first qualified female chemist and druggist.

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. 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.

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. 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,

Vickery founded the Women's branch of the International Malthusian League in 1904. 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.

Vickey also became one of the first members of the Eugenics Education Society, She also argued that the “true” sexual selection, of females selecting their mates, was inherently eugenic.

Later years

In 1921 Vickery resigned from her position as president of the Malthusian League due to ill health. 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.

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, and "above all a feminist".