Dorothy Layton

Dorothy Layton, Lady Layton (born Eleanor Dorothea Osmaston; 4 October 1887 – 18 March 1959) was an English suffragist and politician. She was active in the Liberal Party after some women were given the vote in 1918. She supported the ideas of family allowance and family planning.

Life Layton was born in Hampstead in 1887. She was the first of three children born to the suffragist Eleanor Margaret and Francis Plumptre Beresford Osmaston. Her father was a barrister and they lived in Limpsfield, Surrey.

Her parents arranged her education at various places until a bequest enabled her to attend Julia Huxley's Prior's Field School where she made friends with Julian and Aldous Huxley. She went on to attend Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1906 where she continued her suffragism by joining the non-militant National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). Her mother was also a suffragist and during the 1906 general election the two of them were in Surrey canvassing voters in Limpsfield to sign a suffrage petition. She graduated she would speak in villages as they passed. Her greatest influence was also in 1937 when she persuaded the Women's Liberal Federation to back the idea of family allowances, which led to the party supporting family allowances. He would die in 1966.