Edith Annesley Badham

Edith Annesley Badham (6 December 1853 – 17 May 1920) was an Australian educator and headmistress of the Sydney Church of England Girls Grammar School in Darlinghurst, New South Wales (a suburb of Sydney), now known as SCEGGS Darlinghurst.

Early life Badham was born in England in Louth, Lincolnshire. She was the oldest daughter of Reverend Charles Badham and his first wife, Julia Matilda ( Smith). She went to school in Dinant, France, where she was taught by her father, who recognised her gift for languages as a student.

In 1867, the family moved to Sydney, where her father was a Professor of Classics and Principal of the University of Sydney. Although women were not allowed to attend university, she studied all the subjects on the arts course and became so proficient that she helped her father in his work and corrected examination papers alongside him. She was succeeded in the same year by Dorothy Irene Wilkinson.

Personal views and writing Badham's views on education and social thinking have been described as conservative; for example, she was an anti-suffragist (arguing against women's right to vote in The Brisbane Courier in 1895), and argued that motherhood and marriage were the highest developments of women's nature, a theme her schooling instilled into its pupils. Her views were widely held by the population at large, and her school flourished.