Flora Freeman

Flora Lucy Freeman (4 April 1869 – 23 May 1960) was a British philanthropist and writer. She was known for starting clubs for girls and then writing to tell others how to also organise similar clubs. She was a Roman Catholic convert and she helped form Catholic Girl Guide troupes.

Life Freeman was born in Westminster in 1869. Her parents, Emily and William Henry Freeman, were Anglicans. Her father was a general practitioner. She had three elder brothers, she was well read and her family employed a nurse who she would read novels to. She became a writer.

She and Maude Stanley were involved in creating clubs for girls. Her first club was formed when she was 21. in which she confesses her own shyness when talking about religious subjects to strangers. She explains her own approach and how upper and middle class girls can assist working class girls if they realise that they too can learn from the experience.

In Brighton, she developed a special interest organisation to coordinate local clubs for "working-girls" named the "Brighton Girls' Club Union" in 1906. She wrote of the pleasures of shaping the "rough stone of slum childhood" and that although the leaders of these clubs would teach, they would also learn from the clubs members.

In 1911, she was involved with the creation of the National Organisation of Girls Clubs if only in the writing she had published in support of clubs for girls.

Freeman died in 1960 in Brighton.