Lucy Soulsby

Lucy Helen Muriel Soulsby (18 July 1856 – 19 May 1927) was a British headmistress of Oxford High School for Girls. She notably opposed women's suffrage.

Life Soulsby was born in London in 1856. Her parents were Susan Sybilla (born Thompson) and Christopher Percy Soulsby and she spent her early childhood in New Zealand. She and her mother, who ran a school, returned to England in 1867 after her father died. She was very close to her mother who provided her education.

In 1885, Dorothea Beale took an interest in Soulsby's career and she began to work at Beale's Cheltenham Ladies College which Soulsby acknowledged was excellent training for her career. In her first year she employed Charles Dodgson as a mathematics tutor. He proved a demanding teacher, but he later donated several first editions of his (Lewis Carroll's) Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. She introduced chemistry as a subject with the warning that it should not overshadow needlework.

Soulsby was a friend of Elizabeth Wordsworth and she was on the council of Wordsworth's Lady Margaret Hall but she came to think that women should not aspire to academic subjects and she was a lone voice in opposing the idea that women in Oxford should be given degrees. Every other Girls' Public Day School Company headmistress was in support of the idea.

From 1897 to 1915 she led a small school for up to 40 girls at the Manor House, Brondesbury. She supported the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League and believed that women should not have the vote. She valued each pupil and trained each so that they could be as good a wife and mother as her mother had been. By 1915 when she retired these ambitions were no longer inspirational for students. She said that when she needed advice she turned to men. Her 1914 revised version of Principles of Education emphasised bible-reading, prayer and self-discipline.

Soulsby died, unmarried, in Reading in 1927.