Margaret Emily Hodge

Margaret Emily Hodge (8 January 1858 – 13 August 1938) was a British educator, suffragist, pacifist and urban district councillor who established teacher training courses in Australia.

She was a member of feminist organisations including the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales (WSL), the National Council of Women of Australia (NCW), the Peace Society, the Australian and New Zealand Women Voters' Committee (ANZWVC), the British Dominions Woman Suffrage Union (BDWSU) and the Women's Freedom League (WFL).

Early life Hodge was born on 8 January 1858 at Campden Hill, Kensington, London into a large and wealthy middle-class family. She was the fifth daughter and one of seven children of actuary William Barwick Hodge and Penelope Sarah Hodge .

Hodge was educated at home, then gained a higher local certificate from the University of Cambridge. In 1879, she enrolled at Maria Grey Training College for Teachers in Bishopsgate, where she met her friend Harriet Christina Newcomb (1854–1942).

Hodge taught at Bishopsgate School for Girls, Hodge and Newcomb founded Shirley School and Kindergarten, a girls' demonstration and training school, on Edgecliff Road, Sydney in January 1900. Trainee kindergarten teachers were often new immigrants that had arrived in the Australian colony from Britain. Shirley School had 100 students by the end of the first year and pupils included Kathleen Ussher and Eunice Mort.

Hodge and Newcomb continued to be involved in the Australian women's suffrage movement from Britain. They organized an Australian contingent to march in the suffrage procession in London on 18 June 1910.

Newcomb was honorary secretary of the Australian and New Zealand Women Voters' Committee (ANZWVC), established in London in 1911, and Hodge was also a member of the ANZWVC executive committee. They travelled across the British Empire to speak on Australian women's suffrage, including to South Africa in 1912, Australia and New Zealand in 1912 and 1913 and Canada in 1914. The BDWSU was established for Australian, British and New Zealand women to help white Canadian and South African women gain the right to vote. Members of the advisory committee included Maud Arncliffe Sennett, Adeline Chapman, Milicent Fawcett, Catherine Marshall, Sylvia Pankhurst and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence.

Newcomb and Hodge had initially supported the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) when they returned to England, but moved away from the WSPU due to the "militarism" of the Pankhurst family during World War I.

In 1919, Hodge was elected an urban district councillor for Hendon with the Labour Party.

Former pupils and friends set up a memorial fund, which became the Newcomb-Hodge Fellowship at the University of Sydney's Department of Education in 1950.