Margaret Llewelyn Davies

Margaret Caroline Llewelyn Davies (16 October 1861 – 28 May 1944) was a British social activist who served as general secretary of the Co-operative Women's Guild from 1889 until 1921. Her election has been described as a "turning point" in the organization's history, increasing its political activity and beginning an era of unprecedented growth and success. Catherine Webb considered Davies's retirement such a significant loss for the Guild that she began writing The Woman with the Basket, a history of the Guild to that time.

Davies compiled Maternity: Letters from Working Women (1915), a book based on letters from Guild members about their experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and raising children. She was the editor of Life as we have Known it (1931), a collection of Guild members' reflections, which included an introduction by her friend Virginia Woolf. Davies was a prominent and dedicated pacifist of her era.

Early life Margaret Caroline Llewelyn Davies was born on 16 October 1861 in Marylebone, London, the youngest of seven children born to Mary (née Crompton) and John Llewelyn Davies. Davies' parents were involved in radical intellectual movements when she was a child. Her father was the vicar of Christ Church in Marylebone, as well as a fellow of Trinity College and an outspoken foe of poverty and inequality, active in Christian socialist groups, and was also involved in the early co-operative movement. Her aunt, Emily Davies, helped found Girton College, Cambridge, where Margaret studied from 1881 to 1883, after attending Queen's College, London. Many of her extended family were also politically active, especially around the issue of women's suffrage. and was impressed by the co-operative theory of the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers. Davies and her friend Rosalind Mary Shore Smith researched profit-sharing workshops in 1888, and recommended against their adoption by the movement. During her tenure, the Guild became far more politically active than it previously had been. In Kirkby Lonsdale, Davies worked closely with Lilian Harris, who became the Guild's cashier in 1893 and its assistant secretary in 1901. During World War I, Davies was elected the general council of the Union of Democratic Control.

Davies's election as general secretary was described by Jean Gaffin and David Thoms, authors of Caring & sharing: the centenary history of the Co-operative Women's Guild (1993), as a "turning point" in the organization's history; her tenure ushered in an era of unprecedented growth and success for the Guild. Davies was considered such a significant figure in the Guild, and her retirement such a loss, that Catherine Webb began writing The Woman with the Basket, a history of the Guild to that point. In 2020, Margaret Llewelyn Davies: with women for a new world, a biography by Ruth Cohen, was published. There is a commemorative plaque to Davies on the house she lived with Harris and her father in, in Hampstead as well as in the churchyard of St Mary's Church, Kirkby Lonsdale.