Minnie Lansbury

Minnie Lansbury ( Glassman; 1889 – 1 January 1922) was an English suffragette and the first female alderman on the first Labour-led council in the Metropolitan Borough of Poplar, England. She died after contracting pneumonia while imprisoned for refusing to levy full rates in Poplar.

Family

Lansbury was born about 1889, off Brick Lane in Stepney, London. She was the daughter of Isaac Glassman, a Polish-born coal merchant, and his wife Annie Glassman. Her parents were Jewish immigrants.

In 1914, she married Edgar Lansbury. He was the son of George Lansbury, mayor of Poplar and later leader of the Labour Party, and Elizabeth Lansbury (née Brine). After Lansbury's death, Edgar remarried to actress Moyna Macgill and became the father of actor Angela Lansbury, Bruce Lansbury and Edgar Lansbury Jr.

Career Lansbury became a teacher, and joined the East London Federation of Suffragettes in 1915. She made arrangements with the film distribution company Pathé News to film suffrage meetings.

Lansbury was persuaded by Sylvia Pankhurst to give up her teaching post to become the secretary of the League of Rights for Soldiers' and Sailors' Wives and Relatives, fighting for the rights of widows, orphans and wounded soldiers from World War I. She was the first woman to be elected alderman on Poplar’s first Labour council in 1919, after a change in the law allowed some women to receive Parliamentary suffrage and stand as candidates. She said of the arrests that "if we said the word, the people of Poplar would prevent our arrest by no less than a machine-gun corps." Lansbury was buried in the Jewish cemetery in East Ham, with "thousands" of women assembling near her home to walk with the funeral procession.