Eva MacNaghten has two claims to fame: firstly, she was one of Brighton’s Suffragettes and secondly, she became a founder member of the Women’s International League which is still in existence, known today as the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
Eva was born in Ovingdean, the daughter of the Hon. Elliott McNaghten and his wife Mathilda Maria nee Vibart. Her father had been born in Calcutta, and her mother in South Africa. During his career, Eva’s father served as a JP, a member of the Supreme Court in Calcutta, and as Chairman of the East India Company. This represents a background of financial security and elevated social status.
However, Eva seems to have been of a different stripe! In the years before the First World War she was advertised in Common Cause, the newspaper of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, as a regular speaker at their public meetings. But the outbreak of war in 1914 disrupted the Women’s suffrage movement. Mrs. Pankhurst urged women to stop, and to put their energy into supporting the war. Other women, including Sylvia Pankhurst and Eva MacNaghten, spoke out against the war, and became campaigners for peace, calling themselves the Women’s International League.
History shows that Germany went through a disastrous post-war slump, and the Nazis used that to persuade the Germans that they could become great again, through Fascism. Mussolini persuaded the Italians that they too could find national pride under Fascism, and there was no formal opposition from the victorious allies of the Great War to challenge Franco’s imposition of Fascism in Spain, although a number of men (and women) from Brighton & Hove went to support the Republican cause, and others gave refuge to the children of Spanish Republicans here in Brighton & Hove.
Eva MacNaghten lived to see all women in the UK receive the vote in 1928, which must have gratified her, but unfortunately, so she saw the rise of Fascism in Europe, and would have known about the Spanish Civil War. She died in 1936, so she was spared the experience of living through the Second World War.
