Dr. Alice Vickery (1844 – January 12, 1929) was a pioneering English physician, feminist, and advocate for social reform.Queer Places:
Brookwood Cemetery, Glades House, Cemetery Pales, Brookwood, Woking GU24 0BL, United Kingdom
Dr. Alice Vickery (1844 – January 12, 1929) was a pioneering English physician, feminist, and advocate for social reform.
Born in Devon, Vickery became the first woman in Britain to qualify as a chemist and pharmacist (1873). She later became one of the first five women to qualify as a physician in Britain, earning her degree from the London School of Medicine for Women in 1880.
A committed humanist, secularist, and feminist, she was deeply involved in the campaign for women’s suffrage and reproductive rights. She was a prominent advocate for6 birth control, serving as a vice-president and later president of the Malthusian League.
In defiance of Victorian social norms, she and her partner, physician Charles Robert Drysdale, entered into a "free union" and never married, as they considered marriage to be a form of "legal prostitution". They had two sons together and eventually lived in a domestic arrangement that many contemporaries simply assumed was a traditional marriage.
Her association with "free love" is sometimes discussed in historical contexts, but this term in the late 19th and early 20th centuries generally referred to the movement advocating for sexual and reproductive autonomy—specifically the right for women to choose if and when to have children and the rejection of state or religious control over personal relationships (such as marriage laws). While her rejection of the institution of marriage and her support for bodily autonomy were radical for her time, these positions were rooted in feminist and Malthusian advocacy rather than the modern framework of LGBTQ identity or rights.
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