"Eleanor Rathbone" is the first book in the series "Women of Ideas". This, and succeeding volumes will: provide succinct introductions to the ideas of women who have been recognized as major theorists; make the work of major women of ideas accessible to students and those who wish to know more; appraise and reappraise the work of neglected women of ideas and give them a higher profile; and provide a full bibliography of its subject's writings, where they are easily available. In this book Johanna Alberti explores the political and intellectual context in which Eleanor Rathbone wrote, the impact of her ideas on feminist theory today, and on the women with whom she lived and worked. She traces Rathbone's life and ideas as a political activist (the only suffragist to become an MP in UK), and as an academic: her advocacy of child benefit; her wide-ranging analysis of contemporary economic and social structures; her focus on the definition and politicization of the myth of the family; the impact of race and imperialism; and the development of her wider thinking on gender - particularly her move from an equality-based analysis to one of gender difference.