Frances Mansbridge

Frances Jane Mansbridge, born Pringle in Cape Town in 1875 and raised from childhood in Hampshire, England, co-founded the Workers' Educational Association in 1903 alongside her husband Albert Mansbridge, whom she had met as a fellow Sunday school teacher. The couple built the WEA, formed to promote the higher education of working men, on modest personal funds, and Frances went on to serve on its Women's Advisory Committee from 1907 and to run its Comradeship Fund during the First World War. She also lectured internationally on adult education, touring Canada, the United States and Newfoundland in the late 1920s to speak to women's groups; her husband later said he could never have achieved what he did without her. She died in 1958.