Dr Rathi Guhadasan
The achievements of Dr Edith Summerskill – a founding member of the Socialist Medical Association in 1930 – were extraordinary. She qualified as a doctor in 1924 and from the start of her career, she understood that women’s health was inseparable from women’s and class equality.
In Isabel Hardman’s history of the NHS, “Fighting for Life” Dr Summerskill describes attending her first patient in labour, as a newly-qualified doctor:
“There lay the patient on a mattress, covered by a threadbare blanket, a girl of my own age, in labour with her second child. By the bed stood a cot and standing grasping the wooden bars was a child with bulging forehead and crooked legs. The classic picture of rickets, a disease of undernourishment. The young mother clutched my hand with her own moist bony fingers, on which she wore a greenish brass wedding ring, twisted round with cotton to prevent it falling off.
In that room that night I became a socialist and I joined in the fight, not against a class but against a system.”
She established a surgery in Enfield in the 1930s and saw firsthand the health inequalities endured by working-class women and their families. She joined the Socialist Medical Association (later to become the Socialist Health Association), a new group of doctors set up to campaign for universal health care, free and open to all. Within a few years, they achieved their first victory when the Labour Party, to whom they had affiliated shortly after their foundation, adopted the idea of free medical care, managed by local government, as official policy.
By that time, Edith’s political career was already advancing but she stuck to her principles of women’s health and women’s equality. As a candidate in the 1935 general election, when an endorsement from the Catholic Church would have meant agreeing not to advocate for birth control, she refused. She lost but emerged as a politician driven by principle, not self-interest. She finally entered Parliament in 1938, serving as a London MP until 1955. She then moved to the newly created constituency of Warrington, which she represented until her elevation to the House of Lords as Baroness Summerskill of Ken Wood in 1961.
Her experience and expertise in health and nutrition directly informed her legislative campaigns. She was deeply concerned by the prevalence of preventable disease among the poor and acted from the conviction that good health was a right and not a by-product of wealth and privilege. Within the SMA, Summerskill was a powerful advocate for integrating women’s health into the broader socialist programme. She argued that specific health burdens borne by women — repeated pregnancy, domestic labour, malnutrition — were not merely medical problems but symptoms of a profoundly unequal social order. She used the SMA as a platform to link clinical evidence to political argument, making the case that a National Health Service must serve women on equal terms and must take seriously the relationship between poverty and ill health. As part of the campaign for universal health care, she campaigned with midwife Esther Rickards, for a National Maternity Service, raising awareness of the high rates of preventable maternal mortality and morbidity and ensuring that the birth of the NHS in 1948 brought considerable improvements to maternal, newborn and child health.
The SMA’s influence on the creation of the NHS was considerable, and Summerskill’s dual authority as both a practising doctor and a parliamentarian made her uniquely effective in bridging the medical profession and the Labour movement. Her prominence in the organisation helped ensure that the case for a national health service was heard not just as an abstract policy argument but as something grounded in the daily realities of clinical practice.
Her contributions in Parliament were wide-ranging and often ahead of their time. As Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Food from 1945 to 1950 and later Minister of National Insurance (1950–51) under Clement Attlee, she was one of the most senior women in post-war British government. In these roles she championed the rights of housewives and mothers, arguing for equal social security provisions, and pushed for cleaner, safer food standards at a time when food adulteration was still widespread. She was instrumental in establishing regulations requiring the pasteurisation of milk — a campaign she pursued for over a decade in the face of considerable resistance from farming lobbies. As early as 1962, she called for a ban on tobacco advertising.
Summerskill was an outspoken advocate for women’s equality in marriage and law. She steered the Married Women (Restraint upon Anticipation) Act 1949 through Parliament, removing an archaic restriction on married women’s property rights. She campaigned to legalise abortion. She was also a pioneering voice against boxing, introducing private members’ bills on multiple occasions to ban the sport on medical grounds — a crusade she maintained despite relentless opposition, convinced by the neurological damage she had witnessed in her medical practice. She opposed nuclear weapons and the American war on Vietnam and visited a Palestinian refugee camp in Jordan speaking out about the conditions for women and children there.
Edith Summerskill died on 4 February 1980, having spent more than four decades at the intersection of medicine and politics. Her life embodied a conviction that the doctor’s responsibility does not end at the consulting room door — that tackling disease means tackling the social conditions in which disease flourishes. In this sense, her work helped lay the intellectual and political foundations for the National Health Service and is still relevant today.
She was also the author of several books, including A Woman’s World (1967), a memoir that reflected on her experiences as a woman in medicine and politics during a period of remarkable social change. Outspoken, principled, and occasionally combative, Summerskill was among the most significant women in twentieth-century British public life — a woman whose insistence on connecting medical knowledge to political action helped define what progressive healthcare could look like.
References
Isabel Hardman, “Fighting for Life – The Twelve Battles That Made Our NHS, and the Struggle for Its Future”. 2023. Penguin Random House UK.
What have you done for the feminist movement?: Edith Summerskill – LabourList