Helen Taylor’s election poster

Helen Taylor was nominated by the Camberwell Radical Club to be their Independent Radical Democrat candidate for Camberwell North in the November 1885 election. This was a deliberate challenge to the existing laws, as women remained excluded from full citizenship, and would not gain the vote for more than three decades. Taylor was the first British woman candidate for Parliament (although her papers were ultimately refused on account of her sex), and part of a tradition of radical candidacies which included those of Charles Bradlaugh (the atheist MP for Northampton), and religious dissenters who were excluded from public office. This election poster, held in the collections of the LSE Library, is a reminder of the barriers faced by women and the non-religious for many centuries, and of the bravery of humanists throughout history who worked to overcome them.

Helen Taylor was a progressive and compassionate reformer, and an inheritor of her mother Harriet Taylor Mill‘s humanism. She was closely associated with the ethical societies (not yet established during Taylor Mill’s lifetime), and expressed particular admiration for educationist and humanist F.J. Gould. Taylor’s election agent was Ethel Leach, who was in turn a close friend of Emilie Holyoake – both freethinkers. Leach went on to become the first woman mayor of Great Yarmouth.