Activism
Cadbury and her husband played a great role in the development of Bournville and she opened the 200th house there. In 1909, she opened the Woodland Hospital, which became the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital. She also built The Beeches, to provide holidays for slum children. She chaired the Birmingham school medical service committee and worked energetically to provide medical inspection in schools. Together with her husband, she participated in the reform of industrial working and living conditions through supporting the welfare, health and education of women and children in Bournville. Amongst the original Trustees of the Bournville Village Trust, in 1922 she succeeded George Cadbury as Chairman and supported the development of housing schemes and community life in Bournville village for over fifty years.
From 1941-48, she was president of the United Hospital in Birmingham. Throughout her life she campaigned for the education and welfare of women as a philanthropist and convinced, but non-militant, suffragist. She taught a class for the wives of her husband's students at the Severn Street Adult School in Birmingham.[5]
The founder in 1898 of the Birmingham Union of Girls' Clubs, Cadbury was active in the National Council for Women from 1896 to her death. She was the founder of the Midlands Division of the Young Women's Christian Association. She was Vice President of the Electrical Association for Women, an organisation which sought to promote the benefits of electricity in the home and alleviate women's domestic drudgery.[6] In 1911 she was appointed Chairman of Birmingham City Education Committee’s Hygiene Sub-Committee.[7]
An active pacifist, Cadbury opposed the Second Boer War, fought between the British Empire and two independent Boer states, although Cadburys did donate chocolate free of charge in unbranded tins to soldiers.[8] She was the first chair of the Peace and International Relations Committee of the National Council of Women, established in 1914.[9] In 1916, she was elected to the National Peace Council, becoming its treasurer and then its vice-president. Along with Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon, Lady Aberdeen, Millicent Fawcett, and Mrs Corbett Ashby, she pressed for the inclusion of women's issues in the agenda of the Congress of Versailles.[9] She was an energetic supporter of the League of Nations Union. In 1924 she led the work of a Public Utility Society, Residential Flats Ltd., which erected a residential club ‘designed to meet the needs of business and professional women who are enabled to have ‘a home of their own’, with the additional advantages of the communal services of a club’.[10]
During and immediately following the First World War, Cadbury led local efforts to provide housing and schooling for young refugees from Serbia and Austria who came to Birmingham to escape conflict and poverty in their home countries.[7] During the Second World War, she worked with Belgian refugees, and after that war continued her efforts with the International Council of Women.[3]
In national politics Cadbury's sympathies were similar to those usually associated with Christian socialism, and she was a pillar of the Liberal Party. She was a Birmingham city councillor, for King's Norton ward, from 1919 to 1924, as a Liberal, losing her seat to a Conservative. Her political platform was a reformist one: municipal action in housing improvement, a school health service, and equality of opportunity. Among her political successes were her co-option to the Birmingham education committee in 1919, and her services as a magistrate from 1926. Cadbury also fought the King's Norton seat for the Liberals at the 1923 general election coming third but maintaining the Liberal share of the vote at 25%.[11]
In 1936, aged 78, she led the UK delegation to the World Congress of the International Council of Women, held in Calcutta.[12]
