Catherine Impey
English Quaker activist (1847–1923)
Catherine "Katie" Impey (13 August 1847 – 14 December 1923) was an English Quaker activist for temperance and against racial discrimination. She was the founder and editor of the anti-racist journal Anti-Caste (1888–1895).
Biography
Early life
Impey was born into a Quaker family on 13 August 1847 in Street, Somerset, to Robert Impey (1820–1886), a farmer who formerly worked as a tanner, and Mary Hannah Impey (née Clothier; 1823–1895). She went by the name Katie.
She and her sister Ellen received a Quaker education at Southside House, in nearby Weston-super-Mare. The school required all graduating students to embark on a philanthropic endeavour; Catherine and her sister elected to "help remove oppression among the darker races of the world."
Activism
Temperance
Impey was a lifelong teetotaller and made advocating temperance part of her life's work. She was a member of the Street Teetotal Society, the British Women's Temperance Association, and the International Order of Good Templars.
Anti-racism
Impey founded Britain's first anti-racist journal, Anti-Caste, in March 1888 and edited it until its last edition in 1895. In the first issue, she wrote:
When the curse of negro slavery lay upon the Southland, when it means danger and even death to agitate against it, and philanthropy was ever busy upon the thousand social evils of the day; when men who were timid or indifferent begged to be let alone – there came from the young man William Lloyd Garrison those grand words that are now engraved upon his monument at Boston: "I am in earnest, I will not equivocate, I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard."
The journal was inspired by Booker T. Washington's Southern Letter. Impey visited the United States several times from 1878 and the journal focused largely on issues in America.
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This entry incorporates text from “Catherine Impey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.