Flora Forde
Political activist, feminist, welfare worker
Flora McMillan Forde (9 June 1883 – 13 December 1958) was a New Zealand political activist, feminist and welfare worker.
Early life
Forde was born on her parents' farm in Wyndham, Southland, New Zealand on 9 June 1883. Her parents were Catherine Stalker and Henry Ive. Her father later became a baker and master butcher. She attended school in Wyndham and Invercargill. She married a railway clerk, Michael Joseph Forde, on 5 November 1902 and they had two daughters and a son. Michael left his job in July 1903 to become a journalist and eventually became the chief reporter for the Southland Times.
Later life and activism
She began to volunteer in women and labour movements in 1910 by joining the Sixpenny Clothing Club, the Invercargill Housewives’ Union and the Southland Trades and Labour Council. She also helped set up the Southland branch of the Worker's Educational Association in 1915.
Forde and her husband moved to Wellington in 1917 where Michael began working in the railway industry again until he retired in 1954.
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This entry incorporates text from “Flora Forde” 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.