Margaret Benn, Viscountess Stansgate
British theologian, women's rights activist
Margaret Eadie Benn, Viscountess Stansgate (née Holmes; 7 June 1897 – 21 October 1991) was a British theologian, the President of the Congregational Federation, and an advocate of women's rights.
Life
Margaret Holmes was the daughter of Scottish politician Daniel Holmes. In her youth, in the 1920s, she was a member of the League of the Church Militant which was the predecessor of the Movement for the Ordination of Women and was rebuked by Randall Thomas Davidson, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for advocating the ordination of women.
Holmes had spent some of her time in Paris and learned French. She started school at the age of seven, when the family was back in Scotland. Margaret started at St Columba's School, Kilmacolm in Renfrewshire but moved to St. Mary's College when it was in Lancaster Gate, London, before moving due to disagreements with the school's high church headmistress.
Over the 20th century, many British congregationalists became convinced of the merits of ecumenical cooperation. The majority of Congregational churches moved to union with the Presbyterian Church of England in 1972, and the re-formed Association of Churches of Christ (in 1981). However, significant minorities did not share this conviction.
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This entry incorporates text from “Margaret Benn, Viscountess Stansgate” 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.