Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick

Eleanor Mildred Sidgwick (née Balfour; 11 March 1845 – 10 February 1936), known as Nora to her family and friends, was a physics researcher assisting Lord Rayleigh, an activist for the higher education of women, Principal of Newnham College of the University of Cambridge, and a leading figure in the Society for Psychical Research. Biography Eleanor Mildred Balfour was born in East Lothian, daughter of James Maitland Balfour and Lady Blanche Harriet. She was born into perhaps the most prominent political clan in 19th-century Britain, the 'Hotel Cecil': her brother Arthur would eventually himself become prime minister. Another brother, Frank, a biologist, died young in a climbing accident. One of the first students at Newnham College in Cambridge, in 1876 she married (and became converted to feminism by) the philosopher Henry Sidgwick. In 1880 she became Vice-Principal of Newnham under the founding Principal Anne Clough, succeeding as principal on Clough's death in 1892. In 1890 Sidgwick was elected to the Ladies Dining Society that had been founded by Louise Creighton and Kathleen Lyttleton. Other members included the economist Mary Paley Marshall, the classicist Margaret Verrall, the Irish-born sugffragist Mary Ward, former Newnham lecturer Ellen Wordsworth Darwin, the mental health campaigner Ida Darwin, Baroness Eliza von Hügel and the U.S. socialites Caroline Jebb and Maud Darwin. Eleanor and her husband resided at Newnham until 1900, the year of Henry Sidgwick's death. In 1894 Sidgwick was one of the first three women to serve on a royal commission, the Bryce commission on Secondary Education.