DISTINGUISHED VISITOR

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23362, 30 November 1937, Page 16

DISTINGUISHED VISITOR

MISS KATHLEEN D. COURTNEY Miss Kathleen D. Courtney, an outstanding speaker in Great Britain, is to arrive at Auckland on February 10 and to tour New Zealand, speaking at various centres. The societies co-op-erating in arrangements for her Dominion tour (says an exchange) are the League of Nations Union, the National Council of Women, Women's Institutes, the Women's Division of the Farmers' Union, the Y.W.C.A., and the PanPacific Women's Association. Miss Courtney is a member of the National Executive of the League of Nations Union, and for 10 years was chairman of the British section of the Women's International League of Peace and Freedom. She was one of the founders of the Women's International League, and took part in the famous congress at The Hague in 1915, when women from 12 different countries, neutral and belligerent alike, came together to consider the foundations upon which peace must be based and how women conic l help to realise thorn. She is also honorary secretary of the British Women's Peace Crusade, which is an association of nearly all the great national women's movements. She was one of the originators of this crusade, and it is from her it has drawn in great measure its inspiration and vigour. _ Like so many others, Kathleen Courtney came into public life in connection with the suffrage movement. As a voung student, fresh from Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, she threw herself into the agitation for the political enfranchisement of women, which was then at its height, and soon became a figure of national importance in the movement. She still retains her interest in all that relates to the citizenship of women and their position in social and political life; she is vicepresident of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship. She was one of the British delegates to the

congress of the International Women's Suffrage Alliance held at Berlin in the spring of 1920. During the war Miss Courtney did relief work among Serbian refugees, for which she was decorated by the Serbian Government. When the war was over she went to Vienna and ( worked in connection with the Friends' Relief Mission there in the darkest days of Austria's misery. She has also travelled much in the Balkans and in Poland, and for many years has gone to Geneva to follow discussions in the Assembly of the League of Nations. On behalf of a large group of women's organisations Miss Courtney stayed at Geneva as an observer throughout the Disarmament Conference; her knowledge of the work of its committees is probably greater than that of any individual delegate or press correspondent.