Dame Ellen Frances Pinsent DBE (''née'' Parker; 26 March 1866 – 10 October 1949) was a British mental health worker, and first female member of the

Birmingham City Council Birmingham City Council is the local government body responsible for the governance of the City of Birmingham in England, which has been a metropolitan district since 1974. It is the most populated local council area in the United Kingdom (e ...

Family

Ellen Frances Parker was born in Claxby,

Lincolnshire Lincolnshire (abbreviated Lincs.) is a county in the East Midlands of England, with a long coastline on the North Sea to the east. It borders Norfolk to the south-east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south-west, Leicestershire ...

, the daughter of the Rev. Richard Parker and his second wife, Elizabeth Coffin. Her brother Robert Parker was a barrister and a chancery judge. In 1888, she married Hume Chancellor Pinsent (1857–1920), a relative of the philosopher

David Hume David Hume (; born David Home; 7 May 1711 NS (26 April 1711 OS) – 25 August 1776) Cranston, Maurice, and Thomas Edmund Jessop. 2020 999br>David Hume" ''Encyclopædia Britannica''. Retrieved 18 May 2020. was a Scottish Enlightenment philo ...

, and they had three children. Their two sons, David Hume Pinsent and Richard Parker Pinsent, were killed in the First World War, and their daughter, Hester, a mental health worker, married the Nobel-prize winner

Edgar Douglas Adrian Edgar Douglas Adrian, 1st Baron Adrian (30 November 1889 – 4 August 1977) was an English electrophysiologist and recipient of the 1932 Nobel Prize for Physiology, won jointly with Sir Charles Sherrington for work on the function of neurons ...

, a peer. Lady Hester Adrian would be named a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

Career

Pinsent chaired the Special School Sub-Committee of the Birmingham Schools Committee from 1901 to 1913. In 1904, she was the sole female member of the Commission on the Care and Control of the Feebleminded. On 1 November 1911, Ellen Pinsent was the first woman elected to serve on Birmingham City Council. She represented the Edgbaston Ward as a

Liberal Unionist The Liberal Unionist Party was a British political party that was formed in 1886 by a faction that broke away from the Liberal Party. Led by Lord Hartington (later the Duke of Devonshire) and Joseph Chamberlain, the party established a political ...

. She stood down from the council in October 1913 upon appointment as commissioner on the

Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency The Board of Control for Lunacy and Mental Deficiency was a body overseeing the treatment of the mentally ill in England and Wales. It was created by the Mental Deficiency Act 1913 to replace the Commissioners in Lunacy, under the Home Office howe ...

. Pinsent worked for many years with the Central Association for Mental Welfare. She was a founder of the National Association for the Care of the Feebleminded, an active member of the Eugenic Education Society, and served on the general committee of the First International Eugenic Conference. Her support for eugenic policies is reflected in the provisions of the

Mental Deficiency Act 1913 The Mental Deficiency Act 1913 was an act of Parliament of the United Kingdom creating provisions for the institutional treatment of people deemed to be "feeble-minded" and "moral defectives". "It proposed an institutional separation so that menta ...

. She was created a Dame of the British Empire in 1937. Pinsent also wrote fiction, including the novels ''Jenny's Case,'' ''No Place for Repentance, Job Hildred'', and ''Children of this World.''

Death and legacy

Dame Ellen Pinsent died in 1949, aged 83 years, and her funeral was held in Wootton. The Dame Ellen Pinsent Special Primary School (for children with

learning disabilities Learning disability, learning disorder, or learning difficulty (British English) is a condition in the brain that causes difficulties comprehending or processing information and can be caused by several different factors. Given the "difficult ...

) in

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands in England. It is the second-largest city in the United Kingdom with a population of 1.145 million in the city proper, 2.92 million in the West ...

is named after her.

References

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Pinsent, Ellen 1866 births 1949 deaths English health activists Dames Commander of the Order of the British Empire People from Birmingham, West Midlands Place of birth missing