People Australia

Isabel Frances Longworth, née Swann (1881-1961) dentist, feminist, Socialist and peace activist

Birth: 1 June 1881 at Temora, New South Wales, daughter of William Swann (1845-1909), a public school teacher born at Bradford, West Yorkshire, England, and Elizabeth, née Devlin (1853-1940), born at Sofala, NSW. Marriage: 23 August 1924 at the District Registrar’s office, Randwick, Sydney, to William Longworth (1879-1958), a universal grinder, former soldier and a peace activist, born at Manchester, England. They had one daughter. Death: 13 January 1961 in a private hospital at Newcastle, NSW; usual residence Maitland Road, Mayfield, Newcastle. Religion: buried with Congregational forms. 

• Isabel registered as a dentist in 1902, a pioneer woman in dentistry, and she practiced that profession for much of her adult life. She became the sole provider for her family when her husband broke his back while working on their passion fruit farm near Wyong. They moved to Newcastle in 1935, and Isabel starting dental practice in Mayfield.
• She was a peace activist from the time of the Boer War, an anti-conscriptionist and member of the Peace Society during World War I and an advocate of the League of Nations in the 1920s. She joined the Movement Against War and Fascism in the 1930s and was a founder of the International Peace Campaign in Newcastle.
• Briefly a member of Communist Party of Australia, where she did “good work among women”, she was never one for working within hierarchies.
• She was the first honorary secretary of the Howard League of Penal Reform in NSW in 1918 and in later years was involved in the campaign against Indian indentured labour in Fiji.
• In 1946 she was a Socialist candidate for the Federal seat of Newcastle and in 1949 for the new Federal seat of Shortland. That year she was president of the local branch of the League for Democracy in Greece.
• She and her husband were regular correspondents to the Newcastle Morning Herald for more than twenty years presenting socialist perspectives. Isabel was the author of a pamphlet, An Open Road to International Order (1938).
• Cause of death: arteriosclerosis (years). 

Sources
Information from Ross Edmunds; Ross Edmunds, In Storm and Struggle.. A History of the Communist Party in Newcastle 1920-1940 (1991).