Biographies
Edith Simcox (1844-1901)
Edith Simcox (1844-1901) was a shirtmaker with Hamilton and Company, established in collaboration with Mary Hamilton in 1875 in London, and run as a women-only co-operative. Besides her successful business activities she was active in the Trade Union movement and promoted women’s suffrage. A friend and admirer of George Eliot – ‘the love passion of my life’ she wrote in her unpublished Autobiography of a Shirt Maker – she contributed to journals such as Fortnightly Review, as well as publishing Natural Law: An Essay in Ethics (1877), Episodes in the Lives of Men, Women, and Lovers (1882) and Primitive Civilizations, or an Outline of the History of Ownership in Archaic Communities (1894).