Ishbel Hamilton-Gordon - Infinite Women

Born: 15 March 1857, United Kingdom
Died: 18 April 1939
Country most active: United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland
Also known as: Isabel Maria Marjoribanks, Isabel Aberdeen

This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Patrick Maume. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.

Gordon (Marjoribanks), Dame Ishbel Maria (1857–1939), marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, philanthropist, was born 14 March 1857 in London, daughter of Dudley Marjoribanks, 1st Baron Tweedmouth, banker and liberal MP, and his wife, Isobel Marjoribanks (née Hogg), who belonged to the Lisburn family of the viscounts Hailsham. Childhood visits to the family’s country house in Inverness-shire gave Ishbel a strong sense of her Scottish roots and an abiding romantic Celticism. She was privately educated by tutors (including Swiss governesses, who taught her fluency in German and French) and wished to attend Girton College, Cambridge, but this was vetoed by her father. Tweedmouth was an irascible man – her daughter recalled that Ishbel ‘inherited her father’s strong passions but bridled them’ – and Ishbel identified strongly with her mother. At the age of eleven she acquired a deep and lasting admiration for W. E. Gladstone (because he spoke to her as a friend and without condescension).

From February 1871 she acquired a confidant: John Campbell Gordon, 7th earl of Aberdeen, grandson of a prime minister, was nervous, introspective, and puritanical (traits encouraged by the early death of his depressive father and his unexpected succession in 1872 to the title after one brother drowned and another committed suicide). In the ensuing years Gordon continued to regard her as an amusing child-friend, while she fell in love with him. After she made her feelings plain, they were married on 7 November 1877. They had three sons and two daughters (one of whom died in infancy). The ebullient Ishbel was clearly the dominant partner; she assumed the running of the estate, since her husband took little interest in business matters, and she devoted much attention to relieving his recurring bouts of depression.

In 1879 Ishbel developed a strong evangelical commitment and began to keep a diary. She took a deep interest in religiously inspired social work (which included assisting Gladstone’s efforts to reclaim London prostitutes). This increased after 1884 when the Aberdeens came under the influence of Henry Drummond (1851–97), a Free Church of Scotland theologian, whose ‘evolutionary theology’ dispensed with biblical literalism and presented love (expressed in part through social reform) rather than dogma as central to Christianity. One of Ishbel’s biographers, Doris French, suggests that Ishbel and Drummond were lovers; this highly speculative view discounts the emotionalism of late-Victorian religious conversation. (The Aberdeens preserved a notable sexual puritanism. Lord Aberdeen was a long-serving president of the pro-censorship National Vigilance Association – his outspoken endorsement of a catholic-dominated pro-censorship campaign in Ireland in 1911 helped to delay publication of Dubliners by James Joyce.) Ishbel’s activities included the provision of education and training for servants; this (and her characteristic disregard for protocol) gave rise to rumours that the Aberdeens treated their servants as equals, which may have inspired J. M. Barrie’s play ‘The admirable Crichton’, though Barrie denied that he had meant to satirise the Aberdeens.

Encouraged by Ishbel, Aberdeen left the conservative party for the liberals in 1879 over his opposition to Disraeli’s war policy. Gladstone regularly stayed at their principal residence, Haddo House in Aberdeenshire, and Aberdeen was a popular, hospitable, and free-spending high commissioner of the Church of Scotland, 1881–5. On 5 February 1886 Gladstone appointed Aberdeen lord lieutenant of Ireland; although Ishbel had previously sworn never to set foot in Ireland and their initial reception was lukewarm, the Aberdeens won considerable popularity through their enthusiasm for home rule and disregard for viceregal protocol. Soon after their arrival they attended a famine relief meeting organised by T. D. Sullivan, lord mayor of Dublin, at which Aberdeen shook the hand of the nationalist Michael Davitt; they toured the country, receiving an enthusiastic reception, and Ishbel set about encouraging Irish craft industries (promoted locally by various landed families and catholic convents). On 1 May 1886 she launched the Irish Home Industries Association at a crafts exhibition which she had organised. The Aberdeens’ departure on 3 August 1886 after the fall of Gladstone’s government was marked by a great popular demonstration. Ishbel continued to visit Ireland regularly to promote the Industries Association and to help market Irish goods abroad. Her marketing efforts culminated in the organisation of a successful Irish model village at the Chicago World Fair of 1893.

The Aberdeens expected to return to the viceroyalty in the next Gladstone government; in 1892, however, John Morley, the chief secretary, vetoed a reappointment to ensure his own undivided control of the Irish administration, and Aberdeen became governor-general of Canada (1893–8). The Aberdeens had visited Canada in 1890, an event commemorated in Ishbel’s book Through Canada with a Kodak (1893). During their time in Canada, Ishbel founded the Victorian Order of Nurses to mark Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee (1897). In 1893 she was elected president of the nascent International Congress of Women, a federation of women’s organisations; in this role (1893–9 and 1904–36) she played a major part in building up its international network (and rebuilding it after the first world war). She was also president of the Women’s Liberal Federation, 1901–6, which split over her support for women’s suffrage.

At the end of 1905 Aberdeen was reappointed lord lieutenant by the new liberal government and Ishbel returned to her role in encouraging charitable work and Irish craft industries. Irish attitudes to these activities were by now considerably more equivocal than in 1886. The Irish aristocracy, predominantly unionist, avoided the viceroy with his home rule views. The Aberdeens responded by extending invitations to upwardly mobile catholic professionals and business people, attracting further denunciations from unionist snobs and from nationalists who accused them of ‘political souperism’; the author and nationalist Alice Milligan compared Ishbel to the soul-purchasing demons in ‘The Countess Cathleen’ by W. B. Yeats. Ishbel saw her task as uniting Irish factions for the common good and was bemused by the reluctance of even moderate nationalists to identify too closely with the Castle.

Throughout their second term the Aberdeens were extensively ridiculed by both unionists and nationalists. This reflected a stereotypical image of them as Scots misers in contrast to their free-spending predecessor, Lord Dudley; in fact the Aberdeens’ activities cut heavily into their personal income – depleted by agricultural depression – as well as the earl’s official salary, and her descendants blamed Ishbel’s charitable works for dissipating the family fortune. The Aberdeens suffered from the perceived dominance within the marriage of Lady Aberdeen (who was physically larger than her husband), her interference in official business to procure appointments for sometimes dubious protégés, and the unwillingness of advanced nationalists and socialists to accept favours from a British Lady Bountiful. Opponents also spread rumours linking their eldest son, Lord Haddo, to the theft in 1907 of the Irish crown jewels. (Haddo, an epileptic, was a disappointment to his mother; she married him off to a widow considerably older than himself as she believed it undesirable for him to have children.)

Lady Aberdeen was particularly associated with an anti-tuberculosis campaign spearheaded by the Women’s National Health Association (WNHA), which she launched at the Dublin International Exhibition in 1907, and in connection with which she edited a three-volume lecture collection, Ireland’s fight against tuberculosis (1908). Two WNHA vans toured Ireland giving information on how to prevent and treat tuberculosis, and Ishbel raised funds in Britain and America to build Peamount sanatorium (which opened in 1912). Some nationalists attacked the campaign as being marked by social condescension and questioned the motives behind it. Brian O’Higgins produced vitriolic verse satires on ‘Lady Microbe’, while Arthur Griffith claimed that the enterprise was a British plot to kill Irish exports by representing them as plague-stricken.

In 1911 the Aberdeens met the labour leader James Larkin in a bid to promote arbitration of labour disputes. This initiative (apparently reflecting Ishbel’s belief in the use of personal influence to promote goodwill) had little effect; William Martin Murphy and his allies regarded it as official appeasement, Griffith cited it as proof that Larkin was a British agent, Larkinites continued to denounce the Aberdeens with the rest of the social establishment, and unionists sneered: ‘they split the ha’penny buns in two when Larkin comes to tea’ (Keane, 208). A civic exhibition in 1914 devised by the Scottish urbanist Patrick Geddes and organised by Ishbel to promote the redevelopment of Dublin under home rule closed prematurely because of the outbreak of the first world war.

At the beginning of 1915 Aberdeen was removed from the lord lieutenancy, his departure hastened by the revelation that Ishbel had sent a private letter to the editor of the Freeman’s Journal about the need to guard against unionist dominance of the Irish Red Cross. (Unionists accused her of politicising the Red Cross, while separatists claimed that this proved the Freeman’s Journal was secretly controlled by the government.) John Redmond unsuccessfully opposed their removal because of their symbolic value as advocates of home rule. As a consolation Aberdeen was made a marquess. The proposed title ‘marquess of Aberdeen and Tara’ provoked protests from many unionists and nationalists as a presumptuous claim to the seat of Ireland’s ancient kings; Aberdeen compromised by changing ‘Tara’ to ‘Temair’. Aberdeen served again as lord high commissioner to the Church of Scotland in 1915, after which the couple spent much of the first world war in Aberdeen raising funds for Peamount.

Faced with severe financial problems, the Aberdeens handed over a diminished estate to Lord Haddo in 1920 and retired to a dower house at Cromar. They co-authored two anodyne memoirs, We twa (1925) and More cracks with we twa (1929); Musings of a Scottish granny (1936) by Ishbel alone largely reprises material from the earlier books. On her husband’s death in 1934 Ishbel had to give up Cromar and move into a house in Aberdeen. She was made GBE in 1931 and remained active in the liberal party and in women’s causes (presenting a petition for women’s ordination to the general assembly of the Church of Scotland in 1931). In the later 1930s she developed an interest in spiritualism; her last major initiative was to encourage a peace mission to Hitler in 1937, undertaken by her fellow spiritualist, the Canadian prime minister Mackenzie King (though she despaired of peace after Munich and the annexation of Czechoslovakia). To the end of her life she regularly revisited Ireland to supervise and raise funds for Peamount sanatorium. She died 18 April 1939 at Aberdeen of heart failure.

Although previous vicereines had engaged in charitable work, Lady Aberdeen’s activities were unprecedented in their scale and the extent of her personal involvement; they can be seen both as an expression of personal concern and as an attempt to transform the viceroyalty into a ‘welfare monarchy’, paralleling the contemporary British development of charitable endeavours as a prime raison d’être for a royal family whose political role was declining. Her late-Victorian sentimental adherence to noblesse oblige can seem as grating to later generations as it did to many contemporaries, and it is understandable that she was denounced as embodying a suffocatingly maternalist ancien regime; but a recent Irish biographer discovered that gratitude for her kindness and concern survived among the descendants of many of her local beneficiaries and associates. Her achievements in healthcare, the encouragement of craft industries, and the promotion of women’s role in society were exaggerated by her associates but were none the less genuine. A collection of Ishbel Aberdeen’s papers, including her surviving diaries, is held at Haddo House. The records of the WNHA are kept at Peamount Hospital.

This biography is shared from The Dictionary of Canadian Biography, in line with the Creative Commons licensing. See below for full attribution.

MARJORIBANKS, ISHBEL MARIA (Hamilton-Gordon (Gordon), Countess of ABERDEEN and Marchioness of ABERDEEN and TEMAIR), viceregal consort, feminist, social reformer, and author; b. 14 March 1857 in London, England, daughter of Dudley Coutts Marjoribanks and Isabel (Isabella) Hogg; m. there 7 Nov. 1877 John Campbell Hamilton-Gordon, 7th Earl of Aberdeen, and they had three sons and two daughters, one of whom died in infancy; d. 18 April 1939 in Aberdeen, Scotland, and was buried in the family cemetery at Haddo House, Aberdeenshire.

Ishbel Marjoribanks is a leading example of what historian Amanda Andrews has called the “great ornamentals,” viceregal “new women” who claimed leadership in good works throughout the British empire. The ambitious and upwardly mobile Hogg and Marjoribanks families, with fortunes made in India, banking, and brewing, directed their sons and daughters into marriages with members of Britain’s Conservative and Liberal elites. Forbidden by her father from attending Girton College, Cambridge, the pioneering university option for women, the talented Ishbel was educated at home and groomed in French, German, music, and art; she was presented at court just before her 18th birthday. Kinship links remained important, but she went beyond expectations in embracing the evangelical Protestantism of her mother, her uncle the philanthropist Quintin Hogg, and politician and family friend William Ewart Gladstone. By her teens Ishbel was teaching Sunday school to working-class boys in London’s East End and to tenants’ children on the Highland estate of Guisachan, which her father had purchased in the mid 1850s. Despite early recognition of her intellectual and organizational abilities, Ishbel remained often uncertain and nervous. In particular, she was self-conscious about her looks (especially her size) and her lack of a formal academic education, which she attempted to make up for by reading widely. Her sensitivity further encouraged her lifelong compassion for the unfortunate and balanced her compulsion to lead. Fortunately, her essentially sunny temperament, personal warmth, and great energy inspired admiration and affection and helped her survive the misogyny often directed at talented women.

Her philanthropic sympathies enhanced the attractions of the similarly evangelical Earl of Aberdeen, who succumbed after a three-year on-and-off courtship. Their marriage in St George’s Church, Hanover Square, was presided over by the archbishop of Canterbury, a friend of both families. The couple’s narrow Protestantism would be liberalized in the 1880s under the influence of Henry Drummond, the charismatic Scottish theologian who reconciled evolution and Christianity in a doctrine of social altruism. The union proved to be a loving one, becoming a feminist ideal of progressive activism and companionship. An Egyptian honeymoon saw the Aberdeens dispensing medical supplies and rescuing Sudanese children from slavery and a young Christian convert from his Muslim family.

On the Haddo estate in northeast Scotland the young countess guaranteed the lineage, giving birth to five children between 1879 and 1884. She also discovered the costly pleasures of renovation (Haddo House eventually became a treasure of the National Trust for Scotland) and the needs of rural and domestic labourers. With her husband’s support, she built upon the practical philanthropic programs initiated by her mother-in-law. Her respectful relationship with the lower classes took form in the Haddo House Club for household staff and the Haddo House Young Women’s Improvement Association, originally intended for servant girls in the district and later expanded into the Onward and Upward Association, which spread throughout Scotland and beyond. These organizations (whose names would vary over the years) were intended to bring together working-class women and their mistresses in educational and recreational programs. Lady Aberdeen’s magazine for women, Onward and Upward (Aberdeen and London, 1890–1920), and its supplement for children, Wee Willie Winkie (nominally edited by her daughter, Marjorie Adeline), disseminated the messages of social improvement, spiritual renewal, and social stability and partnership. School meals and health services for tenants on the estate served the same ends.

The countess had also extended her efforts to the Aberdeen Ladies’ Union (ALU), becoming its first president in 1883. The ALU sought to advance the welfare of local women working in factories, fish-processing plants, private homes, and hotels. It also assisted their emigration to the colonies, especially Canada. The same decade saw her assume the presidency of the Edinburgh Association for the University Education of Women, which was committed to preparing members of her sex for responsible citizenship. In London, where the couple spent parliamentary seasons, she lent her weight to the Women’s Trade Union Association’s successful campaign for female factory inspectors in the 1880s and the pro-union efforts of its successor, the Women’s Industrial Council, in its attempts to improve conditions for women employed in the trades. In 1888 Lady Aberdeen became president of the Society to Promote the Return of Women as County Councillors (later the Women’s Local Government Society), which promoted female candidates in municipal elections. In these endeavours she would remain a maternal feminist, who rejected any idea of wars between the sexes: maternally minded women worked hand in hand with responsible men such as her husband. Her activism in the 1880s provided her with critical experience in public speaking and effective organization. However, while she soon excelled in these areas and was regularly hailed as proof of women’s potential, she also made enemies, particularly among those impatient for the implementation of women’s rights. As a result, she often felt intimidated and emotionally drained.

A passionate admirer of Gladstone, Lady Aberdeen encouraged her husband’s move from the Conservative Party to the Liberals by 1880. Her ecumenism was confirmed during his term as lord high commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland between 1881 and 1885, when the couple attempted to bring together the leaders of the established and Free churches. Lord Aberdeen’s appointment as lord lieutenant (viceroy) of Ireland in 1886 introduced a lasting passion. Initially apprehensive, Lady Aberdeen soon threw herself into her new role and embraced a romantic vision of what she saw as the essential Celt. Dressing herself and her children in locally made textiles, she championed home industries.

The defeat of the Liberals that year ended Lord Aberdeen’s viceregal tenure and led to a world tour in 1886–87 that raised the countess’s hopes for a reformed empire in which progressive elites would further social peace. She returned to her many activities in Britain, promoting the welfare of women and children and addressing large congresses in Aberdeen and Birmingham. But in October 1889 she suffered a collapse and was ordered by her doctor to rest. The following year the Aberdeens and their children set out on an extended visit to Canada. While in Montreal, they dined with railway builder Sir Donald Alexander Smith* and met Oblate missionary Albert Lacombe*, whom Lady Aberdeen charmed when she conversed with him in French, to the surprise of the other guests. After a stay at Highfield House in Hamilton, Ont., and visits to Toronto and Ottawa, the couple travelled to the west coast by train. In Manitoba they met with immigrants from northeast Scotland whom they had assisted. During a stop in Winnipeg on the way back east, the countess, together with local women, initiated the Aberdeen Association [see Margaret Vallance*] to provide reading material for isolated settlers in the northwest. A return trip to North America in 1891 brought the Aberdeens to Guisachan Ranch, in British Columbia’s Okanagan valley, which they had purchased the previous year and where it was hoped Lady Aberdeen’s remittance-man brother Coutts Marjoribanks might redeem himself; they went on to buy the larger Coldstream Ranch [see Charles Frederick Houghton*]. These two journeys form the basis of her first book, Through Canada with a Kodak (Edinburgh, 1893), illustrated in part with her own photographs. She largely dismisses the Chinese she encountered in the west, seeing them as sojourners rather than permanent settlers like the Europeans. Several chapters are devoted to the traditions of indigenous peoples; as historian Marjory Harper comments, Lady Aberdeen was simultaneously attracted by romantic images of natives and repulsed by the harsh reality of their lives.

On the couple’s return to Britain, she increasingly focused her efforts on the English and Scottish women’s Liberal federations. She joined moderates such as Catherine Gladstone and her own sister-in-law Lady Fanny Octavia Louisa Marjoribanks (later Lady Tweedmouth) and suffragists such as the Countess of Carlisle and Priscilla Bright McLaren in modernizing the party and making claims for women’s public duties. But fearful of antagonizing members of the male elite, she was cautious about advocating parliamentary (as opposed to local) suffrage. As she struggled to find a middle ground, some condemned her as too radical, while others judged her too timid.

Gladstone’s electoral victory in 1892 and her husband’s imminent appointment as governor general of Canada ended Lady Aberdeen’s first presidency of the women’s Liberal federations. At the World’s Columbian exposition in Chicago the following year, she opened the “village” she had organized to promote Irish industries. More significantly, she was elected to the presidency of the International Council of Women (ICW), founded by American suffragists in 1888 and holding its first quinquennial gathering during the fair. Seen as a safe international candidate, the trilingual countess was to bring feminism in from the wilderness. In order to maximize its appeal, the ICW held back from suffrage.

In Toronto, soon after the viceregal couple’s arrival in the dominion in the autumn of 1893, she took up the challenge she had been given. A number of Canadian women, including Adelaide Sophia Hoodless [Hunter*], had been in Chicago during the ICW meetings and were eager to start their own group. At its inaugural congress in Toronto in October 1893, Lady Aberdeen accepted the presidency of the National Council of Women of Canada (NCWC). Its pledge to follow the golden rule (“Do unto others as you would have them do unto you”) and its ecumenism tempted women eager for a non-partisan voice in a divided nation. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, the country’s largest women’s society, deplored its new rival’s refusal to endorse Protestantism and temperance, but the support of the Women’s Art Association and the Girls’ Friendly Society helped confirm the NCWC’s respectability. Of equal or greater significance was the council’s alliance with the Dominion Women’s Enfranchisement Association and its hard-pressed suffragists. By the time Lady Aberdeen left Canada in 1898, the NCWC had become the nation’s most powerful feminist group, with local councils in every region except the far north. In an era of intense political conflict, it was highly unusual in associating francophones and anglophones, and Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Jews, though indigenous peoples and other racial minorities remained largely unrepresented.

Lady Aberdeen’s second major contribution in Canada grew out of the work of the NCWC. This was the creation in 1897, despite the opposition of many male medical professionals (and, initially, some trained nurses), of a nationwide public-health service, the Victorian Order of Nurses (VON) for Canada. Charlotte MacLeod, a Canadian-born nursing instructor then working in Massachusetts, was appointed chief superintendent. Lady Aberdeen became the organization’s president, a tradition followed by wives of later governors general. Strategically invoking the sovereign, the VON affirmed women as active citizens in a northern nation, a female equivalent of the North-West Mounted Police. In May 1898 four nurses, accompanied by journalist Alice Matilda Freeman (Faith Fenton), were sent to the Yukon territory to minister to prospectors during the gold rush there. This mission, launched with great fanfare and reported in the Toronto Globe and Vancouver Daily World, drew much favourable attention to the new organization.

Individual women could also thank Lady Aberdeen for her support. Inviting Adeline Foster [Davis*], the wife of finance minister George Eulas Foster and the innocent party in a divorce, to a concert at Government House in December 1893 broke the ostracism that Mrs Foster had faced in Ottawa society. When pioneering female lawyer Clara Brett Martin* sought legislative changes that would allow her to be admitted to the Law Society of Upper Canada, she won the help of the countess and the NCWC.

During her stay in Canada, Lady Aberdeen entered enthusiastically into its social life. She organized skating and tobogganing parties and learned to dance in the Canadian fashion. The series of historical balls she orchestrated in Ottawa, Toronto, and Montreal made women and Europeans central to the image of the nation as an imperial rival to the United States; the indigenous figures the events incorporated advanced the same concept. A May Court Club was started to introduce the capital’s elite young women to the idea of service. Lady Aberdeen’s ambitious plans for Ottawa, though never realized, anticipated the work of the National Capital Commission. These years also brought her several distinctions, including, in 1897, the first honorary degree given to a woman by Queen’s College in Kingston, Ont., and her selection as convocation orator at the University of Chicago.

Like earlier viceregal consorts Lady Dufferin [see Frederick Temple Blackwood*] and Princess Louise, Lady Aberdeen attended parliamentary debates, sitting between the speaker and the government benches. She followed the arguments with interest and reported back to her husband, providing him with a perspective on Canadian affairs. Sometimes described as a “governess general,” not in compliment, she joined him in addressing the leadership crisis that followed the death in December 1894 of their friend Prime Minister Sir John Sparrow David Thompson*. Her dislike of the obvious candidate, political veteran Sir Charles Tupper*, fears about the French–English and Catholic–Protestant conflict over the Manitoba school question [see Thomas Greenway*], and her preference for the Liberal leader, Wilfrid Laurier*, drove her to intervene more than many critics then and later have thought appropriate. She even used a colleague from the NCWC, Emily Ann McCausland Cummings [Shortt*], as an intermediary behind the scenes with Laurier. She was often censured for meddling in political affairs, but historian John T. Saywell, who claimed that Lady Aberdeen’s journal is the most important single documentary record of the young dominion in the mid 1890s, reckoned the countess a force for good. By the time the couple left Canada in 1898, she believed that the country, now under Laurier’s direction and with a well-established network of women’s councils (which owed much to her infusion of energy, cash, and social capital), could look forward to the more tolerant future she wished for the empire as a whole.

She returned to Britain to immerse herself in planning the London meetings of the ICW the following year. A prized reception by Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle during the conference signalled respectability. Lady Aberdeen’s editing of the seven volumes of reports presented at the gathering testified to the organization’s vitality; the creation of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1904 revealed its limitations. That year American suffragist May Eliza Sewall became ICW president, but the Toronto meetings of 1909 returned Lady Aberdeen, who would hold office until 1920 and from 1922 to 1936. Her edited volume Our lady of the sunshine and her international visitors … (Toronto, 1910) celebrates Canada as the best expression of a liberal empire.

She also became involved once again in Liberal politics. Her cautious opposition to the South African War and to suffrage militancy was designed to maximize the party’s electoral appeal and promote the cause of Home Rule for Ireland. When she returned to that country in 1906, after Lord Aberdeen was reappointed lord lieutenant, it was to help promote an empire on the Canadian federal model. Friendships with political leaders such as Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and sympathy for the “new liberalism,” with its embrace of expanded state welfare, failed to produce a suffrage dividend, however, and the new prime minister, Herbert Henry Asquith, in 1908 proved an anti-feminist. To Lady Aberdeen’s dismay, suffragists increasingly counted on the Labour Party, and the militant Women’s Social and Political Union gained ground.

She nevertheless endeavoured to improve conditions for imprisoned suffragettes in Ireland. Aberdeen’s second viceroyalty, from 1906 to 1915, saw her turn away from rural handicrafts to focus on public health and urban reform, notably under the auspices of the Women’s National Health Association of Ireland, which she led from its founding in 1907 and whose journal, Sláinte [Health] (Dublin), she edited. As in Canada, she faced resistance from extremists, this time aligned with either nationalist or unionist causes. She could run roughshod over opponents, but she was widely recognized as an unusual aristocratic benefactor, a proponent of what historian Frank Prochaska has called a “welfare monarchy.” World War I and the deteriorating political situation in Ireland encouraged Asquith to retire the Aberdeens, who were perceived as too strongly committed to the implementation of Home Rule. They spent much of 1915–17 in the United States, and occasionally Canada, fund-raising for Irish causes. Lady Aberdeen, now a marchioness, would retain her Irish commitments until her death, but the conservative nationalism of the Irish Free State proved hostile to women’s rights.

While the Rome meetings of the ICW in 1914 were highly successful, the war brought the organization to near collapse, and only Lady Aberdeen’s prestige and funds kept it afloat. The ICW endeavoured, with great difficulty, to remain above the conflict and to direct attention to post-war planning and reconciliation. But its claim to an uncertain middle ground aggravated pacifists and belligerents alike. By the time of the conference in Kristiania (Oslo), Norway, six years later, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom was the leading feminist group opposing war. The Aberdeens’ hopes for international cooperation also lay with the emerging British Commonwealth and the League of Nations. A joint autobiography, “We twa”: reminiscences … (2v., London, 1925), suggests life’s twilight, but the marchioness kept working, notably on behalf of public health, child welfare, and peace, only retiring from the ICW presidency in 1936 when she believed she had a safe successor in Belgium’s liberal Marthe Boël.

By that time, even Canadians had become sceptical about her leadership. To the experienced Alberta politician Mary Irene Parlby [Marryat*], such women represented the past: commenting on the Washington meetings of the ICW in 1925, she remarked, “Lady Aberdeen, though evidently warmly regarded by many of the delegates and undoubtedly a woman of kindly, generous heart and sincere interest in her work, does not shine as a chairwoman.” From Parlby’s perspective, the future rested with unions and “the great agricultural organizations,” not aristocratic ladies. Her judgement reflected Lady Aberdeen’s marginality in the interwar women’s movement. The marchioness did, nonetheless, continue the good fight in the 1930s: assisting the Scottish branch of the League of Nations Union, organizing for the Peace Ballot in 1934, which attempted to mobilize British public opinion in favour of the League of Nations and disarmament, supporting republicans in the Spanish Civil War, and aiding Jewish refugees escaping Adolf Hitler’s Germany.

Her husband’s death in 1934 forced Lady Aberdeen to move to a mansion in the city of Aberdeen that she renamed Gordon House; she died there five years later, still planning assistance for Ireland and embattled Czechoslovakia. Her friend and fellow spiritualist Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King* mourned her, as did other Canadians. In old age she still returned the affection many in the country felt for her, insisting, “I am a Canadian. I have been a Canadian for a great many years. I shall always be a Canadian.” In the 21st century Lady Aberdeen survives in the collective memory as representative of a heritage of public duty that later feminist governors general, such as Adrienne Clarkson, have proudly embraced.

Work cited
Veronica Strong-Boag, “MARJORIBANKS, ISHBEL MARIA (Hamilton-Gordon, Marchioness of ABERDEEN and TEMAIR),” in Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 16, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–, accessed March 5, 2026, https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/marjoribanks_ishbel_maria_16E.html.