Gertrude Eaton was born in Swansea, the fifth daughter of businessman and magistrate Robert Eaton of Bryn-y-mor, and his wife Helen.[1] The Eatons were a prominent family; the imposing Bryn-y-mor was built by an ancestor in the eighteenth century.[2]
In 1911 Eaton co-founded the Society of Women Musicians with composers Katharine Emily Eggar and Marion Scott.[4][5] The first meeting was held in October 1911, when Eaton was elected treasurer; she also spoke at that first meeting.[6][7] She served a term as president of the Society from 1916 to 1917.[8]
Gertrude Eaton was also active on the issues of suffrage and prison reform, and served a term as president of the Howard League for Penal Reform.[9] Eaton used her musical training to teach fellow activists to use their voices for confident public speaking.[10] As secretary of the Women's Tax Resistance League, in the summer of 1911, her household silver was seized when she refused to pay taxes as a suffrage protest.[11] She also evaded the census in 1911 as part of an organized suffrage protest.[12] She was said to be "instrumental" in getting penal reform on the agenda of the League of Nations.[13] Eaton was one of the British delegates to the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom meeting in Zurich, Switzerland in 1919.[14]
Eaton died in 1939, at Hampstead. Her colleague Margery Fry wrote in an obituary of Eaton, "She would take endless pains to help a cause or an individual when her sympathy was aroused."[15]
^Oxford dictionary of national biography. British Academy., Oxford University Press. (Online ed.). Oxford. 21 May 2024. ISBN9780198614128. OCLC56568095.((cite book)): CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link) CS1 maint: others (link)
^Anne Logan 'The Life of Gertrude Eaton (1864): musician, tax resistor and penal reformer (Women's History: the journal of the Women's History Network Special Issue: 1918-2018, Vol 2, Issue 11 ISSN|2059-0156
^"Tax Resistance"The Vote (5 August 1911); reprinted in Lucy Delap, Maria DiCenzo, and Leila Ryan, eds., Feminism and the Periodical Press, 1900-1918 (Taylor and Francis 2006). ISBN9780415320269
^Jill Liddington, Vanishing for the Vote: Suffrage, Citizenship, and the Battle for the Census (Oxford University Press 2014). ISBN9781847798886