Etta Lemon: The Woman Who Saved the Birds

‘A great story of pioneering conservation.’ - Kate Humble

A heroine for our times, Etta Lemon campaigned for fifty years against the worldwide slaughter of wild birds for extravagantly feathered hats. As a young Victorian woman, Etta wrote militant letters to church-going ladies wearing feathered hats. As the pugnacious Secretary of the RSPB, she made ornithologists quake in their boots. Etta Lemon ran the long eco-campaign against the feather trade with single-minded tenacity, triumphing with the Plumage Act of 1921. She turned the tide against the insatiable fashion for feathered hats, saving countless species from extinction. In her lifetime, Etta was known as ‘Mother of the Birds’.

Yet her triumphant battle against ‘murderous millinery’ has been eclipsed by the campaign for women’s votes, led by the elegantly plumed Emmeline Pankhurst. This gripping narrative explores two singular heroines and their rival, overlapping campaigns. Moving from the feather workers’ slums to high society, from the first female political rally to the triumph of women’s suffrage and the Plumage Act of 1921, it celebrates the extraordinary, untold story of Etta Lemon, the woman who saved the birds