Abstract
Hertha Ayrton was an extraordinary woman, not only because she was the first woman to grace this Institution, but because of the impact she appears to have had on anyone who came into contact with her. As her husband, Professor William Ayrton, once said to her cousin, Dr Philip Hartog, “you and I are able people, but Hertha is a genius.”
She was born in 1854 as Sarah Marks, the third child of a Polish Jewish watchmaker. Her father died in 1861, leaving Sarah’s mother with seven children and an eighth expected. Sarah certainly took on some of the responsibility for caring for the younger children, one that she never relinquished in the case of her younger sister, Lavinia, but her mother, Alice Marks, was a very strong woman.
In spite of the temptation to keep her daughter at home to help with the upbringing of the younger children, she was determined that the family’s difficult circumstances were not going to stand in the way of Sarah’s obvious intellectual capabilities.
In 1863, Sarah’s aunt, Marion Hartog, offered to take her to London, to be educated in the school she ran with her husband. Mrs Marks, holding the view that women needed more, not less, of an education than men as life was likely to be harder for them, allowed Sarah to go.
At the Hartogs’ school, Sarah established her reputation both as a scholar and a fighter in the cause of justice, once going on hunger strike for two days when wrongly accused of some misdemeanour. It was this principle which later lead to her committed involvement with the suffrage movement.
She was always keen to promote the idea of women’s fitness to vote through her own achievements in a male-dominated field, but she was never shy of making herself prominent in the political arena. She took part in marches and demonstrations and opened her home to women released from jail after being on hunger strike, including Mrs Pankhurst.
