Six Point Group

The Six Point Group (1921-1983) was founded in 1921, soon after the granting of limited franchise to women in 1918. In this period the issues that women's organisations now had to deal with widened considerably to encompass general issues of women's social and economic status and their lack of equality with men under the law and in the professions. The Six Point Group was founded in 1921 by Lady Rhondda with six very specific aims in mind: 1) satisfactory legislation on child assault; 2) satisfactory legislation for the widowed mother; 3) satisfactory legislation for the unmarried mother and her child; 4) equal rights of guardianship for married parents; 5) equal pay for teachers and 6) equal opportunities for men and women in the civil service. These later evolved into six general points of equality for women: political, occupational, moral, social, economic and legal. During the 1920s, the group campaigned on strictly equality-based principles and was active in trying to have the League of Nations pass an Equal Rights Treaty. This was in direct contrast to other women's groups such as the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, which supported protectionist legislation that applied only to women such as an 'Endowment of Motherhood' that was intended to be paid to women in order to ensure their financial independence. Much of its work was done through its journal, Time and Tide. From 1933, along with the Open Door Council, it spearheaded the movement for the right of married women to work. It was responsible for establishing the Income Tax Reform Council and in 1938, the Married Women's Association. During the Second World War, they campaigned on issues such as female volunteers in the Civil Defence Services receiving two-thirds the man's pay and compensation rate provided for by the Personal Injuries (Emergency Provisions) Act of 1939 by traditional constitutional methods: deputations to the appropriate government ministers, public rallies and letters to major newspapers. They were also closely involved in the Equal Compensation Campaign from 1941 to 1943 and subsequently had representatives beside the Open Door Council and the Fawcett Society on the committee of the Equal Pay Campaign from 1944 to ensure equal pay in the Civil Service. They continued to have a significant political influence after the war, taking part in the protest to have the Matrimonial Proceedings and Property Act changed to give married women more financial protection. From 1967, they played an active part in the co-ordination of other women's groups on a number of issues through that decade and into the next. However, later in the 1970s the group declined through its failure to recruit younger women and went into abeyance in 1980, finally dissolving itself in 1983. Throughout its existence the Six Point Group stressed its feminism and its belief in practical politics. It always emphasized its non-party stance, although at one stage members were pleased to be thought as the left-wing feminist group. Such women as Elizabeth Robins, Winifred Holtby, Dorothy Evans, Sybil Morrison, Dora Russell, Monica Whateley and, for very many years, Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan, played active roles in the group.

Hazel Hunkins-Hallinan (1890-1982) was born in Colorado, in the United States, and brought up in Montana. She was well educated and became a chemist, but found her career both as an academic and as a practising chemist thwarted by discrimination because of her gender. Through a friendship with Anna Louise Rowe, Hunkins-Hallinan became a member of the American National Woman's Party (NWP) and an active campaigner for women's suffrage in America - in 1917 going to jail for her role as a protester. After meeting Charles Thomas Hallinan, a pacifist, she travelled to England and lived with Hallinan in London, having four children before they married at the end of the 1920s. In 1922 she joined the Six Point Group in which she became an active member, and the Married Women's Association. She also worked with the Abortion Law Reform Association from the end of the 1960s. Hallinan died at the age of 91 in London, she was buried in Montana with her parents and her husband.