EDINBURGH

ISA CRAIG-KNOX

ISABELLA CRAIG, the only child of John Craig, a Scottish Hosier and Glover, was born in Edinburgh in 1831.  Following the death of her parents while she was still a child, Isa lived with her grandmother, attending school until 1840.

In 1853, Isa secured a position on the staff of The Scotsman, writing literary reviews and articles on social questions. She had already from an early age contributed poems to The Scotsman and to various periodicals, and in 1856 her first volume of poems was published by Blackwood of Edinburgh.

In 1856 Isa met Elizabeth ("Bessie") Rayner Parkes – a campaigner for women's rights, journalist, poetess and author and the pair contributed to a Glasgow women's periodical, the Waverley Journal.  Bessie, who became its Editor in April 1857, advertised the paper as "a working woman's journal" and later established an office in Princes Street, London, where Isa assisted her.

In 1857 she moved to London where she took up an appointment as Assistant Secretary of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science. This served as a forum for discussion on Victorian social questions and acted as an influential adviser to governments.  It attracted many powerful contributors, including politicians, civil servants, the first British feminists, intellectuals (such as John Stuart Mill, John Ruskin, F. D. Maurice and Charles Kingsley) and reformers, and influenced policy and legislation on matters as diverse as public health and women’s legal and social emancipation. 

 In her role as Assistant Secretary to NAPSS, Isa epitomised the independent single woman of her age,  but this was an age in which women played essential but supporting roles, and regardless of what her feelings might have been about her work for NAPSS, when Isa married her cousin John Knox in 1866 she retired from paid employment. 

In 1865 she was a founder member of the Kensington Society and alongside Charlotte Manning and Emily Davies she organised the agendas for the meetings of the Society.

She died in 1903.