Eglantyne Jebb

Eglantyne Jebb was born into a socially conscious, landed family in Ellesmere, Shropshire. Educated in history at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, she trained as a teacher before joining the Charity Organisation Society in Cambridge, conducting groundbreaking empirical sociological field research on poverty published as Cambridge: A Brief Study in Social Questions in 1906. During the Balkan Wars of 1913, Jebb traveled to Macedonia on behalf of the Macedonian Relief Fund, witnessing firsthand the catastrophic toll of armed conflict on civilian children.

Following the Armistice of November 1918, the Allied naval blockade of Central Europe remained in place, plunging millions of children in defeated Germany and Austria-Hungary into catastrophic starvation and rickets. Horrified that innocent infants were being punished for the sins of politicians, Jebb and her sister Dorothy Buxton formed the Fight the Famine Council in London. In May 1919, at a packed public rally in the Royal Albert Hall, Jebb formally launched the Save the Children Fund to provide milk, flour, and medical care to children regardless of nationality or creed.

In 1920, Jebb moved to Geneva to establish the International Save the Children Union alongside the Red Cross. Recognizing that temporary relief was insufficient, Jebb sat upon the slopes of Mount Salève above Geneva in 1923 and drafted a revolutionary five-point charter proclaiming that mankind owes to the child the best that it has to give. Adopted by the League of Nations in 1924 as the Geneva Declaration of the Rights of the Child, Jebb's charter established the modern international human rights architecture for children.