Frida Kerry Laski was a British suffragist, birth control advocate, and eugenicist. Born in Suffolk, England Winifred Mary Kerry, the daughter of Francis John Kerry of Acton Hall, Suffolk, a member of the British gentry, met future Labour Party chairman and political science professor Harold Laski in Halesowen, where she was working as a physiotherapist and masseuse and he was recovering from surgery. After a brief courtship, Frida Kerry and Harold Laski, who was Jewish, ignored their family's objections and eloped to Scotland in 1911. She was 8 years older than him. It was apparently a happy marriage, due in part to the couple's shared beliefs in eugenics and socialism. Both were also political activists, with Frida Laski especially active in feminist causes including suffrage and birth control. In 1920, she also converted to Judaism to please her husband's family but she remained an atheist throughout her life. They collaborated on several projects including the English translation of Léon Duguit's Law in the Modern State. After a stint at Oxford where Harold Laski got his degree, the couple moved to Montreal, where he had a lectureship at McGill University. They had one child, a daughter, Diana. In 1917, the family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Harold taught at Harvard. In 1920, the Laskis moved back to London, where Harold taught at the London School of Economics and Frida became active in birth control work. She helped form the Workers' Birth Control Group with Dora Russell, Stella Browne and Dorothy Thirtle in 1924. In 1932 she became active in the Birth Control International Information Centre as a member of its London Council. In 1934 she threw herself into politics, working in Fulham for the Labour Party, and agitating for the adoption of birth control into the Party members' platforms. In 1936 she became one of the founders of the Abortion Law Reform Association. After spending the autumn of 1938 through the summer of1939 in the United States, as Harold Laski took a temporary post at the University of Washington, the couple returned to Cambridge, England to which the London School of Economics was evacuated during World War II. After Harold Laski died in 1950, Frida Laski devoted herself to Third World issues, focusing particularly on hunger. She died in London on 31 July 1977 at age 93.
