Eleanor Rathbone

An independent MP for the Combined English Universities, Rathbone had argued for payments to mothers since the First World War. When the coalition's Family Allowances Bill of 1945 proposed paying the allowance to fathers, she threatened to vote against her own lifelong cause, organised cross-party pressure and won a free vote that put the money in mothers' hands. Child benefit is still paid to the main carer, usually the mother, because of that intervention.