She was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, on 9 August 1887, daughter of Arthur John Batho, a postal telegraph clerk, and his wife Lilian, née Outram. Her father died in May 1891, in Graaff-Reinet, South Africa, where he was seeking treatment for his tuberculosis.
She was the fourth of six children, three of whom died in infancy. She joined the Women"s Social and Political Union, a militant group campaigning for women"s suffrage led by Emmeline Pankhurst, and in 1909 disrupted a speech by Winston Churchill with the suffragette cry "Votes for women!"
In 1912 she delivered a paper, "Is Woman"s Place the Home?", to the Fabian Society, arguing that the liberation of women from economic slavery depended on the destruction of private property. In 1926 she travelled to the Soviet Union, where she met North. K. Krupskaya and visited Lenin"s tomb.
Her trip appears to have been organised by the Society for Cultural Relations with the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics. She also visited Poland and witnessed a mass trial of political dissidents.
lieutenant took anti-war, anti-fascist and pro-nationalisation positions, but only lasted until 1937, when the Labour Party declared that membership was incompatible with membership of the Party. She began reviewing books and films for Tribune in 1937, continuing to do so until 1948.
She also wrote for the political magazine Time and Tide and had a weekly column in the Manchester Evening News from 1944 under the pseudonym Freda Wynne. In 1938 her mother died, and she was diagnosed with an ovarian cyst, undergoing a hysterectomy the following year.
In her later years she compiled a collection of autobiographical essays, The Summer of a Dormouse, and wrote a novel, After Which War?, but did not publish them.
She died at her home in Dorking, Surrey, on 24 June 1971, and was cremated at Randall"s Park crematorium, Leatherhead, on 30 June. Her papers are held by the University of Hull.
She had a political awakening while a student, influenced by the South African socialist and feminist Olive Schreiner. In 1915, inspired by the art of William Morris, she became a guild socialist. The Horrabins were involved in setting up the Socialist League, a left-wing faction within the Labour Party led by Stafford Cripps, in 1932, and it was Winifred who named it, after the original Socialist League, founded by William Morris.
