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Lucy Baldwin, Countess Baldwin of Bewdley (; 19 June 1869 – 17 June 1945) was an English writer and activist for maternal health. From 1892 until her death in 1945, she was the wife of Stanley Baldwin, three-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. She was invested as a Dame of Grace, Order of Saint John of Jerusalem and a Dame Grand Cross, Order of the British Empire, and styled as Countess Baldwin of Bewdley on 8 June 1937.
She married Stanley Baldwin on 12 September 1892 in Rottingdean. Among the attendees were Stanley's aunt Alice and her son, Rudyard Kipling. The couple had seven children:
Apart from her home-making and raising of six children, she was active and sociable, quite different from her husband in nature. Unlike her husband, she preferred the city life of London to the country. Their daughter Margaret Huntington-Whiteley said, "two people could not have been more unlike", but that "should they ever differ, it was always done quietly and politely." They shared the same deep Christian faith and moral outlook, and she was very supportive and encouraging of her husband. She often travelled with her husband during his time as prime minister, and she was an excellent speaker who found her own voice in politics.
She was involved in the Young Women's Christian Association and other charitable bodies for women, especially those concerned to improve maternity care, after having herself suffered difficult pregnancies and the loss of her first child. In 1928, she became vice-chairman of the newly established National Birthday Trust Fund to address the high incidence of maternal mortality. Its original aims were to support maternity hospitals and contribute to the development of midwifery practice. In 1929, she helped found the Anæsthetics Appeal Fund with speeches, broadcasts and fund-raising. She was particularly concerned with reducing the pain of childbirth, and lobbied for new funds to make anaesthesia affordable for low-income women. Her work contributed to the passage of the Midwives Act 1936. (See Royal College of Midwives.)
In the 1960s, a new device that administered a combination of Nitrous oxide and oxygen for obstetrics, was named the Lucy Baldwin Apparatus For Obstetric Analgesia.
Baldwin also wrote valuable notes of two major events in politics, the fall of the Lloyd George ministry and the Abdication Crisis.
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