Louisa Lawson, Mother of Women's Suffrage

When female Australian British subjects won the vote with the Uniform Franchise Act (June 16, 1902), Louisa Lawson was hailed by her political sisters as "The Mother of Womanhood Suffrage". It is a title that could be applied internationally; apart from her crusading in Sydney, Louisa was involved in the establishment of the suffragette movement in South Australia, the first place in the world where women could both vote and stand for election (1894).

Louisa, who was born poor in the outback village of Mudgee, was forced by marital breakdown, economic depression and drought to move with her four surviving children to the city. She was an idiosyncratic but indomitable woman, a prodigious worker, powerful writer and fine poet, a spiritualist, farmer, postmistress and shopkeeper.

Louisa spent thirty-five years of her hard life fighting for women’s rights. She founded the Association of Women, and with Henry, in 1887 - 88 she published the journal, 'The Republican'. Louisa then became founder, owner, publisher and editor of 'The Dawn', the new nation's foremost women's political magazine, announcing that it would battle for women’s rights, and the vote. She ran it for seventeen years. "Why should one half of the world govern the other half?" was Louisa’s rallying cry.

In 1891, Louisa helped launch (with Maybanke Anderson, Rose Scott, and Dora Montefiore) the Womanhood Suffrage League of NSW. She also founded the Dawn Club, which met in various locations in Sydney.

The Dawn's press printed the first book by her son Henry (Australia's national poet), 'Short Stories in Prose and Verse'. She published two volumes of verse of her own and had numerous short stories. Thrown from a tram in January, 1900, she suffered severe spinal injuries, from which she never fully recovered, and these injuries led to the decline of her journal by 1905.

Louisa died two years before her famous son, in the Gladesville Hospital for the Insane on August 12, 1920, with Henry and two siblings excluded from her will. She was buried in a pauper's grave.

Pip Wilson is an Australian author. Read more about him at http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/resume.html