Zum Inhalt springen

Daisy Solomon

aus Wikipedia, der freien Enzyklopädie
Dies ist eine alte Version dieser Seite, zuletzt bearbeitet am 10. November 2020 um 15:44 Uhr durch en>Kaybeesquared (added link to brother). Sie kann sich erheblich von der aktuellen Version unterscheiden.

Vorlage:Infobox person/sandbox

Daisy Solomon (1882 - 1978) was posted as a human letter in the British suffragette campaign[1] using a quirk in the postal system to approach the Prime Minister who would not receive a delegation of women demanding the right to vote. Solomon was secretary to suffragette groups and imprisoned for protest,[2] and went on hunger strike.[3]

Early life and family

Daisy Dorothea Solomon was born in 1882[4] in Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa, one of five children, of Saul (1817-1892) and Georgiana Solomon (1844-1933). Solomon's father was a newspaper proprietor and a liberal politician and became governor in the Cape Colony in South Africa[5], and her mother was an educator and suffragette.[6] Daisy Solomon grew up in a household with reforming views, her father was known as a radical due to his support for multi-racial government contrary to the political views of many in power at the time. He was a supporter of women's rights, known for defending freedom of speech in the parliament and in the Cape Argus paper he owned.[7] Solomon's mother had emigrated from Scotland to South Africa in 1873 to teach at a newly founded girls school which became the Good Hope Seminary, and married Saul Solomon, who was much older than her, on 27 March 1874;[8] sadly their oldest daughter and her governess were drowned in an accident in 1881, before Daisy was born. Solomon also had a brother Saul, who became a judge in the Supreme Court of South Africa; Margaret; George; William Ewart Gladstone, a painter who followed his mother into educational leadership as principal of the Bombay School of Art; Daisy, a suffragette; and a son who died in infancy. I

The Solomon family returned to Britain in 1888 due to her father's poor health; he died in Scotland in 1892.[6]

Political activism

Solomon and her mother joined the Women's Liberal Association but had decided by 1908 that this was not making adequate progress on women's right to vote, and they joined the militant suffragette organisation, the Women's Social and Political Union .[9] The Solomons took part in a number of suffragette events during the WSPU's ongoing campaign; it organised protests and publicity stunts to get politicians' and the public's attention.

Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McLelland - human letters at 10 Downing Street 23 February 1909

On 23 February 1909,[6] Jessie Kenney took Daisy Solomon and Elspeth McClelland to the Strand Post Office and paid three-pence to have them 'posted' to the Prime Minister at Number 10 Downing Street the day before the 'Women's Parliament' meeting in Caxton Hall. This made headline news in the Daily Mirror, whose reporter had been alerted.[10] Solomon and McClelland got a rousing cheer on joining the Caxton Hall event. After that meeting a delegation including Solomon tried again to approach the Prime Minister, while he was dining out, and twenty-seven women were arrested with leader Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence. For Solomon and others like Constance Lytton, Caprina Fahey, Rose Lamartine Yates, and Sarah Carwin, this was their first arrest for activism.[9]

Constance Lytton quoted Solomon writing about the sparseness of the furniture in prison: 'a thin hard mattress, and an even thinner pillow' and conveyed in a brief statement the joy of finding a brush and comb in her book Prisons and Prisoners: some personal experiences.[11] Solomon went on hunger strike and was force-fed.[3]

In 1906, Solomon was joint branch secretary of the WSPU Hampstead branch but resigned in 1913,[11] and by 1915, Solomon had joined the Hampstead and Golders Green branch of the United Suffragists,as joint secretary and in 1918, was literature secretary of the British Dominions Women's Citizens Union, attending an international conference in Paris in 1923.[6] Solomon continued to campaign for the extension of voting rights to be equal to men, including in 1926 as honorary secretary to the Equal Political Rights Campaign Committee.

Solomon was in Britain in 1948, but returned to South Africa and was there in 1963,[6] and died there in 1978.[3]

Legacy

Solomon was brought up in a family who believed in women's rights, and she donated to the Women's Service Library (now the Fawcett Library) her father Saul Solomon's original copy of Mary Wollestonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women.[6] Solomon's own papers[12] were donated to the South African library at Cape Town,[3] now part of the National Library of South Africa.[13]

References

Vorlage:Reflist

  1. ↑ Human Letters. In: The Postal Museum. 23. Februar 2018, abgerufen am 30. Oktober 2020 (amerikanisches Englisch).
  2. ↑ SUFFRAGETTES: Amnesty of August 1914: index of people arrested, 1906-1914. (gov.uk).
  3. ↑ a b c d Daisy Solomon.
  4. ↑ Miss Daisy Dorothea Solomon / Database - Women's Suffrage Resources. In: www.suffrageresources.org.uk. Abgerufen am 1. November 2020.
  5. ↑ Solomon, Saul (1817–1892), newspaper proprietor and politician in Cape Colony. In: Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Abgerufen am 10. November 2020 (englisch, 10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-51112).
  6. ↑ a b c d e f Elizabeth Crawford: The women's suffrage movement : a reference guide, 1866-1928. UCL Press, London 1999, ISBN 0-203-03109-1, S. 267, 643 (worldcat.org).
  7. ↑ , Reader's Digest Association South Africa.: Illustrated history of South Africa : the story of Saul Solomon. 2nd Auflage. Reader's Digest Association South Africa, Cape Town 1992, ISBN 0-947008-90-X, S. 129 (worldcat.org).
  8. ↑ Elizabeth Crawford: The Women's Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866-1928. Routledge, 2003, ISBN 978-1-135-43402-1 (englisch, google.co.uk).
  9. ↑ a b Atkinson, Diane: Rise up, women! : the remarkable lives of the suffragettes. London 2018, ISBN 978-1-4088-4404-5 (worldcat.org).
  10. ↑ E. Sylvia (Estelle Sylvia( Pankhurst: The suffragette : the history of the women's militant suffrage movement. Dover Auflage. Mineola, New York 2015, ISBN 978-0-486-80484-2, S. 351, 362 (worldcat.org).
  11. ↑ a b Constance Lytton: Prisons and Prisoners: some personal experiences. Hrsg.: Haslam. Broadview Press, 2008, ISBN 978-1-77048-048-3, S. 26.
  12. ↑ Item Details Page for Daisy Solomon Collection. In: nlsa.on.worldcat.org. Abgerufen am 5. November 2020.
  13. ↑ About Us. In: NLSA. 21. August 2018, abgerufen am 5. November 2020 (amerikanisches Englisch).
Abgerufen von „https://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Daisy_Solomon&oldid=251481432“