Louisa Lawson

Louisa Lawson ( born February 17, 1848 in Mudgee, New South Wales, † August 12 1920 in Gladesville ) was an Australian writer, editor, Suffragette and feminist.

Life and work

Lawson was the eldest of nine children in a poor family and had to leave school at the age of 13 years. 1866, she married Niels Larsen. However, your husband was often absent, leaving Louisa with four children alone back. 1882, she moved with her children to Sydney. You managed pensions and saved money order in 1887 the radical to acquire a share, the Federation of Australia supporting newspaper The Republican. With their income and experience from working at the newspaper she could The Dawn issue in May, 1888.

The Dawn was Australia's first journal, which has been exclusively produced by (up to ten) women. It has been seventeen years (1888-1905) published monthly and distributed throughout Australia and overseas. The magazine had a strictly feminist perspective and discussed topics such as women's right to choose and to occupy public office, education, and economic and legal rights for women, domestic violence and the temperance movement. Louisa's son Henry Lawson also wrote poems and stories for the magazine. The publisher of The Dawn printed in 1894 also Henry's first book, Short Stories in Prose and Verse.

1889 Louisa founded the Dawn Club, which became the center of the Suffrage Movement in Sydney. When in 1891 the New South Wales Women's Suffrage League was created to support the movement, Lawson allowed them to use the Dawn of the office to print pamphlets and literature free of charge. After 1902 in New South Wales of " Womanhood Suffrage Bill" was enforced, we asked Louisa to Members of Parliament as "The Mother of Suffrage in New South Wales " presented. For the women of this time universal suffrage was not the central theme. Louisa kritisiterte the government is not that they denied the Aborigines the right to vote.

Lawson retired in 1905 back, but continued to write for the magazines in Sydney and published The Lonely Crossing and Other Poems, a collection of 52 poems. She died in 1920 in the psychiatric clinic of Gladesville and was buried in a pauper's grave.

In 1975 the Australian post in her honor issuing a stamp.