Léontine Cooper

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Léontine Cooper , née Leontine Mary Jane Buisson , (born April 22, 1837 in Battersea , Great Britain , † March 12, 1903 in Queensland ) was a teacher, socialist , trade unionist and suffragette who advocated women's rights in Queensland, especially women's suffrage in Australia started.

Early life

Her father, Jean François Buisson, was French. Dorothy, her mother, was born in England. Léontine was the eldest of eleven children of this marriage, who lived with her family in Battersea and later in Brighton . She married Edward Cooper on January 31, 1866 in Hamstead , an explorer and poet. The marriage remained childless. They both immigrated to Australia in 1871 and she was working as a teacher soon after arriving in Queensland. Her first job took her to the Albany Creek School , and later she taught French at the Brisbane Girls Grammar School .

Political activity

Léontine Cooper was a socialist, believed in the need for an autonomous women's group that was not part of a party, and was involved among other things. a. also against blackbirding . She became the first female member of a Royal Commission and examined the working conditions of women in factories, workshops and commercial stores. She campaigned for better education for women and formed the Pioneer Club for women .

Léontine Cooper was also a writer who wrote short stories in The Boomerang magazine. She combined her interests as a teacher with her writing career in the mid-1890s when she published the only women's magazine in Queensland, the Star . She also wrote an academic article on Émile Zola and published commentary on current events on various occasions.

She was first in Emma Miller 's Woman's Equal Franchise Association (WEFA) , which campaigned for equal rights for women with the slogan "one woman, one vote" (German: "one woman, one vote"). Women were given equal rights under the Federal Electoral Act of April 9, 1902 and were able to vote for the first time in Australia on the occasion of Australia's first national election in 1903. From the WEFA split into the conservative Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Queensland Woman's Suffrage League , which was led by Léontine Cooper, because - in her opinion, the WEFA - oriented itself too much towards the ideas of the Australian labor movement.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ emsah.uq.edu.au ( MS Word ; 84 kB): Deborah Jordan: There Is No Question More Perplexing at the Present Time and More Frequently Discussed than Women's Place in Society ': Léontine Cooper and the Queensland Suffrage Movement, 1888– 1903. First published: Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women's Liberation, Vol. 30, no. 2, 2004, accessed March 31, 2011
  2. ↑ a b www.emsah.uq.edu.au : Who's Who in Brisbane in 1900, accessed March 31, 2011
  3. ↑ atua.org.au : Australian Trade Unions Archives. Miller, Emma (1839-1917), accessed March 28, 2011
  4. ↑ womenaustralia.info : Miller, Emma ( 1839-1917 ) (English), accessed on March 28, 2011
  5. ↑ womenaustralia.info : Women's Equal Franchise Association (1894–1905) (English), accessed April 1, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Cooper, Léontine
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Buisson, Leontine Mary Jane (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British-Australian suffragette and socialist
DATE OF BIRTH April 22, 1837
PLACE OF BIRTH Battersea , UK
DATE OF DEATH March 12, 1903
Place of death Queensland , Australia