Ethel Maud Tawse JollieOBE (8 March 1874 – 21 September 1950; née Cookson; widowed Colquhoun) was a writer and political activist in Southern Rhodesia who was the first female parliamentarian in the British overseas empire.[1]
Career
Cookson was born Ethel Maude Cookson in Castle Church, Stafford, the daughter of Samuel Cookson, a doctor. She studied art under Anthony Ludovici at the Slade School of Fine Art where she met her first husband, explorer Archibald Ross Colquhoun. They married at St. Paul's church, Stafford, on 8 March 1900, and she accompanied her husband on tours across Asia, the Pacific, and Africa, before settling in Southern Rhodesia.[2] After Colquhoun's death on 18 December 1914, she replaced him as editor of United Empire magazine.[3] She later remarried a Rhodesian farmer called John Tawse Jollie.[4]
Jollie was a supporter of white supremacy, albeit she later came to view blacks as equal to whites. In 1937, she said Africans had to be integrated into a "composite civilisation" and further changes were possible, albeit there was no evidence of her ever supporting a fully integrated society.
"So far as political evolution goes, we may not be at the end of our own history. Under present conditions political or social equality would not be accepted by the white race and could not be exercised by the black one with any degree of advantage to themselves, but permutations and combinations may open out a compromise as yet unforeseen."[7]
Lowry, Donal (June 1997). "'White Woman's Country': Ethel Tawse Jollie and the Making of White Rhodesia". Journal of Southern African Studies. 23 (2): 259–281. doi:10.1080/03057079708708536. JSTOR2637621.
Berlyn, Phillippa (1969). "Ahead of Her Time," Illustrated Life Rhodesia, No. 3.
Lowry, Donal, "Making Fresh Britains Across the Seas" in Fletcher, Ian Christopher, ed., (2012). Women's Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation and Race, Routledge.
Lowry, Daniel William (Donal) (1989). The Life and Times of Ethel Tawse Jollie, Rhodes University.
Riedi, Eliza (2002). "Women, Gender, and the Promotion of Empire: The Victoria League, 1901–1914," The Historical Journal, Vol. 45, No. 3.
Sanders, Valerie and Delap, Lucy (2010). Victorian and Edwardian Anti-Feminism, Routledge.