Selected Lead Articles from "THE DAWN"

Louisa Lawson

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Louisa Lawson, the mother of Australian writer Henry Lawson, was the founder, publisher and editor of an early feminist journal in Sydney named “The Dawn”. From 1888 onwards, it played no small part in the gaining of the vote for Australian women in South Australia (1895), Western Australia (1899), New South Wales (1902), Commonwealth (1902), Tasmania (1903), Queensland (1905), and Victoria (1908).

Since the success of the “Digitise The Dawn” project, a number of Louisa Lawson’s lead articles from the journal are available PD online, including the one written in defiance of the male-dominated New South Wales Typographical Association. This union attempted to shut down The Dawn by getting up an advertising boycott and other methods, angered as they were by The Dawn’s all-woman team of editors and printers … the NSW Typographical Association objected to them employing women at all.

Louisa Lawson described one attempt at intimidation to the 'Bulletin' :


'We were just going to press, and you know how locking up isn't always an easy matter-particularly for new chums like we were. Well he stood there and said nasty things, and poor Miss Grieg-she's my forewoman-and the girls, they got as white as chalk; the tears were in their eyes. I asked him three times to go, and he wouldn't, so I took a watering pot full of water that we had for sweeping the floor, and I let him have it.'

The advertising boycott in time collapsed after Louisa Lawson suggested her readers adopt the following simple expedient:

‘If it is made clear to your tradesmen that you deal with them because they advertise with us, the boycott is immediately defeated.’

- Summary by Son of the Exiles (1 hr 54 min)

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