‘White woman's country’: Ethel Tawse Jollie and the making of White Rhodesia

Abstract

Until recently, the role of European women in the expansion and consolidation of the British colonial empire has been largely ignored by both historians and women's studies scholars. This is an analysis of one such woman who played a leading role in the development of the British Empire in south‐central Africa, Ethel Tawse Jollie (1875–1950), formerly Ethel Colquhoun. In partnership with her first husband, Archibald Ross Colquhoun, explorer, writer and Cecil Rhodes's first Administrator of Mashonaland, she became steeped in the philosophy of the Edwardian ‘Radical Right’, the post Anglo‐Boer War reaction to imperial decline, and she played a prominent role in the opposition to the women's suffrage campaign before the Great War. As a member of the Legislative Council of Southern Rhodesia, she became the first woman parliamentarian in the British overseas empire. She was a prolific writer on imperial affairs and a leading intellectual of her political generation and, as the founder and principal organiser of the Rhodesian Responsible Government Association (RGA) (1917–1922), she imported from Britain a singular political philosophy shaped by the Edwardian ideology of ‘National Efficiency’. She played a central role in the achievement of responsible government in Southern Rhodesia in 1923, which set the territory's separate course outside the Union of South Africa. No other Rhodesian politician had achieved such prominence in the metropolis, or possessed such a thoroughly formed and comprehensive ideology, or the propaganda skills necessary for a simultaneous confrontation with the imperial and South African governments, local capitalists and the ruling British South Africa Company. During her parliamentary career she sought to promote European settlement and improve the educational, health and communications infrastructure of Southern Rhodesia. She paid particular attention to the development of a strong local identity which would attach the settlers more closely to their community and to the British Empire at large.