Musician, singing teacher, and ‘prime mover’ in the Women’s Freedom League. Scotland’s only known Black suffrage activist.
Active in
Glasgow
Edinburgh
Scotland
Key Dates
Born 1870
Died 1954
Prime MoveR
Jessie Soga was a professional singer and music teacher who used her organisational and musical skills to help start a branch of the Women’s Freedom League in Hillhead, Glasgow and organise many successful fundraising events. She also donated to the Women’s Social and Political Union and was involved in the Movement for the Taxation of Land Values.
She was born in South Africa in 1870, the youngest child of Glaswegian Janet Burnside and Reverend Tiyo Soga, pictured below. Janet had been a weaver in Glasgow when she met Tiyo Soga, a black Xhosa man whose University of Glasgow education had been sponsored by John Street Church, where he was baptised.
SUFFRAGETTE STATS
Gallusness
5
Organisations
2
Barrier Busting
9
Age in 1928
58
Miles traveled for the cause
200
More about jessie
She studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London, qualifying as a singing teacher, and also at the Milan Conservatory. Newspaper adverts in the Glasgow Herald (1899) show that she worked as a singing teacher in the West End.
The report of the inaugural meeting of the Hillhead Women’s Freedom league is where we first find her involved in the suffrage movement and, at the next meeting, she became joint Branch Secretary. After this, we continue to see more of her activities through various reports in the suffrage press. For example, in March 1908 there was praise for the “delightful programme of songs, recitation, and violin selection” that Soga arranged for a reception of former Scottish prisoners which was held at the Prince of Wales Halls in Glasgow. She is again lauded in December 1908 for her “indefatigable labours” in making a success of a Café Chantant event, which attracted over 1000 visitors.
Interestingly, in late 1909 she is noted as having donated money and items to the Pankhurst’s Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). This was a rival suffrage organisation that the Women’s Freedom League (WFL) had split from in 1907, due to disputes over the use of violence and the dictatorial attitudes of the Pankhurst’s leadership.
Fun Facts about jessie
Scotland’s only known Black suffrage activist
Secretary of the Hillhead Branch of the WFL (Women’s Freedom League)
Organised concerts to raise money for the cause
Helped create a profitable circulating library for the WSPU
A professional singer who trained in Milan and was awarded medals for her performances
Joined An Comunn Gaidhealach, an musical organisation supporting Gaelic language, history and heritage
More Information
Jessie appears as a regular donor of large sums to the Women’s Social and Political Union. In April 1910 she donated £4 to their Scottish Exhibition, which would be around £480 today. As before, she was also involved in organising “entertainments” like music and drama for the WSPU’s Glasgow events. Further donations of money, items and her time are recorded in ‘Votes for Women’, the Annual Report of the WSPU, and ‘The Suffragette’ until the end of 1913 – after which her name disappears from the records.
Unfortunately, we can only speculate as to what caused this change of activities and what appears to be Jessie’s move away from suffrage entirely. However, Jessie’s activism clearly made an impression. In 1951, the well-known suffragette Helen Crawfurd reminisced in a letter to Janet Barrowman about their activist comrades from previous decades, and Jessie’s name is listed as one of “so many women who did valuable work behind the scenes”.
We do know that Jessie continued to teach singing, and she was also active in helping at events for other campaigning organisations, including the Movement for the Taxation of Land Values. She also became a member of the Gaelic language and cultural heritage society, An Gaidheal, in 1924. Jessie never married, and on her death in 1954 at the age of 83, she was living at the Old People’s Cottages in Glasgow’s Rottenrow.
‘The meeting of the week […] was due to the energy of Miss Soga and Miss Semple, the prime movers in the formation of the Hillhead Branch’ of the WFL.
Suffrage activist, writer and recruiter Teresa Billington Greig in Women’s Franchise 23.01.1908
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