Elizabeth Molteno
Still in South Africa, and a lifelong friend of Emily Hobhouse, we find Elizabeth Maria Molteno, or ‘Betty’, as she was better known. Betty Molteno was born in 1852 into an influential political family in the Cape Colony of South Africa. Her father, John Molteno, served twice as Prime Minister of the Cape, and was an extremely wealthy man.
The Cape Colony, however, enjoyed a liberal tradition, and it was perhaps easier for Betty Molteno to discard the conventions of Victorian womanhood than it might have been in England. She was unashamedly intelligent, well educated and encouraged by her liberal father to express herself with absolute freedom. Her interests developed unconventionally, and as a friend and confident of Mohandas K Gandhi, she began to value simplicity of life and non-religious spirituality, exploring vegetarianism, theosophism and various other fringe interests that were gathering in popularity at the time.
At the time, the Cape Colony, largely thanks to her father, employed a liberal, ‘color-blind’ constitution that was somewhat at variance with the much more rigid race codes of the rest of South Africa. She became very active in promoting race and gender equality in South Africa, an in particular the extension of education to girls. As an educator, she promoted these values, and worked to reform and modernize the Cape education system.
It was during the Anglo/Boer War that she met Emily Hobhouse and Olive Schreiner, who we will meet later, and the three women formed a formidable front in the anti-war movement in South Africa. Her activities alongside Emily Hobhouse in aiding Boer women, and publicizing their plight, earned her a reputation for being ‘pro-Boer’, for which she was forced to resign her teaching job.
After the war she moved to London where she became actively involved in Gandhi’s South African activism, and where she also joined Christabel Pankhurst in the Suffragette movement.
Back in South Africa, Gandhi’s passive resistance movement, or Satyagraha, was gathering momentum, and upon her return to South Africa she moved briefly into his Phoenix Settlement to engage more vigorously in the struggle. There she became actively involved in the development of African education. Joining Emily Hobhouse and Olive Schreiner in England during WWI, she actively campaigned against the war, and there too, in 1927, she died. She was described by South African author Phillida Brooke Simons as ‘One of the most remarkable South African women of her generation.’