Rose Summerfield's eventful life

1864 Rose Summerfield (b. Rose Stone at Middleton Creek, near Ballarat in the gold mining districts of central Victoria; d. April 14, 1922), Australian socialist and pioneer feminist.

Rose Summerfield was active in the Australasian Secular Association (ASA) in Melbourne by 1886 and in that year (March 23) the 21-year-old Rose married fellow freethinker Henry Lewis Summerfield, a 55-year-old well-to-do Sydney businessman to whom she bore a son. She wrote articles for the Hummer (soon to become the Sydney Worker) under the name 'Rose Hummer', from April, 1892. In the same year, she campaigned in Bourke on behalf of William Lane's utopian scheme in South America, called New Australia, and she delivered lectures on progressive topics in Sydney. Following the death of her first husband, she married Jack Cadogan, a shearers' cook in the spring of 1897.

A state socialist (she was a valued campaigner and speaker in the Australian Socialist League), disillusioned and embittered by the labor politicians she knew in Australia, who she believed had sold out the working class, Rose Cadogan and her husband travelled in 1899 to New Australia in Paraguay, where they had four more sons. In 1908, like many others before them, they left William Lane's failed utopia and settled in Yataity, north of the town of Villarrica, where Rose worked as a kind of district nurse, selling her own herbal preparations, and Jack opened a store. It was Rose Cadogan, nee Summerfield, who claimed the body of mercurial activist (some may call him a terrorist) Larry Petrie after he was hit by a train at Villa Rica railway station in March, 1901, where he worked as a watchman following his own disillusionment with Lane's communalism ...

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Tagged: australia, feminism, utopia, radical, progressive, history