Christina Jamieson

Christina Jamieson (1864–1942) was a Scottish writer, playwright and suffragist known for her association with Shetland.

Early life Jamieson was born to Robert and Barbara Laing on 30 June 1864 at Cruisdale, Sandness on Mainland, Shetland. Three of her brothers became doctors.

Activism

Suffrage Jamieson is known for founding the non-militant Shetland Women's Suffrage Society in her home during October 1909, which became associated with the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), and for leading the society. Despite living hundreds of miles away from London, she created a banner with Orkney artist Stanley Cursiter which she carried in national processions. These included the Women's Coronation Procession on 21 June 1911, with a Miss Courtenay (who was the niece of the Orcadian Women's Suffrage Society chair Mary Anne Baikie). Jamieson also engaged in letter-writing regularly on suffrage to the local press, pamphleting campaigns and argued that as fishermen were absentee voters that their wives should have the right to vote in their stead. and published a short book on the women's suffrage movement called Sketch of votes for women movement.

Shetland history Alongside her suffragist campaigning, Jamieson wrote both fictional and factual items about Shetland and women's roles in society, sometimes under the pseudonym John Cranston. She wrote about how Shetland women "adored" their menfolk and that worrying about men being lost at sea was "a subcurrent of the whole course of their lives, to which it imparts an intense and religious pathos."

During the First World War, Jamieson served on Shetland's school board and led it temporarily as chair. She was the first woman in Shetland to serve on a public committee. In 1919, she also volunteered, alongside "Mrs Menzies and Misses Mitchell" to tend to the graves of Norwegian naval men who had been killed during a German raid on their convoy and who had been buried in Shetland, which was reported on in the Shetland News. She wrote a play in Shetland dialect Da Dooble Sporin (1935). She also spent time working to transcribe church records.