(Author: Gwynne Schrire, Vol. 68, No. 3, Chanukah 2013)
Few in the year 2013 think it strange that the immediate past Chairman of the SAJBD Cape Council and the current SAJBD National Chairman and National Director, respectively Li Boiskin, Mary Kluk and Wendy Kahn, are women. Today ability, not the possession of a Y-chromosome, is what matters.
That was not always the case. Among the artifacts that the SAJBD Cape Council inherited from the former Jewish Museum is a silver salver, whose inscription refers to the fight for women’s rights in South Africa. The EPNS tray belonged to one of the first women’s rights activists in South Africa. Its inscription reads: “Bertha Solomon MP, In appreciation Women’s Legal Disabilities Act 1938-1953 From Western Province Women Members Constantia Constituency”.
Bertha, born Schwartz, emigrated from Minsk to Cape Town with her mother and sister. There they joined their husband and father, Idel. A fervent Zionist,1 Idel Schwartz had, in 1899, been one of the founders of the Dorshei Zion Society (today’s SA Zionist Federation – Cape Council),2 becoming its secretary and then its president.3 When the Hebrew University was established in 1925 Schwartz, by then a wealthy man, donated a chair of Post-Biblical Hebrew Literature and attended the opening. In the Samson Centre, which houses the Jewish communal organisations in Cape Town, there is a reproduction of a painting The Opening of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem by the Rt Hon The Earl of Balfour, K.G. 1.4.1925 by Leopold Pilichowski. It was presented by Schwartz to the Dorshei Zion Society.
One Saturday afternoon in 1907 Canon Jenkins, Principal of the Diocesan College (Bishops), called on the Schwartz family asking to see Bertha. Bishops had decided to admit girls to its post-matriculation college and he had come to offer her a scholarship.4 Bertha, then fifteen years old, had just matriculated from Good Hope Seminary School for Girls. Although her father believed in education for girls, her mother did not. Furthermore, the family had no money. The depression that had followed the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902 and the departure of the soldiers and refugees from Cape Town had all but wiped out Idel Schwartz’s property investments, and only by their sale had he narrowly avoided bankruptcy.5 Without telling the family, Idel’s friend Advocate Morris Alexander, who lectured in Law at Bishops, had put Bertha’s name down for one of the two scholarships on offer.
Apart from interceding to help the gifted Bertha, Alexander was also deeply involved in Jewish affairs. He had, inter alia, been a founder of the Cape Jewish Board of Deputies, of which he was chairman from 1904-1937. The year after the Canon’s visit, he was elected to the Union House of Assembly in 1910, and remained an MP until his death in 1946.
Thus, with Alexander’s help, Bertha became the only Jew at the Anglican College, with a four year scholarship. There she flourished. She obtained a B.A. degree with honours in Classics, a post-graduate teacher’s qualification and an M.A. in Classics. She also made good friends, including her class mate Jan Hofmeyr, Philip Millin, future judge and husband of the novelist Sarah Gertrude Millin, and Morris Alexander’s younger brother, Aaron. The latter was to marry a girl he met at Cambridge and move with her to her home town, Cairo, to practise law.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row] In 1923, now Mrs Bertha Solomon and living in Johannesburg with two children, Frank and Joan, she complained to Advocate Millin that she was bored. He suggested that as legislation had just been passed allowing women to practise law she should consider practising the profession, and sent books and newly qualified lawyers to coach her. In due course, she became one of the first women advocates in practice. Most of Bertha’s clients were women, and she was horrified to learn of the legal disabilities under which they suffered as a result of the outdated Roman Dutch Common Law of Marriage. This regarded women as minors and gave to husband’s marital power over their wives’ money, possessions and children. A feckless husband could spend his wife’s inheritance, collect her wages, sell her possessions and furniture and remove the children. And nothing could be done about it. Bertha realised the only way to rescind these legal disabilities was to change the law, and the only way to change the law was for women to have the vote. She thus joined the National Council of Women, threw herself into the suffrage movement, and became a chairman of the Women’s Suffrage campaign, a cause which Morris Alexander MP and his wife Ruth strongly supported. The Dutch Reformed Church was firmly opposed to votes for women in the belief that this was in direct conflict with the Word of God. Finally in 1930, after a heated debate in Parliament (in which it was argued that scientific evidence proved what every male knew – that females had smaller brains) the vote was eventually given to women – but only to white women. It was also made compulsory for them to register as voters. Ruth Alexander at first refused to register for a discriminatory law, but when her husband told her she could be arrested for non-compliance, she agreed to register under compulsion but on the understanding that she would leave him as soon as their children had finished university (which she did).6 With the right to vote gained, Bertha was elected first as a member of the Provincial Council in 1933 and then, five years later, as a Member of Parliament. Her maiden speech dealt with women’s rights. In time, her daughter Joan qualified as an architect and married Michael Comay, a Cape Town lawyer. Her son Frank qualified as an advocate. Bertha set about lobbying to change the laws regarding women’s rights. Just as she had worked out a plan of campaign to get the law on the statue book, however, the Second World War broke out. Changing laws affecting women was now low on the government’s list of priorities, particularly with the opposition of the Dutch Reformed Church and a government divided about South Africa’s entry into the war. Both Michael Comay and Frank Schwartz enlisted and were sent to North Africa. When General Dan Pienaar was told that he was being assigned a Jewish Information Officer, he exploded “No, good heavens man, I don’t want a blooming Jew!”7 But he soon realised Michael’s worth. After his demobilisation in 1946 Major Michael Comay, Joan and their two children moved to Jerusalem, where Michael was the SA Zionist Federation’s official representative to Palestine. Joan, an activist like her mother, smuggled arms for the Jewish underground army. Michael, in order to avoid arrest by the British army, was sent to the United Nations in 1947 to help lobby for world support for an independent Israel. In the 1960s, he became Israel‘s chief delegate to the United Nations and one of his nation‘s most influential diplomats, serving as Ambassador to Canada and Britain.8 Joan became a popular author of books on Israel, including Ben-Gurion and the Birth of Israel; Everyone’s guide to Israel; Introducing Israel; Israel and the Book; The Diaspora Story: The epic of the Jewish People among the Nations; The Hebrew Kings; The Jerusalem I love; The Oxford Who’s who in Jewish history: after the period of the Old Testament; The Routledge Who’s who in the Old Testament: Together with the Apocrypha; The Temple of Jerusalem: With the history of Temple Mount; The UN in Action; The World’s greatest story: The epic of the Jewish people in Biblical times. Bertha was also a keen Zionist. Accompanied by Joan, she attended a ceremony at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1958 at which the Idel and Sonia Schwartz Lecture Hall was dedicated. She left a bequest to that university in her will.9 Frank joined the artillery, becoming a captain, and was one of the first five South Africans to be awarded the Military Cross at Sidi Rezegh. He was taken prisoner, escaped, was shot in the throat and spent five months in hospital in Cairo, where Aaron Alexander’s wife, Morris’ sister-in-law, visited him daily. In 1946 the Cape SAJBD, confronted with additional responsibilities, decided to expand its offices and appoint an assistant secretary to help the Chairman, Leon Segal.10 The first one to be appointed was Advocate (Captain) Frank Solomon, M.C. His throat wound had affected his voice, so that he sounded as if he had a bad cold. As a result it was the Cape Board – rather than the law courts –that benefited from his expertise. Later he joined an engineering consultancy, and then became an editor for a specialist magazine.11 All this time, Bertha Solomon M.P. continued addressing meetings, arranging for women’s organisations to send letters to their MPs, introducing bills, speaking in parliament and mastering the parliamentary rules in order to get the marital powers law changed. It was an uphill battle. General Smuts once quipped, “What this house needs is more Bertha control.” In 1944, she managed to get a bill passed in the Assembly, only to have it rejected by the Senate. She then asked Prime Minister Smuts to establish a judicial commission to investigate the position of women in South Africa. The commission was horrified at the findings; even the chairman, who had initially been opposed to such a bill, changed his view. However, by the time the commission presented its report, the conservative National Party was in office, and it was more interested in legislating apartheid than in antagonising the church. Finally, the Matrimonial Affairs Act – called Bertha’s Bill by Prime Minister DF Malan – was passed in 1953, giving women legal rights to their property, income and children. One of those who spoke in support of the Bill was a newly elected Member of Parliament, whose maiden speech this was – Helen Suzman. One of Bertha’s supporters, former Rand Daily Mail editor Rayner Ellis, wrote the following “Ode to Bertha”: Bertha’s Bill is a bitter pill To the wretched man without good will Who doesn’t treat his wife, his sister or his daughter With the love and affection that he really oughter. Let Husbands rage and Tyrants glower, No longer need the housewife cower, For this is the last, the fatal hour Of that dreaded bane, the marital power. How happy now our womenfolk, Freed from old oppression’s yoke By a female Solomon in the House Who feared neither Minister, man nor mouse! Now Bertha’s Bill is the people’s will And we all admire her courage and skill. Having finally achieved what she had set out to do, Bertha retired from Parliament in 1958. She now turned her attention to the equality of women under Jewish law. Here she was not successful, and the battle continues. In her autobiography, Bertha wrote that the morning after the bill was passed “there came the telegrams, shoals of them from all over the country, many from women I had never heard of. In their gratitude many of the women’s organisations bestowed on me such honours as they could… the Union of Jewish Women gave me an Honorary Life membership… The United Party women of Claremont [sic], under Mrs Waterson’s leadership presented me with a charming little silver salver ‘in appreciation’”. And this is the salver that is proudly displayed in The Samson Centre. Gwynne Schrire is Deputy Director of the Cape Council of the SA Jewish Board of Deputies. She is a regular contributor and a member of the Editorial Board of Jewish Affairs and has written, co-written and edited various books on aspects of local Jewish and Cape Town history. 
NOTES
