Special L&L: In search of Sonja Schlesin’s letters

Dear Liz Stanley,

I hope you will share this request with a few scholars who have worked on British reformers active in the decade before World War I. Thank you!

I am completing an article about Sonja Schlesin (1888-1956), the daughter of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants to South Africa, who worked with Gandhi from 1906 to 1914. She began as legal secretary in his Johannesburg office and rose to become a trusted and valued associate in his endeavors on behalf of Indian immigrants.

For years she handled Gandhi’s correspondence and fund-raising, and she managed the office in his absence. Because of Gandhi’s ongoing connections with various British reformers, I suspect that some letters she wrote on his behalf–or possibly on her own–are scattered in British archives. If you have come across any such letters in your research, please contact me at harfein@aol.com. I will be grateful for any information.

Sonja Schlesin was an ardent supporter of woman suffrage. Here is an excerpt from a speech she wrote when she was nineteen and which Gandhi delivered for her at a rally of over 2500 Indians and their supporters on New Year’s Day, 1908 at the Hamadia Mosque near Johannesburg:

“But I implore you not to flinch from the hardships which now confront you, not to falter at the shoals ahead….Let me remind you of a similar crusade now being waged by my sisters in England. I refer to the suffragettes. For the sake of a principle they are prepared to lose their all, to brave innumerable trials….If delicately nurtured women can do this, will hardy men, inured to toil, do less?”

With thanks,

Harriet Feinberg
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA

Last updated: 23 November 2016