In a small, sparsely furnished office in Kingston in the spring of 1928 Jamaica’s feisty first woman editor-publisher Una Marson proudly proclaimed, ‘This is the age of woman: what man has done women may do’. Born in 1905 in the county parish of St Elizabeth, Marson, the headstrong daughter of a Baptist parson rose to become an internationally famous feminist, poet, playwright, journalist, social activist and BBC broadcaster. In word and deed, Marson was a progressive intellectual with an incandescent intelligence whose ideas centred on women’s liberation, racial equality and cultural nationalism.
In 1922, after leaving the colonial and conservative Hampton high school in Kingston, Marson steered her career path towards stenography and social activism, working for the Salvation Army and YMCA. In 1928, Marson founded the journal The Cosmopolitan, which was aimed at middle-class black professional women. The journal consisted of poetry, short stories and articles that offer a splendid snapshot into the glorious technicolour of Marson’s literary gifts. By the early 1930s, Marson had established her place in Jamaica’s literary scene having published two volumes of poetry, Tropic Reveries (1930), and Heights and Depths (1931), and she staged her first play, At What A Price (1932), to popular acclaim.
In 1932, Marson arrived in London for what was meant to be a three-month vacation, but it turned out to be a four-year sojourn. In the metropole, Marson joined fellow Jamaican Harold Moody’s multi-racial organisation, The League of Coloured Peoples (hereafter LCP), and became editor of its journal, The Keys. As a central member of the LCP, Marson worked with leading pan-African and anti-colonial black intellectuals including C. L. R. James, George Padmore and Jomo Kenyatta.
In 1933, the West Indian, African and English members of the LCP were cast as actors in the production of At What a Price at the YMCA hostel on Great Russell Street. The popularity of At What a Price saw it staged at the Scala Theatre, and the play made history as the first black colonial production in the West End.
