THEY say behind every successful man is a woman.
For Arthur Griffiths, the eldest son of George Griffiths, founder of The Fiji Times, it was his wife Jennie Wilson who wrote and edited for The Fiji Times in the early 1900s.
Jennie was the daughter of Randolph Wilson, a veteran who fought during the American Civil War and relative of Woodrow Wilson who was US President between 1913 and 1921 and widely regarded as the leading architect of the League of Nations.
“When she was 21, Jennie began travelling the world as part of a group whose aim was to establish Hagey Institutes, which guaranteed to cure addiction to liquor and narcotics,” says The National Library of Australia website www.nla.gov.au.
In Suva, she met Arthur and “agreed to marry him the day after they met”.
Later, Jennie became the mother of a big family of 10, nine of whom were born in Fiji from the eldest Randolph born in 1898 to Ciwa (a Fijian word for the number nine) who was born in 1910.
Ciwa Griffiths later became a US pioneer in methods of dealing with deafness in children.
“Early in the 1900s, Jennie began writing for The Fiji Times and from 1908 she worked full time as ‘the unacknowledged, unpaid editor’,” NLA reported.
In 1912, Jennie convinced Arthur to sell the paper and the family moved to Sydney so that the children could have access to a better education. Arthur, who was trained by his father, had taken over the reign of The Fiji Times in 1908 after George Griffiths’s death.
Being a great scholar, Jennie helped her husband run the newspaper and “wrote the editorials”.
In 1913, after the Griffiths moved to Sydney and using her experience of many years of work with The Fiji Times, Jeannie was appointed the editor of The Australian Women’s Weekly, one of Australia’s top most read magazines that still exists today.
She also contributed to Sydney’s Sunday Times, the Brisbane Labour Paper, The Daily Standard, Britain’s The Social Democrat and the Sydney-based, The International Socialist where she expressed her socialist anti-war and feminist views.
In 1921, most of the Griffiths family emigrated to the US, where over many years, Jennie contributed to local San Francisco papers and other publications.
She remained an activist until her death in 1951.
