Maker: Helen Porteous

Panel number: 190

Petition Sheet Number: 229

Person honouring: Louisa Blake

Relationship to makers: I am not related but felt a connection due to Louisa being married without children, being religious and described as having strenuous enthusiasm - all things that could describe myself.

Louisa Blake (nee Lipscombe) was born in 1844. She was married to Leonard Blake, a land agent, but had no children. She died in 1901 at the relatively young age of 56 and was greatly mourned by the women’s organisations in Christchurch. ‘In her the active brain and strenuous enthusiasm of a reformer was combined with a charming simplicity of heart that was almost childlike in its pureness and truthfulness’ said The White Ribbon.

Louisa was a great reader and writer, often sending letters, on a wide range of subjects, to the editors of newspapers. She also wrote poems, and published one book of verse. Despite not having children herself, she was vitally interested in education, which she saw as having great potential benefit for the worker. She believed that employment, not charitable aid, was needed to solve unemployment, and that fair wages, shorter hours and work for everybody was the ideal.

She was an active member of the Canterbury Women’s Institute (CWI), the Progressive Liberal Association, one of the initiators of the Children’s Aid Society and read several papers to National Council of Women meetings. In 1896 the CWI unsuccessfully tried to get her nominated to a position on the North Canterbury Charitable Aid Board. 

She was deeply religious, believing that the ‘law of the Universe is love.’ Her death notice requested no mourning, and any remembrances to be in the colours of light blue and white, emblems of hope and purity.Biographical information taken from 'The Women Question’ by Margaret Lovell-Smith, New Women’s Press, 1992.

Panel materials: New but spare curtain lining, plus material from a lady who had gone into a nursing home. My sister in NZ sent material and I bought ribbon that I had printed. Coloured buttons, beads, an angel from a candle, end of a fountain pen. The backing material of a William Morris design was from an elderly friend from curtains she had owned nearly 50 years ago. The design was from around the year of the petition.