Jeanne Young, welfare worker, journalist, social worker and political activist, was one of eight children of John Goodman Forster and his wife Sarah Jane Forster. By the time she was twelve she was a competent musician and played the church organ, in spite of having lost one eye in an accident. Young was also a talented mathematician. She became a freelance journalist with the Register and joined Catherine Helen Spence (q.v.) in the campaign for proportional representation in 1896. After Spence's death in 1910 Young took over the leadership of the campaign, and also completed Catherine Helen Spence's Autobiography. She later published Catherine Helen Spence: A Study and an Appreciation (1937), and she wrote several books on proportional representation.
On 23 January 1899, Young married Alfred Howard Young. Her husband later became foreign editor of the Advertiser. They had three sons and a daughter. At the outbreak of World War I she became the honorary organizer of the Wattle Day League Ambulance Committee. Young was a strong supporter of Australia's involvement in the war. In 1916 she was appointed the first and only woman on the Board of Governors of the South Australian Public Library, Museum and Art Gallery (1916-1928). In 1917 Young was appointed to the Magistracy and in 1918 she stood, unsuccessfully, as an independent candidate in Sturt for the House of Assembly, maintaining that 'women are tired of voting for men of whom they do not approve and in whose selection they had no choice.' Her eyesight began to fail when her good eye was damaged by medical incompetence, but she continued in active pursuit of her goals.
In 1937 Young formed and became the first president of the Democratic Women's Association; she also stood for the Australian Senate in that year. She was also awarded the Order of the British Empire in 1937; the only woman to receive such an award in that year. She travelled overseas to meet with British politicians who sympathized with the cause of proportional representation, and at the same time attempted to find treatment for her failing eyesight. Young also founded the C. H. Spence Scholarship for Women.
The Young's home was a centre of much of Adelaide's intellectual and political life in the late 1920s and 1930s, and her novel describes elements of this life. She was involved in the Theosophical Association and the Spiritualists Association. Her unpublished novel, 'Jenifer' was found in a tin trunk by her grandson's wife, Tess Young (Tess Driver, qv) and was published for the Centenary of SA Women's Suffrage in 1994.
(Source: Susan Magarey 'Introduction' in Ever Yours, C. H. Spence ed. Susan Magarey et. al. (2005): 1-15).
