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Leon rose11/10/2023 ![]() Things came to a head at the party's 19conferences. She sought the post of second deputy leader, but Bustamante accused her and other reformers of trying to usurp his power. After the general election of 1959 -which the party lost -Leon continued her earlier efforts to reform the party and substitute collective leadership for Bustamante's personality cult. ![]() Although the JLP lost the 1955 elections, Leon won her seat but she was subsequently unseated for violating an election law.īy the end of the 1950s, Leon had fallen out with Alexander Bustamante, the JLP's dominant personality, over the authoritarian way in which he led the party. When Jamaica achieved ministerial government in 1953, she was one of the first ministers to serve as minister of health and housing, from 1953 to 1955. Leon was also a founding member of Jamaica's legislature and a successful candidate in Jamaica's second general elections, in 1949. Although she had been unsuccessful as a candidate in Jamaica's first local government elections under adult suffrage (in which Jamaicans aged twenty-one and over exercised the right to vote), which had been held in 1947, she was successful in 19. By 1957 the party's newspaper hailed the organizational work as a "revolution."ĭuring this period, Leon also sought elective office. The party's central committee was strengthened, a proper party office was acquired, and its executive became more professional. She succeeded in establishing a number of new branches, bringing in thousands of new members and increasing the presence of the middle class in the JLP. In that role, she was among those credited with creating a revised constitution for the party in 1951 and with attempts to reform the party along more democratic lines throughout the 1950s, a role that eventually brought her into serious conflict with the leader, Alexander Bustamante, and cost her membership in the party.Īs chairperson of the JLP, Madame Leon, as she was called, was determined to make the party into more than a caucus of candidates approved by the powerful Bustamante, as it was believed to have been, and into one with a broadened organizational structure and a popular base with a branch system. Leon was a member of the Jamaica Labour Party (JLP, formed in 1943), serving as party chair from 1948 to 1960. She had the distinction of serving in the governments of the two main political parties and of being a founding member of Jamaica's party, legislative, and ministerial systems at both the local and central levels. Rose Agatha Leon was Jamaica's first notable female politician, emerging in the formative period of Jamaica's modern political system.
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