Liberal-leaning Victoria was the first place in Australia where women’s rights were actively debated. But, like the rising tide of Federation itself, such paradigm-shifting deliberations did not occur in geopolitical isolation. Outrage was infectious. On 29 March 1891, seven years after the first Australian women’s suffrage organisation was convened in a Melbourne drawing room, the inaugural meeting of the Womanhood Suffrage League (WSL) of New South Wales was held in a modest home at 77 Darlinghurst Road, Paddington. The house belonged to Mrs Dora Montefiore.
At that time Dora had been widowed for two years and had two small children. She was luckier, however, than most women in that situation: her late husband’s family, the Montefiores, were Establishment. They had been among the earliest free Jewish settlers in New South Wales; the Montefiore name connoted leadership, respectability and entrepreneurial flair in every field of endeavour, including grazing, mining, shipping and land speculation. Dora’s marital home had been the Octagon, the oldest (and highest) building in Darling Point.1 Originally built with convict labour as a government watchtower, it was perched on a hill with a commanding view over Sydney’s magnificent harbour. And Dora’s own family background was similarly privileged.
Born Dorothy Fuller in Surrey, England, five days before Christmas in 1851, Dora grew up (as she wrote in her 1927 autobiography) in the Victorian nursery, sheltered, nest-like, from the outside world by servants and governesses.2 Francis Fuller educated his daughters along with his sons: when Dora was old enough, she attended Mrs Creswell’s school at Brighton. The eighth of thirteen children, Dora was quick-witted and clever, with a natural gift for languages. Not pretty, though: short and squat, with her curly dark hair, long nose and wide mouth, she was never going to be the belle of the ball.
In 1874, the script of Dora’s insulated life changed when her eldest brother, who had been living in Tasmania, called for one of his sisters to ‘come out’ to him. His delicate wife needed help with the children and the housekeeping, and lord knew good help was hard to find in the colonies. It was decided that I should be the one to undertake this duty, Dora recalled: sailing to Australia was not her choice. But the forced realignment in Dora’s worldview would be the making of her, particularly after she left her brother’s household (for reasons unknown) and took herself off to Sydney where, in 1881, she married George, the scion of the celebrated Montefiores. They married according to Church of England rites, with the bride’s father present. Class proved thicker than holy water.
In 1889, when George died of a strangulated hernia, thirty-year-old Dora found herself in reduced but not desperate circumstances.3 She could feed, clothe and house her two children, six-year-old Florence and two-year-old Gilbert, although she was forced to leave the Octagon and move to Paddington, a drop in both altitude and social status. But Dora was truly floored when informed by her solicitor that in law, the child of the married woman has only one parent, and that is the father.4
The fact that she could not legally assert custody of her children, even if nobody was at this moment threatening to take them away from her, shaped the course of the rest of Dora’s long life. As she would write in her autobiography:
I was forced by a sense of duty towards other women who were not so free as [I] was to act publicly in the cause that was dear to [me], in order to help bring about before the public the question of the gross disabilities under which women were suffering.
This motivation, to help women who did not have the social and economic advantages she enjoyed, drove Dora to seek the political remedies that no woman possessed. Finally emerging from the cocoon of privilege, she found herself constantly up against wrong and unsympathetic laws, and without political power to alter or abolish such laws.5 In that first grief-stricken year of her widowhood, Dora began to meet other women who were in the same position, all suffering under the same sex disabilities.
What did they do with their newfound solidarity? We discussed, and rebelled, and longed to make things better for our children. Discussion, rebellion, longing. An economical recipe for change.
Dora’s decision to form a suffrage society was influenced by a chance meeting with Sir George Grey, a true Renaissance man whose colonial careers included army officer, explorer, linguist, land speculator and ‘suppressor’ of native rebellions. He had been governor of two British colonies: New Zealand and the Cape Colony in South Africa. He was also a liberal and a democrat who championed the principles of social equality and ‘pure democracy’: the anti-aristocratic concept of one man, one vote.
By 1891 Grey was living in Sydney. He was eighty years old and three-quarters senile, and he was attending the Australasian Constitutional Convention on 2 March. The delegates had been appointed by the parliaments of each Australian colony, plus New Zealand, to explore the possibility of federation and to consider and report upon an adequate scheme for an Australian Constitution.6
In Grey, Dora found a political mentor. She began to accompany him to meetings, where she was generally the only woman in the room. He spoke to me of the enfranchisement of women in the colonies, Dora recalled, where things moved more rapidly than in older countries, and said that such legislation would lead the way for similar reforms in Great Britain and elsewhere.7
Grey also persuaded Dora that the present historical moment was a unique opportunity.
He added that now that the question of Federated Australia was becoming a fait accompli, each state in the Federation was making its own special laws, and in consequence, the women in each state must agitate and organise for political enfranchisement.
Whereas Victoria had had its own suffrage society since Henrietta Dugdale and Annie Lowe rallied the troops in 1884, New South Wales only had individual advocates. Women like the formidable Louisa Lawson, and the independently wealthy Miss Rose Scott, who had been a Sydney celebrity for a decade, famed for her intellectual ‘at homes’ where politicians, writers and artists would gather to discuss the fashionable topics of the day. But there was no suffrage organisation. That should be your work, George Grey told Dora Montefiore.
After the inaugural Womanhood Suffrage League meeting at Darlinghurst Road, Dora found new premises for meetings: the tea rooms of Quong Tart in George Street. Mr Quong Tart, reported an American newspaper on the issue of the Chinese in Australia, speaks good English, sings Scotch songs, has an English wife, and takes a prominent part in religious, moral, and philanthropic movements.8 Tart had made his fortune selling tea, and his rooms were renowned for their noisy and topical meetings. In the month of April 1891 alone, he opened them up to the Single Tax Conference, the Opium League (against the importation of opium to Australia), the Cyclists Union and the Sydney Horticultural Society. He was an accommodating host, fond of concluding these meeting with the words, this evening is devoted to harmony.9
As honorary secretary of the newly minted WSL, Dora was less inclined to accord. She was, from the start, dead set against accepting any form of fancy franchise.10 Just as George Grey believed in ‘pure democracy’, so Dora Montefiore rejected the watered-down version of women’s suffrage based on ownership of property. In New South Wales, men could vote regardless of whether they owned property. In the ideological and strategic battle between the so-called whole-loafers and the half-loafers, Dora set her democratic course towards full adult suffrage.
The latest female-led political lobby group was newsworthy. Papers around the nation reported the event, though often with a fair swag of derision. A Womanhood Suffrage League has been formed in Sydney, wrote the AUSTRALIAN STAR, to advance the cause of the fair agitators.11 An Adelaide paper included the news in a column of titbits from around the world:
German Emperor stirring up the French…
The Governor will attend the Birthday races…
Johnston, the Ballarat murderer, has been pronounced sane…
A Womanhood Suffrage League has been formed in New South Wales…
Portugal in a bad state—revolution and bankruptcy both threatening…
A Melbourne bookmaker charged with bigamy. The odds are 2 to 1 against him.12
Dora was not dissuaded from her purpose, despite the fact that the press was so ignorant, prejudiced and malicious that the general population thought we were a band of ill-behaved viragos with raucous voices and abominable manners.13
She continued to hold meetings with a core group of invited members, including Rose Scott and Louisa Lawson. Then, in early June, over 150 people gathered to debate the rules of the league and elect a committee. The first order of business: to send a circular to all parliamentary candidates in the upcoming elections asking whether they were in favour of woman suffrage.14 The era of practical politics had dawned.
At that first public meeting on 4 June 1891, ‘the cause’ was stated plainly: Women had been looked upon somewhat as chattels, men being so to speak their owners. Women had, however, proved their right to think and act for themselves.15 This was the idea that motivated such respectable middle-class women to march out of their comfortable drawing rooms and throw their bonnets into the political arena: women had long been enslaved; now they had earnt their right to liberty.
But it was more than that. Justice demanded their enfranchisement, whether ‘proved’ or not, and the opportunity for justice was at hand. If the Federation was to go ahead it would have to abide by its own stated principles, as outlined by the likes of George Grey.
The Commonwealth of Australia, to be ‘broad based upon the people’s will’, must listen to the real voice of the people, at least half of whom were women.
This became the first motion passed.
Many of the other sentiments voiced were staples of the suffrage movements in England and America. Women, contended a Mrs Pottie, deserved better than to be classed with convicted criminals, lunatics, idiots and infants. Louisa Lawson put forward a second motion: that the right to the ballot was needed by women because without it they had no power to protect and keep pure their chosen sphere of home. Women were hamstrung (argued Lawson, the mother of a famous drunkard) in their role as moral guardians. Against intemperance, gambling and impurity [men] hold us responsible and yet take away the only weapon with which to fight. Only the vote could arm women to purify politics and scrub society clean of its ills.
Mrs Wolstenholme, a deserted wife who had opened a school to pay her way, proposed a third motion, one that pertained directly to the reason Dora Montefiore had woken the sleeping giant of female umbrage in the first place: The special hardship to women of their legal helplessness in the matter of custody of their own children.
The inaugural public meeting concluded with a vote of thanks to the Hon. W. H. Suttor for chivalrously giving his assistance to their cause in acting as chair. The themes that would set the parameters of the women’s suffrage debate in the context of Federation were set: women in the new Commonwealth would not be treated like criminals or lunatics, but rather would be entitled to the same democratic rights as adult men, in order that they could properly carry out their maternal role as purifiers and protectors of the race. The vote was the means by which women’s citizenship duties could be discharged in the new nation. There could be no Commonwealth without the common cause of a universal federal franchise.
Dora Montefiore had no desire to antagonise men. She wanted to educate them, to bring them along on the journey she had herself unexpectedly found herself on. I am cordially in favour of …anything that brings men and women to work together and to understand and sympathise with each other, she explained. She believed this was the spirit of the age: pens take the place of swords, the platform and the parliament the battlefield. The reign of physical combat has given way to mental combat.
Women, aided by noble men, would reform Australia’s political life. I would have a federation in all things, Dora fantasised. Then, and only then, will you bring about a socialism of love and unselfishness. Dora had used the two years of her widowhood productively. She’d assessed her own position, and found it structural, not situational. She studied the causes and the potential remedies of her disadvantage. I have carefully stored up and written down every argument I have heard against woman’s suffrage, she now told her new allies at the league. I have spoken to, and listened to some of the leading men of this country on this subject. And she took the temperature of the times, assessing the hotspots, the potential allies and the fiery opponents: I recognise in this subject as Mr Barton does of Federation ‘that there are strong prejudices to overcome, old fallacies to be exposed, distrust dispelled, doubt scattered’. (Edmund Barton, Attorney-General of New South Wales, a staunch federalist and a delegate to the 1891 constitutional convention, was an outspoken enemy of women’s suffrage.)
Dora knew that the ideas—and perhaps the tactics—that were beginning to take shape in her were big, dangerous and open to ridicule. Will you call this the dream of the idealist?…Remember, the ideal of one age becomes the reality of the next.
But there was no question in Dora’s mind that one life had been left behind, a skin shed:
If every woman could live in a sheltered home, and be fondly loved and nobly protected, the world might never have heard of woman suffrage, though the right would have remained. But if our young girls must go out into the world and fight side by side with men where the struggle is thickest, for daily bread…if our widows and deserted wives must stand at the head of the family and keep off from the little ones the buffets of a world that is not always kindly…then it is more than right, it is expedient, nay, absolutely necessary that woman and the interests of women should be represented in our Legislative Chamber. The good of our children, the good of our country, the good of our sex demand it.
As years slipped by and one decade folded inexorably into the next, Mrs George Montefiore—no longer a girl but a forty-year-old widow, a mother, a newly minted feminist and increasingly a socialist—saw clearly that she dwelled on the threshold of history. She told the league members gathered around her that they were pioneers.
By-and-by, our daughters and our grand-daughters, who stand in the dawn of the twentieth-century—the women’s century—will say: ‘…they only tottered on the narrow path which has merged into the broad road on which we walk so freely’. But we hope they will say, if they remember the little band of women who stand here to-night, ‘They did what they could’.
And for the time being, Dora felt she had done all that she could in Sydney. In 1892, she packed up her Paddington home and sailed for France on a study tour, with nine-year-old Florence and five-year-old Gilbert in tow. Dora’s autobiography gives no indication of why she decided to leave Australia so soon after establishing the Womanhood Suffrage League.
Was she confident that, with Rose Scott now at its helm, the league would successfully reap what she had sowed in the fertile fields of Federation? Did she feel her newfound talents as an organiser and a speaker had outgrown the shores of her adopted home, as she hints? Our woman movement (not undertaken, let me remind my readers, to prove our equality with men, but to gain equality of opportunity with men) is an international one.16
Perhaps she remembered Sir George Grey’s conviction that reforms in the antipodes would lead the way. Whatever the impetus, Dora Montefiore would seek in the Old World the opportunities to capitalise on all she had gained, lost and learnt in the New.
She sailed with one lesson front of mind: And I would say to men—‘Trust the women of your country; they will not fail you.’17