It’s Sydney, as the saying goes, or the bush. But it was in Adelaide—sandstone City of Churches—that the face of democracy would be irrevocably remodelled. And all because of a tiny freedom fighter in widow’s weeds.
When a plump Protestant Irishwoman stepped off an immigrant ship at the Port of Adelaide in December 1879, there was nothing to suggest that she would rewrite the rules of the political world. Mary Lee, fifty-eight years old, recently widowed and a mother of seven, had sailed to Australia on domestic business: to care for her critically ill son, John. But he died soon after she arrived and Mary, unable to afford the passage home, was stuck in the colonial outpost on the Torrens River.
Within ten years she had become a star gladiator in the largest arena she could find: votes for women. The issue was, as Sir John Cockburn, South Australia’s premier from 1889–90, put it, the great question of the century, perhaps we may say it is the great question of all time.1
South Australia was founded, like Mary herself, as a model citizen. The only colony to refuse transportation from England, settled in a controlled, ordered fashion, it thought itself a paragon of virtue—an experiment in ‘systematic colonisation’—with a comparatively progressive character to rival Victoria’s. (Universal manhood suffrage was established in South Australia as early as 1856.)
There were, however, more women earning money from prostitution per capita than in any other Australian city, and thousands more providing cheap labour for Adelaide’s rapid industrialisation. Coincidence? South Australia’s feminists thought not: Mary Lee was in no doubt that only women’s suffrage would improve the social and economic position of women. Taking a different tack from Dora Montefiore, who urged education, Mary came down in favour of direct action, and began writing incendiary letters to the paper:
Could women have ever descended to such depths of misery and degradation if women had a voice in making the laws for women? Let us be up and doing. Let every woman who can influence an elector see that he seizes his vote as a sledgehammer…2
Over the next decade, Mary’s firecracker exuberance and relentless activity won her a reputation as a shrew. Poor Mary Lee!, wrote one gentleman to the ADELAIDE OBSERVER, how she does froth and foam and stew and scold.3 But more importantly, she was gaining a network of influential contacts within the Adelaide establishment, including the darling of South Australian letters herself, Catherine Helen Spence.
Spence called herself a professional journalist and reviewer… authoress, poetess, philanthropist, reformer;4 Vida Goldstein referred to her as the prominent social and political economist.5 She was a longtime agitator for social reform in education and prisons, and she is thought to have written the first book about women by an Australian woman: CLARA MORRISON, a goldrush tale published in 1854, the year of the Eureka Stockade. (The book was published anonymously in London.)
By the 1860s she had landed on the issue that would become her life’s work: electoral reform. In 1861, she printed a thousand copies of a pamphlet titled A PLEA FOR PURE DEMOCRACY, outlining her system for proportional representation. She admitted herself that the publication did not set the Torrens on fire.6 But her ideas about how to erode the preserve of the wealthy in parliament had powerful supporters. She corresponded with John Stuart Mill, who told her it gave him great pleasure to see that a new idea both of the theory and practice of politics had been taken up and expanded by a woman and one from that Australian colony.7 Mill and his colleague, Thomas Hare, thought Spence’s pamphlet the best argument from the popular side that had appeared.
Spence, for her part, found Mill—who favoured retaining some forms of property qualification—too cautious in his approach. I took this reform more boldly, Spence boasted: I was prepared to trust the people. She was certain that in our new colonies her innovations would be met with more favour than in the old countries bound by precedent and prejudiced by vested interests.
In this pioneering thinker and activist, Mary Lee had found a powerful ally.
Mary was a tireless letter writer and pulpit-thumping public speaker. Her blistering attacks on men and their follies were frequently published in the Adelaide newspapers.
Will not South Australian women join forces and storm this last miserable subterfuge? Will they not unite and insist with an emphasis which cannot be misunderstood or evaded that it is their right as citizens of a young state, which claims to be free, that its women shall be free?8
But she knew that writing to the press would not be enough. Nor would friends in high places (and she had many, including Julia Holder, wife of Liberal MP Frederick Holder, and Elizabeth Webb Nicholls, president of the South Australian Woman’s Christian Temperance Union). As the prosperity of the 1880s waned and workers everywhere began to fall on hard times, Mary cannily predicted that winning the vote for women would require the support of the labour movement.
And in South Australia, alone among the colonies, the female franchise was a live possibility. As South Australians liked to remind people, their political landscape was different from those of the other colonies. In South Australia, the conservative minority was not in the same position to delay electoral reform as it was elsewhere.9 In Victoria, for example, suffrage bill after suffrage bill had passed the lower house but been stymied by the landed elite in the upper house. South Australia had the most broad-based representation in its upper house, its constitution ensuring that squatters didn’t completely dominate. In fact, South Australia prided itself on this quiet little innovation.
So, Mary Lee deduced, she had a chance to actually get a suffrage bill passed—if she could get labour on side.
There had been a suffrage bill, introduced in 1886 by Dr Edward Stirling, that would have granted the vote to women with property. But South Australia had never had a property franchise, and the Trades and Labour Council smelled a rat. The bill was talked down by conservatives as well as by members with labour sympathies, like the liberal Charles Cameron Kingston, who mocked the suffragists and their supporters, asking whether their demands would one day extend to the absurd spectre of women sitting in parliament.10
Mary Lee’s strategy, then, was to emphasise the link betweeen women’s suffrage and the improvement of conditions for working women. In 1891, the same year that Dora Montefiore inaugurated the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales and Vida Goldstein trawled the slums of Melbourne getting signatures for the monster petition, Mary established a new organisation. We find that the Working Women’s Trades Union of South Australia, she wrote in a letter to the editor, with a courage born of desperation, resolved to lead the way.11
Mary’s method was a simple, if arduous, pincer movement. Bustling about in her voluminous black frocks, she visited countless sweatshops and factories, directly urging the exploited female workforce to join her union. At the same time, she was lobbying the male union leadership, arguing that having female voters would improve the electoral chances of the newly formed United Labor Party of South Australia.12 Mary Lee was like a ferocious little terrier, yapping at everybody’s heels. You just couldn’t shake her off. And by the end of 1891 she had done enough hectoring, door-knocking, cajoling, pamphleting, letter-writing and speech-making to achieve the seemingly impossible, gaining the ULPSA’s official endorsement of universal adult suffrage.
The decisive moment came after the general election of early 1894. The United Labor Party swept a record number of seats in an informal alliance with the liberal government that gave it the numbers to withstand the conservative opposition. Suddenly, South Australia had become the only colony in Australia with a non-conservative majority in its upper house.
The new premier, Charles Cameron Kingston, had undergone a personal volte face a year earlier, introducing a female franchise bill based on adult suffrage. It was characteristic of the wise to alter opinions, he said of his dramatic backflip.13 Wisdom? Or did Mary Lee’s associate, Julia Holder, change Kingston’s mind?14 Her husband Frederick had the ear of the premier, who—at a hulking six feet tall and, in Alfred Deakin’s opinion, a man of great ability, indomitable will and fearless courage…[that] verged upon unscrupulousness15—was a better man to have in your corner than not.
In July 1894, with the newly liberalised upper house in place, Kingston reintroduced his Adult Suffrage Bill, the legislation designed to enfranchise the women of South Australia. Either the proposal is right or it is wrong, noted the OBSERVER. If it is right Parliament, being representative of the people, ought to adopt it and bear the consequences; if it is wrong, they should reject it.16 The Women’s Suffrage League (of which Mary Lee had been a founder member six years earlier) presented a petition to parliament with 11,600 names declaring the proposal was right.
On 17 December 1894, a blistering summer day, the Adult Suffrage Bill was introduced for the third time by Sir John Cockburn, a member of Kingston’s ministry. The Ladies Gallery was jam-packed with women, including seventy-three-year-old Mary Lee. Catherine Helen Spence had arrived home from a speaking tour of America five days earlier to find the women’s suffrage movement wavering in the balance.17 Now she too was in the anxious crowd. Women filled the aisles, sat on the cushioned benches next to the speaker, sat on the stairs and even lifted their skirts to climb up behind the parliamentary clock. The House had never been so full, as the papers were quick to notice:
If so many scores of women can absent themselves from their family circles by day and night in the mere hope of seeing parliament grant to them their rights of citizenship, what stories of deserted hearths shall we not hear when women are transformed into active politicians?18
The debate went on long into the night. Kingston’s government needed a two-thirds majority to get the bill up, and it was fairly certain it had the numbers. But the conservatives were stonewalling. Delicate women should be considered as well as the screaming sisterhood, averred Mr Grainger. Women do not yet know how to vote and there will be more informal votes than ever before. Mr Griffiths preferred to play party politics, referring to the suffrage bill as payment to the ladies for the support they have given to the government, who have been bought cheap by the Labor Party.19 On and on it went, one hackneyed argument after another: most women didn’t want the vote; women would become ‘manly’; they would stop having children; they were too emotional, too uneducated; they would only vote as their husbands directed; they would only vote for the most handsome candidate; what would women want next?
Eventually the House was adjourned. Many of the women went straight to the Café de Paris, where a welcome-home soirée for Miss Spence was still in swing.
The next morning the House was again buzzing. The suffragists were not the only ones who had been up all night. Staring down the barrel of defeat, the conservatives now decided upon a breathtakingly risky course of action. They abandoned their opposition to the bill, adding instead a last-minute amendment to strike out clause 4, which read: until otherwise provided by the Act no woman shall be capable of being elected to Parliament as a member of either House thereof.
Clause 4 stipulated that women would be ineligible to run for parliamentary office: without it, the bill offered the broadest franchise anywhere in the world. No man in his right mind would vote for that—even a Labor man. Not even the women were asking to be allowed to run for election! Indeed, Mary Lee, in a deputation to Frederick Holder, had made it patently clear that women did not aspire to being lady candidates. The conservatives were sure this outlandish amendment would sink the bill.
The debate took up where it had left off in the wee hours of the morning. Mr Brooker strongly appealed to give the women their just right. For thousands of years women had been treated little better than serfs, he pleaded.20 Cultivated women don’t want the franchise, Mr Johnston countered. You are a striking instance of the necessity for woman’s suffrage, jibed Vaiben Louis Solomon. Oh, divide, divide!
Divide they finally did. At 11.35 a.m., the vote was taken. The count was thirty-one in favour and fourteen against. The bill was passed.
The Ayes were sonorous and cheery, reported the OBSERVER, the noes like muffled bells. The gallery erupted in loud cheering. There’s the hen convention, Mr Grainger moaned, loud enough for the press reporter to hear him.21
Sniping was all he had left, for the conservatives’ spoiling tactic had backfired in spectacular fashion. This extraordinary act of political miscalculation meant that South Australian women, including Indigenous women, now had full political equality, making them the most highly enfranchised women in the world.
The most highly enfranchised—but not, of course, the first.
That distinction belongs to the women of New Zealand, who had fought long and hard for their democratic rights. (Mrs Mary Muller, credited by contemporaries as the pioneer worker…in the epoch-making 50s22 was in this respect the New Zealand counterpart of Henrietta Dugdale.)
Kate Sheppard of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union worked with untiring energy and a clear and logical brain in her role as franchise superintendent for the colony to bring about electoral reform. The strong association between women’s suffrage and temperance did not go unnoticed by the New Zealand liquor trades, who said many unkind and unpleasant things [about] the Franchise Superintendent.23
In 1891, an electoral bill was introduced to parliament, including a clause that women should be eligible as members of the House of Representatives. This may be where the South Australian conservatives got their bright idea: in this instance it proved an exceedingly adroit move, as W. Sidney Smith wrote in 1902, giving the Antis (as opponents of suffrage were known) more ammunition. Kate Sheppard unsuccessfully wrote to oppose the amendment. The bill was defeated, just as its architects had intended.
In 1892, a coalition called the Franchise Leagues of New Zealand circulated a monster petition, as the Victorian women had done so dramatically a year earlier. Women trudged the length and breadth of the islands collecting signatures. Lady Anna Stout—young and petite despite her Dickensian name—headed the Dunedin Women’s Franchise League. Lady Stout later praised the efforts of the minority who were brave enough to face the ridicule, opprobrium and martyrdom of pioneers.24
One of the signatories to the petition was a young Australian-born artist named Dora Meeson, who was honing the skills that would one day see her paint an illustrious suffrage banner.
Like Vida Goldstein, Dora was born in Victoria in 1869. She was one of three daughters of John Meeson, a peripatetic schoolmaster, and his wife Amelia. In 1876, the Meeson family sailed for England, but by 1880 had relocated again, this time to Dunedin. A serious girl with a long face and sad eyes, Dora Meeson spent her adolescence in New Zealand developing her love and talent for art. In 1890, she went to London to study at the Slade School, which had recently begun enrolling female students.
By 1893, she was back in New Zealand, studying at the Christchurch School of Art. It was here in Christchurch that Dora and her sister, Amy, signed the suffrage petition attesting to the proposition that large numbers of Women in the Colony have for several years petitioned Parliament to extend the franchise to them.25 The Meeson girls’ names were among over thirty thousand signatures that were added to the latest petition, almost a quarter of all those eligible: that is, adult white women. It was, as one MP noted, the most numerously signed petition ever presented to any Parliament in Australasia.26
A new electoral bill was extended to women, this time without the eligibility clause—and also without a property qualification—but with the support of the government. The bill passed by two votes and the Antis conceded they had been beaten in a fair fight.
No country need fear this privilege being given to the adult population, premier Richard ‘King Dick’ Seddon assured the rest of the world in 1893, as New Zealand ventured further down the road of progressive legislative reform than any other self-governing democracy had yet dared.27 Kate Sheppard correctly predicted that New Zealand’s first election with female voters would attract the attention of the civilized world.28
It was New Zealand statesman William Pember Reeves who later proposed the ‘one fine morning theory’ of New Zealand suffrage: that women themselves didn’t want the vote, nor did any New Zealand female orator or leader of women stand in the forefront and agitate for reform; rather one fine morning of September 1893, a hundred thousand women woke to find themselves enfranchised.29 He would also claim, in his influential book STATE EXPERIMENTS IN AUSTRALIA AND NEW ZEALAND, that the part played by women in gaining the South Australian franchise was useful but strictly subordinate.30
Women on both sides of the ditch vigorously contested the claim that suffrage was a ‘gift’ bestowed by progressive men on indifferent women. Elizabeth Nicholls was among those who testified to women’s efforts to win their rights:
How they lobbied the members, how they interviewed some and argued with others and stimulated a third; how they deluged the press with letters; how they attended the House in throngs at all hours of the night to see fair play; how they used every means in their power to secure their end.31
It was with pride and satisfaction that at last they triumphed.