The autumn of 1897 was to be a busy season for nineteen-year-old Miss Muriel Matters. The aspiring actress already had several bookings. There was a concert at the Fullerton Literary and Musical Society in May, where she would recite ‘The Ride of Jennie McNeil’, followed by, in humorous vein, ‘Shadows’. In June, she would perform at the Norwood Town Hall in the three-hander RUTH’S ROMANCE, a comedy in one act, with Muriel in the role of Ruth.
So far this autumn, the notices had been good. With her halo of blonde hair and pretty features, Muriel knew she stood out from a crowd. The BUNYIP had reported on this Wednesday’s performance of RUTH’S ROMANCE for the Gawler Benevolent Association, singling out Miss Matters as especially good.1 It was not quite A DOLL’S HOUSE, which was Muriel’s favourite play from which to recite (particularly the passages when Nora is told that a woman is expected to stay home to raise children and Ibsen has her say: ‘No, my first duty is to myself.’2) But RUTH’S ROMANCE, a smash on Broadway when it opened five years before, was not too shabby. And she did like the line I don’t wonder when a woman passes twenty, single life begins to pall on her. She wants a change.
Muriel Lilah Matters was born on 12 November 1877 in Bowden, South Australia, the third of ten children. Her father, John, was a wayward spirit holding out against the stockbroking career that had absorbed his older brothers and which would eventually tether him to respectability too. Muriel’s Welsh-born mother, Emma, worked hard to keep her large brood in school and out of doors, and Muriel helped her mother with the younger siblings. When she wasn’t playing little mother, she tried on more satisfying roles: singing, piano and poetry recitals at church gatherings and temperance meetings. Art, she realised, could be her magic weapon.3
This week, the attention of Muriel’s family must have been divided, despite the success of her Gawler performance, because the Federal Constitutional Convention was meeting in Adelaide. The convention had attracted the disapproval of the Gawler Wesleyan Society Sunday School teachers, who met to express their regret at the general desecration of the Sabbath by the members of the Federal Convention in choosing to sit on a Sunday.
Nonetheless, the Matters family Wesleyans were in favour of Federation. More importantly, they were in favour of the womanhood suffrage clauses that would be debated over this heady month of April 1897: Muriel’s brother Charles was a personal friend of Mrs Mary Lee and an active member of her Women’s Suffrage League.
Muriel could not remember a time when she was not interested in the woman question. So, while she worked hard to recall her lines and hit her marks on the small stages of Gawler, Fullerton and Norwood, she would have one eye on the action playing out on the big stage at Adelaide’s Parliament House.
The birth of the Commonwealth of Australia may appear in hindsight as an inevitability. At the time, it was anything but. The terms were fiercely contested over many years and negotiated through a series of constitutional conventions held in Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide from 1891 to 1897. Alfred Deakin would say later that Federation was secured by a series of miracles…any one of a thousand minor incidents might have deferred it for years or generations.4
Each colony had their own parliaments with their own constitutions: creating a nation would require diminishing some powers of the colonies, or expanding some of their laws to benefit all across the new Commonwealth. Federation wasn’t simply instrumental.5 It was an active, dynamic process. The thrashing out of powers, jurisdictions and processes—what the government could do, what the courts could do, what the people could do, who could be ‘the people’—was fraught.
Everything was up for grabs. And the suffragists were front and centre in the scrum, determined bridesmaids leaping for the political bouquet.
By 1897, there were organised and effective suffrage societies operating in all colonies bar Tasmania: the women’s suffrage movement reached critical mass right at the moment when a huge public platform was emerging, along with a mechanism for change. The convergence of feminism and Federation produced the perfect storm for democratic reform.
Annie Golding, secretary of the Newtown Branch of the New South Wales Womanhood Suffrage League, realised the potency of this unique moment in world history. Are women of the people? she asked. Are they not half the people, and are their claims not to be considered?6
Women who publicly voiced their ambitions were still pilloried in press and parliament, but it was no longer a novelty to see letters to the editor published under women’s own names instead of pseudonyms like Justicia, or their brothers’ names. Catherine Helen Spence noted that when she first took up the reform cudgels, women as platform speakers were unheard of. 7 Now women made eloquent speeches to packed houses. It was commonplace for women to send deputations to MPs, and to see women (Vida Goldstein was famous for it) sitting in the galleries of the legislatures, taking notes on how each member voted on each bill.
And in South Australia, at least, women would be able to vote in the Federal referendum—the one that would be held once the constitutional conventions nutted out the form of a draft constitution. Suffragists now began lobbying convention delegates to make sure, as Golding put it, their claims were considered.
The 1897 Convention differed from the 1891 version in one fundamental respect: delegates were elected, not appointed. This was to be the People’s Convention. While the 1891 delegates had all been politicians, any citizen could (theoretically) stand for election for a berth at the 1897 convention. Even women—thanks to the advances in South Australia.
Catherine Helen Spence reluctantly put up her hand. It was her brother’s idea, and at first she found it startling. No other woman in Australia—indeed in the whole empire—had ever stood for public office. In the end she agreed to go where no woman had gone before in order to advocate not for her sex, but for her pet cause: it was as the advocate of effective voting that I took my stand. Here was Spence’s ‘pure democracy’—one man, one vote, the principle that majorities must rule, but that minorities shall be adequately represented.
Having held back her nomination form until five minutes before the noon deadline so that no one could query her validity, she gained 7500 votes: twenty-second out of thirty-three candidates. One wag in the press lamented that Miss Spence was a good man lost.8 (She always maintained that she would have done better if Charles Kingston had not played some grubby politics to sow the seeds of doubt about her entitlement to stand.)
But the sex of a single delegate was not really the point. Vida Goldstein, analysing the situation from Victoria, articulated the crux of the matter: if Federation went ahead, South Australian women could help frame Commonwealth legislation while all other Australian women, herself included, watched helplessly from the sidelines of citizenship. This position was intolerable, she concluded, and the women made the most of it.
Around Australia, women mobilised. They petitioned candidates in the popular ballots—and after the ballots they petitioned the elected delegates—to ensure that when a constitution was eventually drafted for an Australian Federation, women’s suffrage would be included. Not content to be grasping bridesmaids, Australia’s female political activists demanded to be equal partners in the union.