This is an evidence-based non-fiction account of how Australia became the first nation in the world to give white women full political equality, and what certain women chose to do with those basic rights and historic privileges.
While I have engaged with the scholarship on gender, race, citizenship, colonialism, imperialism, internationalism and transnationalism to frame my questions going into the archive, and to make sense of what I have found there, what follows is a narrative account predominantly based on primary sources. Three points of clarification are necessary.
First: the issue of precedence. From the passage of the Commonwealth Franchise Act in 1902, white women in Australia enjoyed full and universal adult suffrage: that is, there was nothing in legislation to distinguish them from male voters. No property qualification; the same age and residency requirements. Australian women were eligible to sit in parliament as well as vote. No other women in the world were so entitled until Finland followed suit in 1906. New Zealand women won the vote in 1893, but could not sit in parliament until 1919. Nor was New Zealand a nation, as Australia became in 1901—it remained a colony or dominion of Britain until 1947. Women in Wyoming could vote from 1869 and in Utah from 1870 but their enfranchisement was viewed as politically marginal and attracted little global attention.
Second: only white women in Australia were accorded the privilege of the vote. The racial qualifier takes a good deal of the gloss off patriotic gloating. The story told in this book should not be read as a celebratory nationalist narrative, nor be seen to imply a tacit assumption of white women’s moral or spiritual superiority.
Finally, the terms suffragist and suffragette are not interchangeable. Suffragists are people who advocate for votes for women. Men can be suffragists, and they were. The term is a generic description of a political position, akin to the terms socialist, capitalist or environmentalist. Suffragettes, by contrast, were a specific group of (mostly) women defined by their membership of certain suffrage organisations at a certain time in British history.