P. 50 “When a plump Protestant Irishwoman stepped of 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, 58 years old, recently widowed and 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 struck… within 10 years she had become a star gladiator in the largest arena she could find: votes for women… [Adelaide] more women earning money from prostituion per capita than in any other Australian city, and thousands more providing cheap labour for Adeliade;s rapid industrialisation… Mary Lee was in no doubt that only women’s suffrage would improve the social and economic position of women.”
P. 62 By 1897. There were organised and effective suffrage societies operating in all colonies bar Tasmania .. the convergence of feminism and Federation produce the perfect storm for democratic reform.. In South Australia, at least, women would be able to vote in the Federal referendum”
P. 110
Vida Goldstein after her visit to the US “vowed to help our English sisters and American cousins in their struggle for freedom… Our chief care will be to use our right of suffrage that the men of other nations will soon want to follow the example of Australian champions of women’s enfranchisement. … You want, and must have, the support of the rank and file of working people.. That is how we got it in Australia.”
P. 136 1903 first federal election “Press, public and parliament alike had to admit that the experiment had been a success. Female electors had come out in great numbers. There had been no discord at polling booths and no more than usual in homes. Women had voted in about the same numbers (proportionately) as men, which was not as exhilarating as it sounds, Vida Goldstein had to admit, given there had been a small voter turnout: 1.7 million voters had registered on the rolls, and only 900,000 went to the polls… female electors had not been moved by some great impulse to cast their ballots in a block and hence sweep the polls. Women had largely voted along class lines, not gender lines. It was widely acknowledged that the women’s vote had increased the Labour vote… women who earned their own living and women in country areas were far more likely to actually vote compared to the city toffs… their presence as electors had changed political culture irrevocably.. Alfred DEakin .. added ‘women’ to his standard salutation ‘Men of Australia’. Others observed that not only was the language of citizenship more superficially inclusive, but some politicians had also needed to quickly change their policy stripes… Ida Husted Harper, reporting for the Washington POst, noted that what Australia had just witnessed was the most important event in the history of the world movement towards woman’s suffrage.
AT the NZ general election of 1908, David McLaren’s Independent Labour League won 3% of seats. Canada didn’t even have a federal Labour party until 1917. When it came to Labour’s electoral strength, Australia was in a league of its own….
P. 308
13 April 1910 .. Labor won 49.97% of the primary vote, a stunning increase on the 18% it mustered in 1901 and 36% in 1906… the first time that an openly socialist government had been elected to govern in its own right anywhere in the world. It had campaigned on three discrete virtues: moderation, respectability and competence. … an Englishman, who had recently returned from Australia and watched the elections … reported that voting in the southern colonies was a pleasant family affair … Women’s part in politics is taken as quite natural, the man wrote… They do not neglect their husbands’ meals, nor are they in any way unwomanly in appearance.”
.. Vida received 54,00 votes, an impressive 25% share, but it was not enough.”
P. 322 “Muriel found that her Australian audiences were as enchanted by her account of her time in gaol as any British reading public would be – and she milked it. After recalling the night of her arrest for obstruction, she would step offstage, only to reappear dressed in full prison garb ,,, described in fine detail the tiny, foul-smelling cell it its wooden shelf and sleeping may, its small ventilator clogged with dust… concluded her hairiraising description of her incarceration with the revelation that she had come out of gaol a wiser woman. She kept her eyes and ears open, vigilant for danger but also revitalized for social reform. If Muriel Matters was ever lukewarm in her commitment to helping British women win the vote, prison had set her on fire.””
P. 325 “For Muriel the impeccably well-connected and respected Vida was the key that would unlock the halls of power. She would not have to chain herself to any railings to get a hearing in the big house. After all the picketing and deputations and rallies and rushing and interrupting required to get close to a politician in England, the openness and proximity of Australia’s MPs was a revelation to Muriel. The ease with which the Australian woman can approach the politician and have their wants attend to, she reflected, is conclusive proof of the power of the woman voter. … Muriel: small and fair, 33, cabinet-maker’s daughter, raised in the bush and public schooled, an aspiring actress turned political street fighter. Vida had used nothing but constitutional means to push forward the case for women’s political equality. Muriel had gone to extraordinary lengths to break rules. … Both were described by the press as having the saving grace of humour and a brain of masculine strength. They got along like two peas in a politically charged pod.”
P. 366 by the end of her tour of the United States in October 1910, Dora had seen enough of the faux-philanthopy of American millionaires – with their lavish bequests to institutions to keep present competitive conditions where they are – and prevent the workers demanding radical upheavals – to be convinced that it was capitalism that must be fought (in tandem with sexism) if the world’s social problems were ever to be solved.”
P. 378 “Now Vida knew why Muriel had put herself at great personal risk to stage her most famous militant protest. To Vida, standing behind that iron trellis in the Ladies Gallery, the grille represented the smallness of the English mind, a symbol of British contempt for Woman, the mother of the race… She’d been bred a democrat, and a feminist one at that. The grille was quite simply galling.”
P. 396 April 2, 1911 Census Day
“In Sheffield, Adela Pankhurst and Helen Archdale hosted a mass evasion in Helen’s home at 45 Marlborough road. A total of 57 people sheltered in the eight-room house on 2 April, including one male and 48 female visitors.”
P. 406 “White women were safe in their political rights while in Australasia, but when they left the sanctuary of the antipodes, they were again vulnerable to a precipitous loss of status. Once in England, Australian women were no longer voters – as Nellie Martel, Muriel Matters and Dora Montefiore had been pointing out at every opportunity for the last five years. But their was a further dilemma. In Australia, laws had been passed to safeguard the British subject status of Australia’s married women. Customarily, a woman assumed the nationality of her husband upon marriage, just as her name, children and property became his. In 1903, urged on by campaigns run by the Women’s Political Association and other female-led lobby groups, the Naturalisation Act 1903 created equal nationality laws for men and women… But should an Austalian woman marry a non-British national… and live with im in England, under the British Naturalisation Act she acquired his legal identity and automatically lost her right to British subject status. It was like being transported back to the days of the femme covert”
P. 408 “The Australian and New Zealand Women Voters’ Committee… the first time that Australia and New Zealand joined forces in an acronym representing Australiasian kinship. Two sister dominions joined by the political pre-eminence of their female citizens. They would be the ANZWVC… Sir John Cockburn’s wife, Lady Sarah Cockburn, was the founding president. She and her husband had been active suffrage campaigners since moving to London from Adelaide in 1898, when John became agent-general of South Australia. Lady Anna Stout came forward as the heavyweight from New Zealand… the founding objective of the committee was formulated and affirmed: “To watch over the interests of Australian and New Zealand women under Imperial legislation, and to promote their welfare generally from this side of the world. To help forward the Women’s Movement in every part of the British Empire.”
June 17, 1911 “the Greatest Procession Known in History” – the Women’s Coronation Procession
P. 448 “the fact that Andrew fisher’s wife was marching at the head of a continent of Australian women – behind the official Coat of Arms of Australia, in a WSPU-sponored rally – was an incontrovertible no=confidence motion in the British government.”
P. 458 “To Bermondsey, a densely populated working-class borough two miles from the City where, in August, the factories emptied s 15,000 female workers went on strike. The Bermondsey Women’s Uprising, as it became known worldwide, was attributed to the combination of the usual appalling pay and conditions and the effects of the long, hot summer. Spoiled food, rising infant mortality, a general air or irritability and fed-upness. And a mood of female defiance. These women – who weren’t unioned – took to the streets, marching together with banners and a sense of industrial solidarity”… the streets were now their streets. They expected more and better. Prominent among the organisers who came in to lend moral and organisational support was Muriel Matters.”
P. 466 “Andrew Fisher is remembered now for saying that Australia would follow Britain into war until the last man and the last shilling. Who recalls that he also told a captive London audience that a true democracy can only be maintained honestly and fairly by including women as well as men in the electorate of the country?
Or that two weeks later his wife would march..
“Seen in this context, Gallipoli, with its militarist narrative of youthful sacrifice, not youthful optimism – was not the birth of the nation. It was the death of the nation we were well on the way to becoming.”
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