franchise

Delegates to the Australian Womens Conference in Brisbane 1909 suffragette movement in Queensland

from State Library of Queensland

• Vesna Verencevic said:

  "It's not by strategy or stealth [that Australian women won suffrage.] It's actually by accident.” Clare Wright, historian, La Trobe University, Australia To start from the beginning: In the late 1800s, women around the world were organizing for voting rights. The first breakthrough came in the British colony of New Zealand. Women there won the vote through a combination of petition drives and male allies in leadership. Their success inspired one of the neighboring colonies in Australia to also introduce a suffrage bill. A conservative lawmaker tried to squash it by expanding it to give women the right to hold office. “He thinks that this is what will sink the bill, because nobody is asking for that,” Wright said. But he was wrong — the plan failed. In 1894, the bill passed, giving women an opening to fight for much more. The colonies were in the process of coming together to create Australia, and South Australia’s representatives insisted they would join the new country only if women kept their voting rights. “So, effectively, women's suffrage is made the precondition to a federated Australia, to this whole process of nation building,” Wright said. Source: theworld.org/stories/2019-12-17/remembering-australia-s-r...