Female suffrage was led by Australia’s ‘colonials’

British women fighting for the vote had powerful allies in the Australian women who helped lead their cause.

Margaret Fisher, front left, wife of then Australian PM Andrew Fisher, Emily McGowen, wife of the NSW premier, and Vida Goldstein at the great suffragette demonstration in London, 1911. Picture: Alamy

A foundation myth of Australia is what the grateful nation has given in return, especially to the mother country. If you believe the typical histories, this tribute consists of the finest Australian young men, to be sacrificed on the killing fields of the Boer War, Gallipoli and subsequent conflicts. Clare Wright’s new book, her first since the award-winning The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, concerns a different contribution altogether: suffragettes.

Such is only to be expected from a revisionist, feminist herstorian. What is unexpected, and sadly so, is how forgotten these women have been, on a par with the rebellious Eureka women. Wright begins her narrative with a central image, a suffrage banner, now displayed in Parliament House, not prominently. The artist was Dora Meeson, one of various antipodean women who worked for suffrage in Britain.

These women were usually looked down on at ‘‘Home’’, England, by virtue of being colonial. The irony was that they had gained the vote well ahead of their British counterparts. In New Zealand and South Australia, women could vote from the early 1890s, though a ­central character in this story, Vida Goldstein, had to wait until 1908 to vote in Victoria.

Even then Goldstein preceded her allies, the Pankhursts and their sisterhood. The centenary of women’s (limited) right to vote in the UK fell just this year. Wright notes that the 2015 film Suffragette omitted the antipodeans, ­although more controversial were the missing women of colour such as Princess Sophia Singh. Surely an Aussie accent or not totally white crowd scene could easily have been included.

It is a pity, for Australian suffragettes make great history. They were vivid characters, something well presented in Wright’s You Daughters of Freedom. Consider Muriel Matters, who hired a dirigible to scatter suffragette leaflets over London; or Dora Montefiore, besieged by the police in her Hammersmith home for refusing to pay tax without representation on the voting rolls. They could vote in Australia, no worries. Outside the country, they were anomalies. When Goldstein met Us president Teddy Roosevelt at the White House in 1902, he told her she had more political rights than any woman he had met before.

These rights had not been achieved without struggle, though no blood had been spilled. Wright has previously reflected on the beginnings of suffrage in Australia, in the ABC television ­documentary Utopia Girls. It represents a thrilling tale of persistence and astute activism.

Women might petition and agitate, but the actual lawmakers were males, who varied from sympathetic to obstructive or opportunistic. South Australian women gained the vote only when a conservative legislative amendment backfired badly. Extending this right throughout the new nation involved almighty political manoeuvres as the Constitution took form.

South Australian MP Frederick Holder is ­remembered as the first Speaker in the national parliament, but Wright reclaims his brilliant work for female suffrage. His colony might have been anomalous but he refused to disenfranchise its women for the sake of Federation.

Western Australia followed the lead in 1899, and after that universal female suffrage (except for women of colour) was only a matter of time. The same could not be said in Britain. In the seven Australian colonies women’s suffrage was achieved peacefully, if tortuously. In Britain it involved mass arrests, police brutality and ­actual torture via force-feeding. That it did so was a national disgrace.

The question is: Why? Britain was certainly a more conservative society but during the 19th century it achieved major reforms, from slavery to the Plimsoll line on ships. Moreover, it had Queen Victoria’s exemplary rule, though sadly the most powerful woman in the world did not approve of her gender’s enfranchisement. A key factor was a uniquely inimical government, ­despite a Liberal prime minister in HH Asquith. His opposition now seems to us like monomania. What was he so frightened of? Unlike in the US, he did not need to amend the constitution. The intransigence earned him the wrath of women.

One difficulty in this excellent account is the sheer complexity of its subject matter. It is as difficult as writing about the Russian revolutions of 1917. Australia had its separate organisations for reform, based on personalities and policies. The British were even worse, with their colours as varied as football teams.

The Pankhursts were not originally dominant, nor the green-white-violet tricolour. ­Furthermore, while a book requires a continuous narrative, in real life the activists took rests from a bruising and exhausting campaign. They would vanish from the historian’s view, revisit Australia, not always reappearing. Compressing the plot lines here into something easily ­followed by the modern reader is a major feat.

It is a small wonder that expatriate Australian women, losing their vote once stepping on to British shores, joined the cause. They had the experience of running effective political ­campaigns. By their example they were inspirational — some having already stood for ­parliament, if unsuccessfully — but were also leaders and innovators. As so many were involved, Wright has to narrow her focus, leaving out some fascinating examples. Otherwise this wise and weighty book would be gargantuan.

Wright’s small group ranges from pioneers to constitutional feminists such as Goldstein and radical protesters (Matters). Of course, not all Australian women in England joined the cause, some keeping well ­distant, or being actively anti-suffrage, such as writer Barbara Baynton. But those who did had a significant impact. Indeed, writer Laurence Housman symbolised “this great wide women’s movement, so startling in its progressive leaps and bounds” as a kangaroo.

These vivid characters were mostly middle-class women of means, though Meeson, as an artist, knew genteel poverty well. Some had been radicalised by privation or widowhood. Others such as Goldstein had been social activists from an early age. Suffrage was only one aspect of their progressive beliefs, even if in Britain it became the dominant interest.

Several had professions involving the public sphere: Matters was an actress, Sydney’s Nellie ­Martel an elocutionist. In previous decades, women speaking in public attracted disapproval; now it was vital. Martel in particular gave good quotes. If parliament was not a fit place for women, she declared, then “women should be sent there to purify it”.

The irrepressible Matters had learned all about PR as an aspiring actress in Australia. In England, she formed a support network for women abused in the theatre and toured the provinces advocating suffrage from a gypsy caravan. She had a sure grasp of spectacle, a gift for innovation and also courage. In Westminster, women could only observe parliament through a separate gallery; she chained herself to its grille. Her ensuing recitation was the first speech by a woman in the House of Commons. To remove her, the grille had to go too. Even in prison she was saucy to the matron.

Wright’s Eureka narrative reclaimed women’s stories. It was also not a triumphant progression, the truth behind achievements often being twisty, taking historical time to gain relevance. The Australians gave hope by the relative ease of their enfranchisement, if not ascent to parliament (the Finns being the innovators in this regard). In Britain the process was seriously delayed. Differences between various suffrage groups became apparent, and some took exception to the Pankhursts’ autocratic tendencies. ‘‘Naught can ye win but for faith and ­daring,’’ wrote Ethel Smyth in the suffrage anthem The March of the Women.

For all the faith and ­daring displayed, winning must have often seemed elusive. They tried everything. Bills were introduced into the imperial parliament, to be defeated or filibustered. Montefiore suggested women boycott the census, something widely followed, though not by Emily Wilding Davison, the martyr of Epsom, who hid in parliament so she could give it as her address.

Some 40,000 women marched in the 1911 coronation procession. It included Meeson’s banner, with its image of Britannia and Australia as Minerva, and the words: Trust the Women Mother As I Have Done. Britannia, whose power rested in male leaders, did nothing of the sort. The suffrage protests became militant and were ­viciously repressed. Wilding died under a horse’s hoofs. It was, as Goldstein commented, civil war. When World War I broke out, many expatriates returned to Australia. Sailing in the opposite direction went the troop ships.

The militant suffrage campaign was ­suspended, the prisoners released, and women threw their energies into war work. As Wright says, it was this factor that belatedly got ­Englishwomen over 30 the vote in 1918. And so the women’s battle was won, thanks to war.

The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka rewrote a pivotal Australian moment. As part of Wright’s progressive project, this book does the same for the history of suffrage, a mighty effort on a ­canvas as huge as Tom Robert’s Big Picture of Australia’s first parliament. It may be subject to quibbles, but is overwhelmingly to be commended. You Daughters of Freedom brings some forgotten women into the public discourse again, and we are all the richer for it.

Lucy Sussex is a writer and critic.

You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World

By Clare Wright

Text, 560pp, $49.99 (HB)