You Daughters of Freedom, by Clare Wright: suffragettes up with Anzacs

Historian Clare Wright believes Australia’s suffragettes deserve equal billing with the Anzacs.

Historian-author Clare Wright has written about how Australian women won the right to vote. Picture: Stuart McEvoy

Clare Wright’s new book on Australian suffragettes, You Daughters of Freedom, would be handy to have stashed under the table at a pub trivia night. Which country was the first to ­enfranchise women? New Zealand, of course, depending on what you mean by enfranchisement. Who was the first Australian to meet an American president in the White House? I’m the first to admit I’d have got that one wrong.

This book follows Wright’s 2013 bestseller The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka, which won the Stella Prize for writing by Australian women and is being made into a television series. Hollywood producer and scriptwriter Anne Kenney, known for the time-travelling Outlande r series, has almost finished the pilot script.

I ask Wright if the brooding star of ­Outlander, Scottish actor Sam Heughan, will be manning the Eureka Stockade. “No, I regret,’’ she says with a sigh. “He’s a dead-set spunk!”

That’s amusing, but it goes to an important aspect of Wright’s work. Men matter in Australian history. But so do women, and we need to be more aware of that. The Eureka book is about the other halves, to use that outdated expression, the women there alongside the men.

“When you put the women in the Eureka story, you don’t just see the men as miners and soldiers in a cardboard cut-out sort of way,’’ Wright says. “Suddenly they are husbands and fathers and brothers and sons, and that helps you understand what they were fighting for.”

The new book details the remarkable period in the early 1900s when Australian feminist activi­sts won the right to vote and then took their campaign to Britain, which lagged behind the rule-rewriting “social laboratory”, as Aus­­tralia was dubbed at the time.

Wright’s first book, Behind the Ladies Lounge (2003), was about Australia’s female publicans. It’s tempting to say her work is about women in history and the neglect with which their contrib­ution has been treated. That’s partly right, but the author puts the emphasis elsewhere. “I don’t take a separatist model. I don’t see it as being a battlefront,’’ she says. “I write ­Australian history, Australian stories, with the women who were there included. They were part of the history-making.

“To characterise it [You Daughters of Freedom] as a book about women is to dismiss its ­significance. This is a book about Australian people, Australian ideas and our democracy.

“And I also think that when you write the women back into history, it makes the men in the story a lot more interesting.’’ Wright has been down this path before. The new book is a companion to the 2012 documentary she made with the ABC, Utopia Girls: How Women Won the Vote. “It took me a long time to convince the ABC. They kept saying: ‘Who will watch a ­documentary about women?’ I could have said, ‘Well, how about 50 per cent of the population?’, but I didn’t go down that line.

“I said it would be about remarkable Australians. I think that approach salves the anxiety that a show about women is going to be niche, uninteresting or a kick in the balls.”

That last thought takes us back to the turn of the century and the Australian emancipists. Opponents said a vote for women would ­destroy family life, as Wright records:

On and on it went, one hackneyed argument after another: most women didn’t want the vote; women would become “manly”; they would stop having children; they were too emotional, too uneducated; they would only vote as their husbands directed; they would only vote for the most handsome candidate; what would women want next?

Wright dryly notes that similar “the sky’s gonna fall; it’ll be the end of the family” arguments abounded during the debate over legalising same-sex marriage last year.

So, what would the women of 1900s Australia want next? How about sitting in parliament? That’s where the Commonwealth Franchise Act, passed in 1902, took Australia further than NZ, where women won the vote in 1893 but had to wait until 1919 to run for parliament.

You Daughters of Freedom, by Clare Wright.

As Wright makes clear, women with a ballot paper in hand changed Australian politics. State and federal law reforms started coming thick and fast, especially ones that protected women, children and, more generally, the working class.

“It was the right that led to other rights, the key that unlocked our society,’’ she says.

There’s a level of paradox in this. Australian women led the world in winning the vote, ­securing the right to run for political office and championing fair and decent laws. Yet this week, for example, we have heard about the significant shortfall in the superannuation benefits women receive compared with men.

“Yes, there has been so much change so quickly,’’ Wright says. “I remember seeing a ­picture on the front page of the paper, as I was working on this book, of Theresa May and ­Angela Merkel having a conversation with each other, as the leaders of two great nations.

“The women who were campaigning for the vote 100 years ago would not in their wildest dreams have believed that could’ve been possible, and within their granddaughters’ lifetimes. That idea would have blown their heads off.

“And yet here we are, in 2018, and female representation in parliament is low, and the way female politicians are treated, particularly leaders, is appalling.” This reaction, especially to Julia Gillard, struck Wright hard as she researche­d the book. “I thought if we did understand what our women have done in the past, the role they played in shaping the nation, then maybe we might give female politicians a bit more ­respect these days.

“Maybe if we had more statues in the streets of female reformers and campaigners; maybe if they had electorates named after them, streets around parliament named after them; then maybe we’d take women in positions of political leadership more seriously, maybe we wouldn’t see them as such a threat.”

Statues and street names? Sounds like what we do for war heroes. “Look, I am not naive enough to think the suffragette story is going to replace the Anzac legend,” Wright says. “But it could receive equal recognition … or at least some recognition!”

■ ■ ■

Wright’s own story is intriguing. She was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Her parents, both ­academics, grew up in Ohio. When her father landed a job at York ­University in Toronto, he and his wife shared a house with another ­academic couple, both Australians. In short, Wright’s mother fell in love with the Australian man, and when he ­returned home in 1974, she and five-year-old Clare followed. The ­couple married later that year. “It was the 70s!’’ Wright observes.

Wright’s father moved to Australia decades later. He married an Australian and now lives in rural Victoria. Her mother lives up the road from ­Melbourne-based Wright, who is associated with La Trobe University. “We are close,’’ she says. I wonder if it was her mother, who worked in Australia as a teacher and librarian, who passed on the love of books.

“No, actually, my love of reading came from my dad, who was a book lover and a book reviewer,’’ Wright says.

“But it is the precision of language that comes from my mum. There was not an essay that I wrote, at school or uni, where she didn’t show me where the semicolons should go. She’s a stickler for the rules.”

Wright’s husband, Damien, is a furniture designer who once played Australian rules football at the top level. They have two sons, aged 21 and 19, who take after dad. The author is well short of being a full forward. Their daughter, who also plays Aussie rules, is 13.

In her acknowledgments, Wright thanks her sons for their “burly hugs”, her daughter for the “late-night emoji kissy faces’’ and her husband for making her excuses at parties. “She’s in 1911,’’ was the usual one.

“Yeah, I can’t complain,’’ she says. “They’re a lovely mob.”

You Daughters of Freedom focuses on five women who were instrumental in the ­campaign for the vote: Vida Goldstein (she was the first Australian to meet an American president — it was Theodore Roosevelt — in the White House), Nellie Martel, Dora ­Montefiore, Muriel Matters and artist Dora Meeson Coates, who painted a suffrage ­banner carried in mass protests in Britain.

It’s sobering to be reminded that only 100 years ago women were sent to jail for ­marching in the streets and demanding the right to vote. “They were not wowsers, but warriors,” Wright says.

Dora Meeson Coates's banner at Parliament House in Canberra.

She admits that seeing that banner on display at Parliament House in Canberra was a turning point in her thinking.

“Did I really not know of this incredible ­object taking up valuable real estate in the big house of Australian democracy? Or had I just misplaced the memory?’’ she writes. “Either way, I was ashamed of myself. Bad feminist.”

Reading that made me feel less guilty about not knowing about Goldstein and Roosevelt. I did wonder why I didn’t know. Wright has some thoughts on that.

“When I go to talk to school groups, the first things I tell them are: ‘Just because you didn’t learn this in school, and just because it doesn’t have a Wikipedia entry, it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’

“The past is different from history. The past is a time concept and history is a human ­construct. Human beings write the stories, and that’s why I think this history, of what Australians were doing 100 years ago, is not only important right now but timely.”

The elephant in the room, however, is plain to see. Indigenous women were not included in the suffrage campaign. It would be another 50 years before indigenous Australians even achieved citizenship.

Wright does not ignore this in the book — “[It] takes a good deal of the gloss off patriotic gloating” — but she does not, in the absence of documented evidence, attempt to second-guess why the movement ignored indigenous people. In conversation, she says the women were women of their time. White Australia was right Australia.

She will address the issue in her next book, the third instalment in what is now a linked trilogy about Australian democracy and ­nation-building. The starting point will be the Yirrkala bark petitions from 1963, the first ­traditional documents to be recognised by the Australian parliament.

“The act that enfranchised women did not enfranchise indigenous people, and that’s what I want to write about next.”

You Daughters of Freedom: The Australians Who Won the Vote and Inspired the World, by Clare Wright, is released next week by Text Publishing. Wright will discuss the book at events next month. textpublishing.com.au/events

The Weekend Australian Magazine will feature an extract from the book next week.