These wowser women aren’t obvious feminist heroes. But their rallying cry rings through the ages

Wowser. Kill-joy. Helen Lovejoy from The Simpsons. No one likes a scold – especially when they’re half-right. On this day 130 years ago – December 18, 1894 – South Australia granted women the right to vote and stand for public office – the first place in the world to grant both political rights.

The scolds in question – otherwise known as the anti-alcohol Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) – played a key role in the campaign for voting rights, gathering as many as two thirds of the 11,600 signatures for the women’s suffrage petition presented to the South Australian parliament in August 1894.

Mary Lee (1821–1909) was a key figure in the women’s suffrage movement at the end of the 19th century, one of the first initiatives advancing gender equality.Credit: State Library of South Australia

Wowser women wanting the vote to step up their crusade against the demon drink aren’t obvious feminist heroes. But we might increasingly feel a weird kinship with them, especially given our current crisis of male violence, in which 76 women have been killed (so far) by a current or former partner, according to Counting Dead Women Australia. In other words, 2024 just might be the year that made wowsers of us all.

John Norton, an influential newspaper editor of the 1890s, apparently coined the “wowser” label to describe “pernickety” types who “interfere[d] with the pleasures and enjoyments of others”. As teetotallers campaigning for total prohibition, temperance activists of the WCTU fit the bill. Their reputation lingers on as uptight matrons big on public morals – who also inadvertently encouraged binge-drinking – the famed six o’clock swill – after they managed to enforce earlier closing times for pubs in 1916.

We shouldn’t totally write them off, though: they were light years ahead in spotting a link between alcohol abuse and family violence. As early as 1876, Frances Willard, who led the WCTU in America, said alcohol put women and children at risk of: “…a stimulant which nerves, with dangerous strength, arms already so much stronger than their own, and so maddens the brain God meant to guide those arms, that they strike down the wives men love, and the little children for whom, when sober, they would die”.

Today, only a Helen Lovejoy-type would attempt Willard’s rallying cry to limit alcohol for the sake of “home protection”. But the welfare of women and children was the guiding light for temperance activists, which helped nudge often conservative Christian housewives to agitate for access to the ballot box. They were also convinced that women’s moral superiority gave them an overlapping civic and moral duty to, in Willard’s words, protect “their homes from the devastation caused by the legalised traffic in strong drink”.

This made temperance activists “God’s police”, in Anne Summers’ unforgettable phrase. That’s fair: the wowser is strong in Willard. Yet, she and the women of the WCTU were onto something.

Earlier this year, DV survivor Kym Valentine called out the role of alcohol in family violence and called for changes to liquor licensing laws. Investigative journalist Jess Hill and criminologist Michael Salter also point to research that regardless of wealth or class, there’s a causal relationship between the prevalence of domestic violence and the number of bottle shops in your neighbourhood.

Other factors also exacerbate family violence. Apparently, rates of domestic violence soar by 40.7 per cent on State of Origin game nights. Also, my colleague Tim Costello, who is also Chief Advocate for the Alliance for Gambling Reform, says domestic violence is three times more likely to occur in families where the men are problem gamblers.

It’s not that I want to tar anyone drawing these links with the wowser brush. But calling out the connections between otherwise apparently isolated phenomena channels a temperance-adjacent spirit. One that, weirdly, evokes the broad program of moral reform pursued by temperance activists, who saw the spillover effects of alcohol abuse and campaigned for everything they thought would improve the lives of women and children. This included better working conditions, a children’s court, fairer divorce laws, a ban on selling tobacco and alcohol to minors, equal pay for equal work, and access to kindergartens.

They also insisted on raising the age of consent from – get this – 12 years old, even though “people laughed at them and thought they were absolutely ridiculous,” Dr Nicole Starling, historian of 19th century Australian religious and political history, told me. Parliamentarians, she said, found it a “ludicrous” idea. Raise the age of consent from 12? What prudes!

In which case, anyone now calling for greater regulation, say, of consent norms, or age verification for social media platforms, or for tech companies to implement a “safety by design” approach to protect vulnerable users, is downstream from the temperance spirit.

Evidently, the anti-alcohol platform of the original temperance activists wound up branching out into multiple areas, making them women out of sync with history: forward-thinking for their era, even if their other ideas – like their belief that women were the society’s moral gatekeepers – makes them embarrassingly outdated by ours.

What to make of the wowsers in whose footsteps we seem to be treading? They blur, perhaps surprisingly to us, the lines between being progressive and prudish, and all because they had the temerity to insist that the world be made a safer place for everyone. The pearl-clutching Helen Lovejoys of the world make us cringe, but their rallying cry rings through the ages: won’t somebody please think of the children?

Justine Toh is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity.

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