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Issue No. 140 | 14 June 2002 |
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Abbott's Rule of Law
Interview: Party Girl Unions: Touch One, Touch All Industrial: Condition Critical International: Innocence Lost History: Strange Bedfellows Organising: Just Say No Review: Choosing Life Beneath The Clouds Poetry: Did We Make a Big Mistake
The Soapbox The Dressing Room The Locker Room Week in Review Bosswatch
 Luke and LearnDue CreditTom's FooleryMore LathamMore Tom
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History Strange BedfellowsCompiled by Neale Towart
************** In some US states, such as Utah and Wyoming, the right already existed. According to Patricia Grimshaw, in "Suffrage and Beyond" edited by Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan (Auckland Uni. Press and Pluto Press, 1994), the passage of women's suffrage in Utah was not something that feminists could boast about. Utah was and is a Mormon Territory. Some saw the chance of women's suffrage as a way to get rid of polygamy. So, in apparent retaliation for campaigns on these issues, Mormon men voted for suffrage for women in 1870 to show the world that Mormon women were happy with polygamy! In Washington, male legislators removed the women's vote in 1887, this time to reduce the Mormon vote in Utah Territory, in the hope that non-Mormon citizens would vote out the offending provisions. The first successful mass women's campaigns were in South Australia (legislation passed in 1892) and New Zealand, where on 19 September 1893, adult women won the right to vote Susan Magarey, the leading historian of Australian women's suffrage has looked into the differing views of early feminist groups on the suffrage question. Here, in an extract from her "Passions of the First wave Feminists" (UNSW Press, 2001) she looks at the passage of the South Australian and Commonwealth legislation. Votes for women 1894 It is 17 December 1894, a Monday, close to the date of the summer solstice in the southern hemisphere. The House of Assembly in South Australia is debating the second reading of the Constitution Act Amendment Bill - legislation that could give votes to women. This is the eighth measure proposing female enfranchisement that the South Australian Parliament has considered. The debates on this day are the culmination of nine years of strenuous and concentrated campaigning. This Bill is the first that has not been encumbered with an array of proposals either to restrict women's access to the vote, or to use the question of whether or not to enfranchise women in a distinct - though related - campaign to increase or diminish democratic citizenship among men. Earlier provisions attached to female suffrage bills proposed that the suffrage be extended only to women who were single or widows, not to married women, whose rights were held to be subsumed in those of their husbands; that the vote be granted only to women over the age of 25; or only to those women who owned enough property that, had they been men, such ownership would have qualified them to vote in elections for the Legislative Council, for which the property qualification for voters remained until the 1970s. All of these cautions indicated both the radical nature of the legislative measure under consideration, and the widespread doubt that the majority of women - wives - would be capable of exercising the privilege that their husbands had had since 1857. The provisions about property qualifications were concerned not so much with women's reasoning capabilities as with conservative efforts to shore up the power of those who owned property against the threats of the new-born labour party and its allies in the small 'l' liberal ministry of Charles Cameron Kingston. A final provision, that the whole question be submitted to a referendum, defeated a similar Bill in the previous year. But this one, the 1894 Bill, at last, has none of these restrictions. And it has been introduced as a government measure. Outside the Parliament, an array of organisations gather - from the Woman Suffrage League to the Algermeiner Deutscher Verein; from the Trades and Labor Council to the Women's Christian Temperance Union; from the Single Tax League and the district Sociological Classes ('sociology' was often seen as both political and progressive at this time) to the Working Women's Trade Union; from the South Australian Fabian Society to the Society for the Study of Christian Sociology. All have been holding meetings, enrolling supporters, writing to the press, arranging deputations to members of the Government, all supporting votes for women. In August 1894, a stalwart supporter carried into the Parliament a 'monster' petition in favour of women's suffrage. It bears no fewer than 11,600 signatures. Like the petition that John Stuart Mill presented to the House of Commons in 1866, this one is a great roll, 400 feet in length, and the number of signatures it contains is only 2,500 fewer than those that the English suffragists had mustered from a vastly larger population. A counter-petition, presented by the 'liquor interest' - fearing that the WCTU's involvement meant that votes for women would bring in prohibition - managed only 2,000 signatures. On this date, 17 December 1894, women have deluged members of parliament with telegrams, and have crowded into the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Assembly to hear the final third-reading debate. Rose Birks, in her capacity as honorary secretary of the Woman Suffrage League, has arranged to bring with her for the afternoon that 'Grand Old Woman of South Australia', Catherine Spence, fresh off the boat after a year of lecturing and attending meetings across the United States of America, through Britain, and in Europe (all of which were the subject of reports that Spence sent to the Adelaide press). Miss Spence met such renowned suffrage campaigners as Susan B. Anthony in the United States and Millicent Garrett Fawcett in England. Parliamentarians take time out from their duties to come and greet her and she takes the opportunity to urge the women's suffrage cause. The debate proceeds. Later in the afternoon, the women leave the Parliament to hold a brief, tense, meeting of the Woman Suffrage League, and then proceed to the Cafe de Paris in Rundle Street, where they are having a party to welcome Catherine Spence home. Always perceptive, Miss Spence notes that Mary Lee is miffed that she, Spence, should be gaining so much attention at this moment, a moment for which Mary Lee has campaigned with all of her very considerable skills and energy, to say nothing of her impatience. Always diplomatic, Catherine Spence calms her down, involving her in the speechifying which, while it is ostensibly about welcoming Miss Spence back from her travels, is really about showing the extent and weight of support for the Bill under discussion little more than a block away. They drown out conversation at the table of a parliamentarian nearby. The party breaks up. The principal speech-makers - Mary Lee; Elizabeth Webb Nicholls, president of the Suffrage Division of the WCTU; Rose Birks - and a host of their friends troop back down King William Street to the Parliament, heels ringing on the pavement. The South Australian Chronicle reported: Ladies poured into the cushioned benches to the left of the Speaker, and relentlessly usurped the seats of the gentlemen who had been settled there before. They filled the aisles here, and overflowed into the gallery to the right, while some of the bolder spirits climbed the stairs and invaded the rougher forms behind the clock. The House is packed, more than it has ever been before. 'So,' reported the chivalrous Chronicle, 'there was a wall of beauty at the southern end of the building, and the standard of legislative eloquence was raised sympathetically.' Eloquent they might have been, but they are not winning this night. The Bill's opponents are trying to talk it out, the Government is waiting for the moment when it will have the numbers for the two-thirds majority necessary for a constitutional amendment. The hours pass. The eloquence grows tired. The women wait, still tense. It is past midnight - after the trams have stopped running - before it becomes clear that the vote will not be taken this night. The women and their supporters make their way home to restless and anxious nights. For, as one of those supporters wrote later, 'No-one, looking at the final figures, would have any conception of the intensity of the struggle, of the manifold difficulties overcome, nor of the fact that the issue was doubtful till within twelve hours of the final vote.' That is taken on the morning of 18 December 1894. 'The Ayes were sonorous and cheery,' reported the Adelaide Observer, 'the Noes despondent like muffled bells.' The count shows 31 in favour, and only 14 against. The House resounds to cheers. And to grudging jibes from the opposition benches: 'Not half of you will get back,' yells one; 'It's a regular hen convention,' sneers another, waving his arms towards the government benches. On the morning of this momentous decision, South Australia's principal daily appeared on the streets and breakfast tables announcing that female suffrage was, essentially, about sex, and sexual difference. We have always urged that the fundamental question is the sexual one. Regard women as a class, and there is no argument worthy of a moment's examination in favour of denying them the suffrage. Regard them as a sex, with an appropriate sphere of sexual activity into which voting and sitting in Parliament - the two things are complementary - cannot be intruded without injuriously deranging normal sexual relations, and the whole aspect of the question completely changes. But the vote taken a few hours later made it clear that for the majority of parliamentarians in the South Australian legislature, the feminists' campaigns had succeeded. Women were no longer to be regarded 'as a sex'. 'Normal sexual relations' would have to take their chances. Women were to have the vote; they were political subjects, just as men were. Indeed, under this legislation, they could sit in the parliament as well. This was an extension of their campaign that they had not asked for. The constitution of the Woman Suffrage League explicitly stated that 'no claim is put forward for the right to sit as representatives', though the WCTU Convention, meeting in Adelaide in 1893, considered such a provision 'unnecessary and offensive'. This right - which set South Australia at the forefront of the world for more than a decade - resulted from an attempt to wreck the Bill. In August 1894, opposition to the suffrage Bill had been growing desperate. One of its opponents was Ebenezer Ward, South Australia's 'silver tongue', a man who had been sued for divorce by his first wife in 1866, was to be taken to court by his second wife in 1895 for failing to support her and their nine children adequately, and would arrive in the Legislative Council to oppose the Married Women's Protection Bill in 1896 so drunk that he could not read the statement on the paper in front of him. During the debates on women's suffrage, on 16 August 1894, he moved that the second clause of the suffrage Bill - excluding women from sitting in parliament - be struck out. But this attempt to make the Bill unacceptable to the Lower House failed. The amendment was carried. This legislation also had an extension which the legislators did not shirk. Just as legislation in 1856, granting manhood suffrage and one man-one vote, had, at least in principle, included Aboriginal men, so too did the legislation of 1894 include Aboriginal women. In 1896, Point McLeay, an Aboriginal reserve near the mouth of the Murray River, had its own polling station with more than 100 people on the rolls, and 70 per cent of them voted in the election that year. In 1894 then, neither questions of race nor exaggerations of the demand made for equality of the sexes could distract the legislators and the women lobbying them. The legislation giving votes to women was about rendering justice to women, recognising them as human beings, not as lesser beings, as members of 'the sex'. Less than a decade later, it was a very different story. 1902 The second legislation to be considered here was debated in the elegant, if unfinished, Houses of Parliament in Melbourne, where the new Commonwealth Parliament met until it moved to the chilly hill-station on the banks of the Molonglo River that became Canberra in 1927. The Victorian Parliament had been banished to the Exhibition Buildings. In April 1902, the new Commonwealth parliamentarians debated the Commonwealth Franchise Bill - for the meetings of the Federal Convention which drew up the constitution for the new government had achieved only temporary agreement on the question of who would be entitled to vote for the members of its Parliament. There had been several differences between the franchise established for the parliament of each colony. There were differences over plural voting, which allowed a man who owned property in more than one electorate to cast a vote in each. There were differences over the proportion of members of the Upper House who were nominated by the local representative of the British crown and the proportion who were elected, and over the property qualifications of those who could vote for members of an Upper House. There were differences over the entitlement of Aboriginal Australians to the vote. After 1894, of course, there were also differences over votes for women. The clause concerned with the franchise submitted to the meeting of the Federal Convention in Adelaide in 1897 (No 29) had dealt with plural voting by providing that 'each elector shall have only one vote', but had then proposed simply that the suffrage for elections to the Federal Parliament should be the same in each state as the suffrage for the Lower House in each colony's Parliament - until the Federal Parliament ruled otherwise. South Australian members of the Convention had sought a revision to that clause that would enfranchise all women over the age of 21. When that was defeated (p.725), largely by objections that such a provision would force those states which had not enfranchised women to do so, Frederick Holder - a former Premier and member of the South Australian Kingston ministry which had brought in the successful women's suffrage Bill of 1894 - had moved swiftly to add another provision: that 'no elector now possessing the right to vote shall be deprived of that right' (p.725). That provision had finally been accepted (p.732), though only after William Arthur Trenwith MLA had quietly threatened that the women of South Australia might well vote against federation if there were any possibility that it would deprive them of 'the privilege for which they have struggled' (p.727). By 1902, the newest of the settler colonies, Western Australia, had also passed legislation giving votes to women, in 1899, although it had not provided for women to sit in parliament. Bills to enfranchise women had been passed by the Lower Houses of New South Wales, Tasmania and Victoria, although they had all been thrown out in the Upper Houses. But their success in the popular chambers, coupled with feminist campaigns - circularising candidates for the first elections to the Federal Parliament asking if they favoured a uniform franchise, and subsequent petitions for votes for women to the new legislature - had imparted a sense of inevitability to the direction of the debate. Many of the speakers protested, in well-worn terms, against the prospect of enfranchising women. But, as one Western Australian senator, Stanniforth Smith, observed: There is no doubt that womanhood suffrage is certain to become co-extensive with the civilised world. The only question is at what date it will come. Sydney Smith mentions a mythical dame of the name of Mrs Partington, who endeavoured with a broom to sweep back the Atlantic. I am very much afraid that there are a great many Dame Partingtons at the present day, each with a broom ... composed of prejudice and conservatism, [who] are endeavouring to sweep back the tide of democracy, and to prevent a simple act of justice like this being done. (c11,485) The Bill passed through both houses before the month was out (cc 11,369, 3 April 1902); 11,984 (24 April 1902). But it had been subjected to one extremely important change. The Bill introduced into the Senate would have enfranchised Aboriginal Australians, female and male, as well as non-Aboriginal women. Settler-Australian parliamentarians observed that their colonial legislatures had long since acknowledged the right of Aboriginal men to vote. They noted, too, that colonial precedents had given Aboriginal women the right to vote, and to sit in parliament as well, following the South Australian legislation, and the determination of the 1897 Federal Convention. But by 1902, following the federation of the colonies and territories into the new Commonwealth of Australia, there was a new consciousness of nation and a new rhetoric of nationalism. Amid this, a majority of the Commonwealth parliamentarians had developed strong objections to the racial dimensions of such extensions of democracy. It was the 'thin red thread of kinship' that, in the view of English-born federation-maker Henry Parkes, bound the settler colonists into a 'new' Australian nation. That kinship was defined by skin colour. Australian 'kin', wherever they came from, had to be 'white'. The franchise for the new nation could be made in-clusive in terms of sex precisely because Anglo-Celtic women could be defined as 'kin'. And that definition of 'kinship' simultaneously ex-cluded Aboriginal Australians, as well as any other possible non-kin members of the new nation. The Commonwealth Franchise Act that was passed in June 1902 - only months after the passage of legislation introducing the infamous 'White Australia' policy for immigration, the first Act passed by the new Australian Parliament - simultaneously enfranchised all 'white' women and men, and entitled both to sit in the Commonwealth Parliament, and disenfranchised all 'black' people, women and men alike. The exclusion of non-whites - of the racially or ethnically different - served, temporarily, to eradicate the differences of sex between Anglo-Celtic women and Anglo-Celtic men. Citizenship, as defined by the right to vote, could be sexually inclusive, because it had just been made racially and ethnically exclusive. The Other of the citizen of the new Australian nation was defined by skin colour, rather than by sex-specific reproductive capacities. The paradox was, though, that such inclusiveness carried within itself the seeds of its own demise, for being included in the new nation - accorded the rights of citzenship - harnessed the new white women citizens to a nationalist agenda in which it was their sex - their reproductive capacities - which would become their most important contribution to the nation. And this was one important factor which spelled the end of the goals around which the Woman Movement arose and crystallised.
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