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In 19th century Queensland, the age of consent was twelve. Upon marriage, women lost what little autonomy they had. They were often forced to resign, and the law prevented them from owning property or investments, obtaining divorces easily, or retaining custody of their children. There were no laws against marital rape or domestic violence. Women’s healthcare was ignored; no maternity wards or women’s hospitals yet existed. Abortion and prostitution were illegal, and contraception was inaccessible for most. Many women believed the vote would at last give them a voice to create change. Women worldwide took to the streets en masse for the first time in history.
When you think of women’s suffrage, images of violent protests, prison sentences and hunger strikes may come to mind. Britain’s suffragettes dominate our collective memory of the suffrage movement. So how do Australian women fit into this narrative? Here, suffragists dominated the campaign. Unlike Britain’s suffragettes, suffragists used non-violent methods but remained tenacious.
Australian women secured the right to vote and stand for federal election on the same basis as men in 1902, twenty-five years before Britain. However, as one of the first acts of the newly established Australian Parliament, women’s suffrage is often lumped in with federation, effectively ignoring years of struggle and each state’s individual movement. Despite the country’s early win, the path to equality was far from straightforward.
This is especially true in Queensland. Queensland explicitly excluded men of colour from voting in 1872. And even after the federal decision, no Queensland women could vote on a state or local level. As the author Pam Young explains in Proud to Be a Rebel: The Life and Times of Emma Miller, “Australians are not very familiar with the Australian suffrage movement, but research shows that in Queensland the vote had to be fought for tenaciously against great opposition.” This opposition is clear when we look at parliamentary debates from the 1890s.
MP George Thorn believed that only ugly women wanted the vote. He said, “The only women in favour of the extension of the franchise to women are…the ugly women and the plain women… if there is a good-looking young man, he will get their votes irrespective of his politics.”
The premier at the time, Boyd Morehead, also dismissed women’s suffrage. “[Women] have higher functions to perform than political ones, and to those functions their attention should be confined.”
MP Patrick Perkins believed: “Women will be unsexed by coming in contact with people at election times. Why, what more privileges can they want than they have at the present time?”
These were the people elected when most of the population had no say. When Queensland split from New South Wales in 1859, the Queensland colony decided that only men with property could vote. The colony also had plural voting in effect. The plural vote enabled men to cast a vote in every electorate in which they owned property. They also excluded men of colour from voting. Wealthy men had a monopoly on Parliament, and most of them wanted to keep it that way. It was in this context that women began their campaign.
The first women’s suffrage organisation in Queensland was founded in 1889. The Queensland Women’s Suffrage League supported wider women’s rights campaigns and was instrumental in passing the Married Women’s Property Act 1890, which allowed women to retain ownership of their property and investments after marriage. However, the plural vote led to fracturing within the group.
Some thought women should get the vote on the same basis as men, that is, if they had property, while others campaigned for universal suffrage. Most of the organisation’s leaders resigned in 1891 over this division.
The Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) opened a suffrage department in 1890. The WCTU was an international entity with branches across Australia. They identified as a non-political organisation, taking up many causes, including campaigning against alcohol abuse, domestic and sexual violence, and working towards raising the age of consent. Elizabeth Brentnall was president of the suffrage branch despite her husband being outspokenly anti-suffrage. Eleanor Trundle and Agnes Williams were also key figures in the WCTU.
During the 1890s, journalists and writers took up the topic of women’s franchise. Annie Lane wrote a column in The Boomerang and The Worker, two papers her husband, William, founded. Under an alias assumed to be William, we see Annie’s interest in unionism, the working class, motherhood, and women’s suffrage. As ‘Lucinda Sharpe’, she put motherhood on a pedestal, often working that into her arguments on women’s morality and strength. On the topic of the plural vote she said: “When I hear men getting indignant, I always feel inclined to ask them how they like being treated as women.”
Some politicians became allies of the suffragist cause. In July 1890, Richard Hyne introduced an electoral reform bill: “I claim a right to extend the franchise to women on the following grounds – first, on the ground of equality; second, on the ground that they are subjected to all kinds of taxation, and have no representation; third, on the ground that they are subjected to all the laws, especially those affecting themselves.”
Premier Morehead shut down the bill, declaring the topic a ‘waste of time’ and saying that ‘no women actually want it’. He cited the empty public gallery and the fact no petition had been brought to Parliament as proof of this. The ever-growing suffragists were ready to prove him wrong.
In 1894, the Women’s Equal Franchise Association (WEFA) was founded. Emma Miller became president. A seamstress by trade, she tried to involve working-class women in the movement. WEFA was the most like the UK’s suffragettes but never used violence, although Miller did rather famously throw the Queensland police commissioner off his horse during a general strike in 1912. In terms of her suffrage days, she described WEFA as: “a crew armed to the teeth and ready for every emergency.” They aligned themselves with the Labor Party and opposed the plural vote.
However, the Labor Party saw destroying the plural vote as more important than women’s suffrage. Annie Lane’s husband, William, wrote in The Worker that, “The most ardent advocates of women’s suffrage must be content to hasten slowly… we have first…to abolish plural voting to make manhood suffrage complete.”
Even WEFA’s allies were putting women on the back burner. WEFA’s vice president, Leontine Cooper, soon resigned. In a letter published in the March 7, 1894 edition of The Telegraph she wrote that her focus was getting women the vote in whatever capacity possible: “I think it is unwise to clog the movement with such a huge political revolution which the ‘one woman, one vote’ subtends. I consider the latter the Labor Party’s battle, and I think they are quite strong enough to fight it without clinging to our petticoats for help.”
Cooper then formed a new organisation, the Women’s Franchise League (WFL). Unlike WEFA, they fought to obtain the vote on the same basis as men. WFL targeted working, professional women. For instance, Queensland’s first female doctor, Lillian Cooper, joined the League.
Leontine Cooper also worked as a journalist, writing for The Boomerang and The Worker and founding Queensland’s first suffrage newspaper, The Star. No records of this paper survive. However, Pamela Young calls Cooper the “ablest writer” who was at the “forefront of emerging feminist theory.” Cooper’s journalistic work was important in spreading suffragist messages and ideologies. Even though the media often depicted suffragists in a negative light, newspapers were key in cementing women’s suffrage in the public consciousness.
After they formed, WEFA started working on a petition demanding women’s suffrage. Doorknockers headed out to Brisbane’s suburbs, and people sent in their signatures via coupons from The Worker. 7,781 women and 3,575 men signed the petitions. These petitions were delivered to Parliament on the 6th of September 1894 at the reading of the Electoral Reform Bill. Journalists from The Daily Northern Argus and The Telegraph detail the day, describing the petition tied up in blue ribbon. Dozens of suffragists sat in the public gallery, watching the debate.
Despite being described as a ‘monster petition’, the member for Mackay, David Dalrymple’s major objection was once again, that no women actually wanted the vote. Understandably incensed by the speaker ignoring the evidence so meticulously collected right before him, the suffragist onlookers were angry.
Journalists present delighted in describing the women’s reactions. The Telegraph reported on September 7, 1894 that, “About 40 of the equal suffragist women occupied the ladies’ gallery. Dalrymple’s speech operated like bitter medicine on some of them. One young lady looked as though she would like to get at him; and it was evident that only the forms of the House prevented her from doing so. It was amusing beyond description.”
The suffragists were not amused.
The WCTU conducted its own petition in 1897, collecting around 4,000 signatures. Academics Carole Ferrier and Deborah Jordan highlight that sections of the petition were sent to be signed as far as Mackay and Townsville. Once again, this landed on deaf ears.
By 1900, frustration among the suffragists was so strong that all three organisations came together and collaborated on a deputation led by Emma Miller, Leontine Cooper and Eleanor Trundle.
Under pressure, the new premier, Robert Philp, introduced a bill that would give the vote to women and abolish the long-hated plural vote. However, it also proposed that an extra vote should be given to married men who had two children to help counteract falling birthrates. Dubbed the ‘baby bill’, it was widely ridiculed. In The Worker Miller declared, “women want no baby vote — we have been treated as babies and lunatics long enough.”
In 1903, white women voted for the first time in the federal election. Two new organisations emerged that were focused on mobilising female voters.
Margaret Ogg and Brisbane Mayoress, Christina Corrie, founded the Queensland Women’s Electoral League (QWEL). It addressed women as political actors for the first time and aimed to educate women on the franchise. Margaret Ogg travelled across the state, using public speeches to spread QWEL’s agenda. Even when prohibited from speaking in public halls, she would conduct her speeches from her sulky carriage instead. At one point, QWEL had sixty branches across Queensland and 16,000 members. This group claimed to be apolitical; however, radical and Labor women withdrew from the organisation because of its conservative ties.
These suffragists formed a counter group that aligned with Labor, the Women Workers Political Organisation. Miller often delivered speeches at the organisation’s public rallies. Although the speeches do not survive today, Miller’s friend Joe Collings’s recollections give us an idea of what her public speaking was like:
“Once she was announced, no matter how big the crowd, as soon as she stood forth, with her frail little right arm and hand extended in her well-known and characteristic way, and her by no means strong but always clear and incisive voice was heard all hearts seemed attuned to her appeal. The eyes of comrades would glisten with the tear of approval and of joy, while in those of her bitterest opponent, even, would be the gleam of admiration for the courage, the energy, and the steadfastness.”
In the 1904 state election, Labor won enough seats to form a coalition with the Liberals. The new premier, Arthur Morgan, promised suffrage would be discussed. When the bill was once again dismissed, suffragists called a public protest in the heart of the city.
WEFA marched out onto Brisbane’s streets and led a deputation to the premier. Premier Morgan called an unprecedented Parliament to session in early January. Journalists describe the sweltering summer conditions as the men of Parliament debated women’s suffrage once again.
On the 24th of January 1905, the Elections Act Amendment Bill allowing white women to vote for Queensland elections passed. It also abolished plural voting. The premier seemed in high spirits, inviting the watching suffragists to celebrate. It is recorded in The Worker that, “Premier Morgan and four ministers handed around tea and cakes to the deputation of newly enfranchised women.”
Although a long fought win, it was not all celebrations. The right to vote on federal, state and local levels excluded First Nations men and women and people of Asian and African descent. Universal suffrage in Australia was not achieved until 1964, when Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people got the vote.
Even once some women could vote and stand for Parliament, change was slow. It was not until 1929 that Queensland’s first female Member of Parliament was elected. Irene Longman was the first to admit that the Liberal Party nominated her for a seat no one thought they could win. Once elected, Longman did not even have a women’s toilet in Parliament and was not allowed to eat lunch with the other MPs. She was, nevertheless, determined to make her mark. She helped to pass legislation that allowed women to become police officers and helped usher in youth justice reforms.
One can imagine that this was what the suffragists envisioned back in the 1890s. Women in Parliament meant issues directly affecting women and girls, so blatantly ignored by an all-male government, would finally be addressed.
Longman only served one term. It took another forty years for another woman to be elected to Queensland Parliament. Even in 1966, there still was not a female toilet for the first female Labor MP, Vi Jordan. The lack of a female toilet shows the parliamentarians did not intend to let women into their midst. For most of the 20th century, they succeeded.
The men of Parliament did not benevolently bestow suffrage on women. On the contrary, women fought for decades to obtain the vote, a basic human right. The suffragists’ campaign was extensive and complicated, as class and different ideologies caused division. The suffragists’ methods ranged from giving public speeches to holding rallies, publishing writing, and gathering petition signatures.
These protest pioneers deserve to be remembered, especially as we reflect on how women are treated in Australia’s parliaments in the present day.
In the words of suffragist May Jordan, “[Change] will not all come about at once, not in a day or a year…but it will come and how soon depends on how hard we work to bring it about.”
Written by Hailey Wight
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