Resolutions

Women's Suffrage Anniversary

Debate resumed.

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (11:23): I rise to support this motion, naturally, and endorse the comments of the preceding speaker, the Hon. Tammy Franks. It will come as no surprise that there are occasions on which the women of the parliament come together for the purposes of these sorts of measures, in particular for the celebration of the 125^th anniversary of suffrage in South Australia.

We have lunch on a regular, but not that frequent, basis. We met most recently—I could not actually say, but it was probably about six months ago. The decision was made that a joint committee would be the best way to advance some preparations, and I am certainly looking forward to the establishment of that committee so that we can get on with preparing for celebrations.

The topic at hand is women's suffrage in South Australia. This is an interesting story, so I will take a little bit of time to tell some of it. With the passage of time, social roles have changed very significantly. I think people make some assumptions about what took place and why, and I would just like to place on the record from my own research what I think actually happened. I have relied significantly on certain texts, in particular a book, In Her Own Name, from Helen Jones, and another text which is The Flinders Social History.

I actually had these books on interlibrary loan from our South Australian parliament. This was back in 2012 when I made a speech for the National Council of Women. The topic was quite extensive: I am certainly not going to repeat all of that. They came in one day and said, 'Michelle, we would like you to speak at our Australia Day event, and we would like you to talk about the topic of all the legislation that advanced the status of women in the South Australian colony.' I basically had to cover 175 years of history.

At the time, I do not think I knew what I was getting myself in for, but I am very grateful to our parliamentary library and in particular John Weste, who reminded me the other day that I had thanked him with some particularly nice chocolates, one of which I have to admit I sampled myself. That was quite an effort, and I could not have done it without the parliamentary library's assistance.

South Australia was famously early in granting women the right to vote, in 1894, in spite of our head of state, Queen Victoria, being reported as labelling the decision as 'mad, wicked folly'. There was an electoral drought of women in parliament for many years. It lasted some 65 years, and ultimately we were the last state in Australia to witness the election of women to our parliament. The key to understanding some of this is in one of the texts I referred to, The Flinders Social History. I will just quote chapter 15 by Carol Bacchi. The chapter is called 'The "woman question" in South Australia'. She says the following:

The key to understanding both early female enfranchisement and delayed female representation lies in prevailing attitudes in the colony towards women and their appropriate roles. This chapter explores these attitudes from the founding of the colony up to and including World War II.

You will be grateful to know I am not going to cover all of that! She continues:

It focuses upon an evolving ideal of womanly behaviour which, despite shifts in nuance, continued to emphasize women's domestic functions. These shifts were important and included a recognition that single women might have to work for a part of their lives, and a re-evaluation upwards of the mother's parenting role which in turn created a willingness to see women educated and active in certain ways in the community. But equally important has been the perpetuation of the belief that woman's ultimate destiny was and had to be homemaker and child-rearer. The historic link between woman, young children and home will be shown to lie behind much of the legislation affecting women, the sexual differentiation of the labour force, and women's under-representation in positions of power.

As I said, in this speech I did for the National Council of Women in 2012, I covered a range of this legislation. Clearly at that stage, when we first gained representative government in South Australia, any legislation which sought to protect women had to be enacted by the men of the colony and was a result of their own constituent work plus agitation and broad public debate, including from individuals such as Catherine Helen Spence, who from 1878 was a regular advocate for women's equal rights in property and marital issues, and non-government organisations such as the National Council of Women, which is still in existence today; the Social Purity Society; the Woman's Christian Temperance Union, which is also still in existence today; the Women's Non-Party Political Association; the League of Women Voters; the Country Women's Association, which is also still here today; the Housewives Association, which only recently wrapped up; and, more recently, the Women's Electoral Lobby.

To set the scene in 1836, it is worth considering the context of the time: English common law had been imported into the new colony and therefore husband and wife were considered one person, with the powers vested in the husband, while the wife was the subordinate or, as the legal term is, a feme covert. Husbands had custody of their wife, including all of her possessions and her children. Interestingly, also from common law, an adult unmarried woman had the legal status of feme sole, which meant she had the right to own property and make contracts in her own name.

Carol Bacchi refers in her chapter to England's cult of true womanhood, which was easy to perpetuate in South Australia because the balance of the sexes in the colony was fairly even. The marriage rate high, with universal marriage for women up until 1876. They married at a younger age and fewer jobs were available for women. These circumstances can be contrasted with other colonies in which women were in the minority and could expect regular sexual abuse, with the odds of becoming a wife much lower than that of becoming a mistress. In those times, there was a distinct gender division between public and private spheres, with the husband operating in public and the wife in private, or the home.

Inherent in women's assumed and desirable qualities were her devotion, caring for her family and home life. She was seen as a kind and nobler creature than man, more trustworthy, but also intellectually inferior and therefore, at times, in need of protection from him, particularly. These sentiments drove much of the pre-federation legislation, the earliest of which appears to be the 1843 Destitute Persons Act (the Maintenance Act) to provide for:

…the maintenance and relief of deserted Wives and Children and other destitute persons and to make the property of Husbands and near Relatives to whose assistance they have a natural claim in certain circumstances available for their support.

In times before divorce laws, desertion of one's wife was the most common means of getting out of the deal. The Maintenance Act provided for maintenance orders and punishment via a fine of two months' gaol for a first offence and three months for a second, with or without hard labour. This was, unfortunately, not a strong deterrent as Australia provided plenty of wide open space for souls to disappear to and scant mechanism to enforce this law in our colonies.

The 1858 Matrimonial Causes Act allowed judicial separation under certain circumstances, but was weighed in favour of the husband, who only required grounds of his wife's adultery to petition the court. Wives required adultery plus some other 'degrading circumstances' such as rape, sodomy, bestiality or desertion for a year or more. Maintenance could be applied but was rendered useless by desertion from the colony. However, the new law made a significant change in that it conferred on divorced women the status of sole feme. It also allowed women to protect their property and earnings if they had been deserted in recognition that some worthless sods had a habit of returning to pilfer what assets their wives had cobbled together in their absence.

The 1883-84 Married Women's Property Act followed, which, for the first time, enabled a married woman to own and administer property in her own name. Mrs Elizabeth Webb Nicholls of the Women's Christian Temperance Union, who was another one of the key players in the suffrage debate, said, some 40 years following, in an interview in 1926 that:

The status of women is altered very much since my young days. When I was a little girl there was no Married Women's Property Act and cruel things were done in its absence. A woman who had slaved all her life to get a little property together might marry a worthless man who would take everything from her and leave her.

In that same year (1883), the Custody of Infants Act gave courts powers to override fathers in order to grant custody and maintenance to mothers of children under the age of 16. Three years later, in 1887, the Guardianship of Infants Act was passed without parliamentary debate. It allowed that on the death of the father, the mother should be appointed as the guardian, either jointly with the father's nominated guardian or on her own. These reforms were a long time coming and were the culmination of several attempts to correct situations that pragmatic male parliamentarians spoke out against as cruel and intolerable.

Unfortunately, arguments against the passing of laws on the grounds that such measures would undermine marriage and the traditional roles of women delayed the cause by over a decade. The Married Women's Protection Act of 1896 provided major reforms, including a number of grounds to relieve a woman from having to cohabit with her husband on the grounds of his cruelty, abuse or desertion, and entitled her to custody of her children and maintenance. At the turn of the century it was still certainly a man's role in the family to be the breadwinner, although the colonialists recognised that when they fell short of the mark the state needed to step in.

I read all those examples to set the context that these were matters exercising debates in parliament about how to address them. At a similar time to these debates about the franchise there were several debates about issues regarding women—this 'woman question' which I have referred to, which was also being experienced in Mother England and also being debated there—as the population underwent demographic changes and it became evident that girls' pathways may no longer be such a fast passage to an early marriage and thence the home.

Girls were experiencing time prior to marriage, so how to keep them most usefully occupied and prepare them for the all-important and inevitable role of wife and mother became a preoccupation in the press. Better education for girls was seen as a better way to educate the colony's flock, as mothers would impart their more learned wisdom to their children. Women in South Australia had been able to vote in council elections since 1861 and they had made use of petitions to parliament. In 1889, for instance, the Women's Christian Temperance Union submitted a petition by 1,500 Christian women for clauses to be included in a divorce bill which sought 'equal justice for women as for men'.

South Australia was different to England and the other colonies because it attracted freethinkers and had a strong and reforming middle-class which participated in debate. There was a belief in ideals, particularly influenced by the teaching of John Stuart Mill, which made the colony unafraid of doing things differently. By the time of the suffrage debates, which lasted just under a decade, South Australia's politicians had actually come to the view that women were the intellectual equals of men as well as morally superior. As Carol Bacchi puts it in her chapter in the book I referred to:

The conviction that women were the purer and more reliable sex and that they could be counted on to have a civilizing influence on social mores was the principal reason for their enfranchisement. Politicians in power turned to women because of the belief that they had particular virtues.

I was corrected in the use of the term 'suffragettes' by Jennifer Cashmore, the sister of Helen Jones who wrote the book I used very extensively on my research for this. She said that the correct term is 'suffragists' because there was a significant number of men involved in these debates, and without them the whole argument would not have been accepted. So in my notes I will use the term 'suffragists'.

On this background of being seen as the saviour of the species, the suffragists used many of these arguments about women's better judgement as an asset in electoral decisions, which would be a positive force for the whole community, including in that private home world over which she had custody. The suffragists were God-fearing men and women of good works and compassion as well as a passion for the vote. In addition to being a journalist, author and active organiser, Catherine Helen Spence fostered a number of orphaned children and served on boards such as the School Board of Advice and the State Children's Council. Mary Lee is remembered for writing both prolifically and eloquently to the papers, but also worked to address issues that caused poverty.

Women and men of strong character and diverse backgrounds worked together to win the franchise. In addition to Catherine Helen Spence and Mary Lee, the Reverend J.C. Kirby and Dr Magarey, the Working Women's Union and church groups played their parts. The Women's Christian Temperance Union formed its own internal franchise department which successfully lobbied within church literary societies. Its president, Mrs Elizabeth Webb Nicholls, whom I quoted previously, helped organise signatures for the historic petition, drafted by Mary Lee, to the House of Assembly, which was its largest ever; 8,268 of the 11,000 signatures were secured by the union's membership. In an interview, Mrs Nicholls gave her reasons for joining the cause after hearing about the comments of some male politicians, and I quote:

The Hon Ebenezer Ward was particularly scathing on the idea that women were fit to have votes. I had never taken much interest before, but I was so incensed by the insolence of his remarks that I wrote my very first letter to the papers. The debate aroused such interest that women began to raise their own voices on the Bill and demand, not votes for women with property, but a democratic suffrage.

I point out to honourable members that we can find a picture of the Hon. Ebenezer Ward located in our rogues' gallery in the Legislative Council lounge. He was a member of the Legislative Council and his role in women gaining the right to stand for parliament was significant even though it was dastardly.

It should not be interpreted that either the suffragists or their political supporters viewed the franchise as a watershed in changing women's roles; it was quite the opposite. The franchise was not about expanding a woman's horizon beyond the home: it was about reflecting her place within it. Nor was it envisaged that women would seek office. Dr E.C. Stirling, who introduced the first bill to give women the right to vote in 1885, said at the time that, 'The right to vote by no means indicated that women should have a right to a seat in the house.' The inclusion of a clause in the 1894 Constitution Act Amendment Bill, which gave women the right to also stand for parliamentary elections, was a tactic by the said Hon. Ebenezer Ward to defeat the bill; however, that failed.

On 18 December 1894, the House of Assembly passed the bill by 31 votes to 14, enabling 80,000 women thereafter to vote. Three years later, in her 1897 president's address to the Temperance Union, Mrs Elizabeth Webb Nicholls reported:

The dire results prophesised by opponents of women's franchise have not come to pass and you can see in this Convention real live women who have voted in a Parliamentary election and remain much the same women as before. We have not heard of any domestic quarrels, or any neglected children as a result of the new departure, and dinner was cooked on election day much the same as usual.

Amongst the women who voted in the election were 81 of the 102 Indigenous women of the Point McLeay Mission, who had registered to vote. Unfortunately, after Federation in 1901, Aboriginal women and Aboriginal men lost their voting rights, which were not regained until the Australian citizenship referendum in 1967.

I place that on the record by way of background. I found it absolutely fascinating. I think, in our current context where we clearly had the multiple waves of feminism, people might link it with the sorts of pushes from the 1960s and so forth whereas, in fact, it is interesting to note that it was really about women being seen as the saviour of the species and, therefore, to assist everyone generally, they ought to be granted the right to have a say in elections.

It is disappointing that South Australia was the last place where women were elected to parliament; that is, in 1959 with Jessie Cooper and Joyce Steele. It took some time. By way of background, I think it is fascinating, but it also shows that the women's organisations, as they have in other certain debates that have occurred in this place in the last 12 hours, have been very active behind the scenes in expressing their views. With those comments, I commend the motion to the council.

The Hon. I.K. HUNTER (Minister for Sustainability, Environment and Conservation, Minister for Water and the River Murray, Minister for Climate Change) (11:44): It is with some degree of trepidation that I rise to close the debate. I dare not trespass too long on a motion wholly owned, according to the Hon. Tammy Franks, by the sisterhood, not being a member of that esteemed group, but I do want to take a moment to reflect on the long, long road to suffrage, which the Hon. Michelle Lensink has outlined.

Women's suffrage was first introduced in the South Australian parliament by Dr Edward Stirling on 22 July 1885. Dr Stirling's 'Extension of the franchise to unmarried women resolution', which was passed by parliament, moved in favour of enabling widows and single women who owned property to vote, but not married women. Dr Stirling later introduced a bill based on the above resolution, but it was unsuccessful.

On 12 July 1888, Robert Caldwell introduced a women's suffrage bill into parliament but it was defeated. On 2 July 1890, the Women's Franchise (Constitution) Amendment Bill was introduced into parliament again by Robert Caldwell. This bill aimed to enable female taxpayers to record their votes at public elections, but it also was defeated. On 14 July 1891, John Warren MLC introduced the Women's Franchise Bill which aimed to grant voting rights to women who owned property. This bill was also unsuccessful.

On 6 July 1893, Sir John Cockburn introduced an adult suffrage bill into parliament, making all women eligible to vote. However, it called for a referendum on the matter and this bill was also defeated. But on 4 July 1894, John Hannah Gordon MLC introduced the Adult Suffrage Bill which would grant voting rights without any restrictions. This bill was passed by parliament on 18 December 1894 and gazetted the following year.

Noting that very, very long road to suffrage and the lessons that can be drawn from it, if I can dare to venture some advice to the joint committee in their deliberations as they prepare their report, it would be this: don't be too polite, girls, don't be too polite.

Motion carried.