18 December 2020
On this day, December 18, in 1894, South Australian Parliament passed the Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Act, allowing women the right to vote and the right to stand for Parliament.
Although New Zealand was the first country in the world to allow women to vote (September 19,1893), South Australia was the first to allow them to run for office, effectively making SA the first electorate in the world to give equal political rights to men and women.
In most other democracies – including Britain and the United States – women did not win the right to the vote until after the First World War.
The South Australian Act officially became law in 1895 when signed by Queen Victoria.
There had been three previous attempts to win women voting rights, but female suffragists struggled against prejudicial traditional views of women that were embedded in society and the law.
Signatures were collected from across the colony for the longest petition that has ever been presented to the South Australian Parliament. With more than 11,600 signatures and measuring around 400 feet in length with its pages glued end to end, the petition was used to show the government that both men and women supported women’s right to vote.
With Australia a newly federated country, the Commonwealth Franchise Act 1902 allowed non-Indigenous women in all states to vote and stand as candidates in federal elections.
But it wasn’t until 1962 that Indigenous Australian women were granted the right to vote.
In 1897, Catherine Helen Spence became the first female candidate for political office, unsuccessfully standing for election in South Australia as a delegate to the Federal Convention on Australian Federation, which was held in Adelaide.
Edith Cowan (1861–1932) was elected to the Western Australian Legislative Assembly in 1921, the first woman elected to any Australian Parliament.
In 1943, Enid Lyons, wife of the late former Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, and Dorothy Tangney were the first elected to the federal House of Representatives and the Senate respectively, with Lyons endorsed by the United Australia Party and Tangney by the Labor Party.
In 1949 Enid Lyons, mother of 11, became the first female cabinet member, as Minister without Portfolio, to enable her appointment to the honorary office of Vice-President of the Executive Council, an office she held until her retirement from parliament in 1951.
In 1966 Senator Dame Annabelle Rankin became the first woman with a federal portfolio when she became Minister for Housing. In 1975 Senator Margaret Guilfoyle was the first female to hold a cabinet-level ministerial portfolio, Education.
In 1983 Ros Kelly was the first woman to give birth while an MP. In 1986 there were two firsts; Joan Child became the first female Speaker of the House of Representatives and Janine Haines became the first woman to lead a parliamentary party when she became head of the Australian Democrats.
Margaret Reid became the first female President of the Senate in 1996. Nova Peris became the first female Indigenous senator in 2013, with Linda Burney the first female Indigenous member of the House of Representatives (2016). Peris was also the first Indigenous person to win an Olympic gold medal as a member of the Hockeyroos’ successful 1996 Atlanta campaign.
In 1983 Susan Ryan became Labor’s Minister for Education and Youth Affairs. She was also handed a new portfolio by Bob Hawke, the Status of Women, and was pivotal in the passing of the federal Sex Discrimination Act 1984, giving women equal rights in the workplace for the first time.
The Act made it illegal to discriminate against anyone based on their gender, marital status or family responsibilities. It was a huge step for Australia's women's rights movement.
Ryan was also instrumental in passing the Equal Employment Opportunity and the Affirmative Action legislation.
The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation is, of course, committed to the principles of equal opportunity in the workplace.
Dr Carmen Lawrence was the first female premier in Australia (Western Australia, 1990-93), the current premiers of New South Wales and Queensland are both women, and, of course, on June 24, 2010, Julia Gillard was sworn in as Prime Minister of Australia.
Dame Quentin Alice Louise Bryce, AD, was our first female Governor-General, from 2008 to 2014.
As of September 2020, 46 of the 151 members of the federal House of Representatives are women, but in the Senate women outnumber the men, 39 to 37.
The women’s suffrage movement was particularly strong in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia.
In the United Kingdom, the Women’s Social and Political Union, under the leadership of Emmeline Pankhurst, fought hard for change at the start of the 20th Century, notes the National Library of Australia. Known as the suffragettes, they endured a particularly violent and slow journey to women’s suffrage - more so than their counterparts in Australia. Agitators for women’s suffrage were often criminalised or persecuted.
Many activists, such as Louie Cullen, were arrested, imprisoned and went on hunger strikes, only to be force-fed via tubes down their nostrils. Others were beaten and publicly humiliated by police and male observers. Some were sexually assaulted. Some, like Emily Davison, even died for their cause. Davison was trampled and killed by a racehorse while protesting on a racetrack during the running of the 1913 Epsom Derby.
Social attitudes towards women began to change over the course of the two World Wars; the bravery and resilience of nurses abroad and women working back home helping to alter public perceptions. Indeed, it was former Prime Minister John Curtin who noted in 1943: “I see no reason why a woman should be paid less than a man for the same work’’.
While there have been many advancements in the status and rights of women among First World nations, globally the situation is vastly different, particularly among Third World nations.
The United Nations reports that worldwide, over 2.7 billion women are legally restricted from having the same choice of jobs as men. Of 189 economies assessed in 2018, 104 economies still have laws preventing women from working in specific jobs, 59 economies have no laws on sexual harassment in the workplace, and in 18 economies, husbands can legally prevent their wives from working.
The gender wage gap is estimated by the UN to be 23 per cent. This means that women earn 77 per cent of what men earn, though these figures understate the real extent of gender pay gaps, particularly in developing countries where informal self-employment is prevalent. Women also face the motherhood wage penalty, which increases as the number of children a woman has increases.
Worldwide, women tend to spend around 2.5 times more time on unpaid care and domestic work than men, says the UN. The amount of time devoted to unpaid care work is negatively correlated with female labour force participation.
Violence and harassment in the world of work affects women regardless of age, location, income or social status. The economic costs – a reflection of the human and social costs – to the global economy of discriminatory social institutions and violence against women is estimated to be approximately $US12 trillion annually.
To quote the late British author, journalist and raconteur Christopher Hitchens:
"The cure for poverty has a name, in fact: it's called the empowerment of women. If you give women some control over the rate at which they reproduce, if you give them some say, take them off the animal cycle of reproduction to which nature and some doctrine - religious doctrine - condemns them, and then if you'll throw in a handful of seeds perhaps and some credit, the floor of everything in that village... education, health, and optimism will increase. It doesn't matter; try it in Bangladesh, try it in Bolivia, it works - works all the time."
Or in the words of Pakistan’s Nobel Peace Prize-winning Malala Yousafzai, who at age 15 narrowly survived after being shot in the head by the Taliban for the crime of campaigning for girls’ education: “I raise up my voice - not so that I can shout, but so that those without a voice can be heard. We cannot all succeed when half of us are held back’’.
Sources:
The National Library of Australia
The National Museum of Australia
The United Nations
New Zealand History