Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-8bhkd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-02T23:52:54.275Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Comparative Perspectives on White and Indigenous Women's Political Citizenship in Queensland: The 1905 Act to Amend the Elections Acts, 1885 to 1899

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 February 2016

Patricia Grimshaw
Get access

Extract

The centenary of the passage in early 1905 of the Act to Amend the Elections Acts, 1885 to 1899, which extended the right to vote to white women in Queensland, marks a moment of great importance in the political and social history of Australia. The high ground of the history of women's suffrage in Australia is undoubtedly the passage of the 1902 Commonwealth Franchise Act that gave all white women in Australia political citizenship: the right to vote and to stand for parliamentary office at the federal level. Obviously this attracted the most attention internationally, given that it placed Australia on the short list of communities that had done so to date; most women in the world had to await the aftermath of the First or Second World Wars for similar rights.

Type
Research Article
Information
Queensland Review , Volume 12 , Issue 2: Special Issue: The Centenary of Women's Suffrage in Queensland , November 2005 , pp. 9 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Notes

1 For a comprehensive account of the suffrage movement, see Oldfield, Audrey, Woman Suffrage in Australia: A Gift or A Struggle? (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1992).Google Scholar

2 For other accounts of the connections between the white women's and Aboriginal political rights, see Patricia Grimshaw, ‘White Women as “Nation Builders”: Gender, Colonialism and the Federal Vote’, in John Chesterman and David Philips (eds), Selective Democracy: Race, Gender and the Australian Vote (Melbourne: Circa, 2003); Patricia Grimshaw and Katherine Ellinghaus, ‘White Women, Aboriginal Women and the Vote in Western Australia’, Studies in Western Australian History 20 (1999): 1–19; Patricia Grimshaw and Sharon Low, ‘Looking Again at the Women's Vote in Tasmania’, Tasmanian Historical Studies 9 (2004): 21–33.Google Scholar

3 See Oldfield, Woman Suffrage in Australia; McCulloch, John, ‘The Struggle for Women's Suffrage in Queensland’, Hecate 30(2) (2004); and other articles in this volume.Google Scholar

4 For a recent account, see Bolt, Christine, Sisterhood Questioned? Race, Class and Internationalism in the American and British Women's Movements, c.1880s–1970s (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Chesterman, John and Galligan, Brian, Citizens Without Rights: Aborigines and Australian Citizenship, (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 For comparative studies, see: Mayall, Laura, Levine, Philippa Fletcher, Ian (eds), Women's Suffrage in the British Empire: Citizenship, Nation and Race (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Patricia Grimshaw, ‘Women's Suffrage in New Zealand Revisited: Writing from the Margins’, in Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan (eds), Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1994): 25–41; Patricia Grimshaw, ‘Settler Anxieties, Indigenous Peoples and Women's Suffrage in the Colonies of Australia, New Zealand and Hawai'i, 1888–1902’, in Louise Edwards and Mina Roces (eds), Women's Suffrage in Asia: Gender, Nationalism and Democracy (London and New York: Routledge, 2004); Patricia Grimshaw, ‘Reading the Silences: Suffrage Activists and Race in Nineteenth Century Settler Societies’, in Patricia Grimshaw, Katie Holmes and Marilyn Lake (eds), Women's Rights and Human Rights: International Historical Perspectives (Basingstoke: Palgrave/Macmillan, 2001): 31–48.Google Scholar

7 Evans, Julie, Grimshaw, Patricia, Philips, David Swain, Shurlee, Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Societies, 1830–1910 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 See Newman, Louise, White Women's Rights: The Racial Origins of Feminism in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Jacobson, Matthew Frye, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race (London and Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998).Google Scholar

10 For a recent study of women's suffrage in the West. see Mead, Rebecca J., How the Vote was Won: Woman Suffrage in the Western United States, 1868–1914 (New York: New York University Press, 2004). See also Suzanne M. Marilley, Woman Suffrage and the Origins of Liberal Feminism in the United States. 1820–1920, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996); Patricia Grimshaw, ‘“A Higher Step for the Race”: Caroline Nichols Churchill, the Queen Bee and Women's Suffrage Colorado, 1879–1893’ Australasian Journal of American Studies 20(2) (2001).Google Scholar

11 See Grimshaw, ‘Settler Anxieties’; Evans et al., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights. Google Scholar

12 Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens Without Rights; Evans et al. ., Equal Subjects, Unequal Rights.Google Scholar

13 Grimshaw and Ellinghaus, ‘White Women, Aboriginal Women and the Vote in Western Australia’Google Scholar

14 Chesterman, Philips, (eds), Selective Democracy. Google Scholar

15 Grimshaw, ‘White Women as “Nation Builders”: Gender, Colonialism and the Federal Vote’, in Chesterman and Philips (eds), Selective Democracy. Google Scholar

16 Commonwealth Parliamentary Debates (CPP), Vol. 7 (1902): 11473.Google Scholar

17 CPP, Vol. 7 (1902): 11596.Google Scholar

18 CPP, Vol. 7 (1902): 11498–99.Google Scholar

19 CPP, Vol. 7 (1902): 11597.Google Scholar

20 CPP, Vol. 7 (1902): 13005.Google Scholar

21 See articles in Hecate 30(2) (2004).Google Scholar

22 Grimshaw, Patricia, ‘Gender, Citizenship and Race in the Woman's Christian Temperance Union of Australia, 1890 to the 1930s’, Australian Feminist Studies 13(2) (1996): 199–214; Marilyn Lake, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1999); Fiona Paisley, Loving Protection? Australian Feminism and Aboriginal Women's Rights, 1919–1939 (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001).Google Scholar

23 Queensland Parliamentary Debates (QPD) (1904): 146.Google Scholar

24 QPD (1904): 147.Google Scholar

25 QPD (1905): 83.Google Scholar

26 QPD (1905): 60.Google Scholar

27 QPD (1902): 483.Google Scholar

28 QPD (1905): 37.Google Scholar

29 QPD (1904): 139.Google Scholar

30 QPD (1904): 138.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

31 QPD (1904): 254.Google Scholar

32 QPD (1904): 256.Google Scholar

33 QPD (1904): 254.Google Scholar

34 QPD (1905): 57.Google Scholar

35 Grimshaw and Ellinghaus, ‘White Women, Aboriginal Women and the Vote in Western Australia’.Google Scholar

36 Chesterman and Galligan, Citizens Without Rights. Google Scholar