Antipodean crossings: Australasian suffragists and the limits of internationalism, 1885–1914

Abstract

Between 1893 and 1908, a wave of women’s enfranchisement swept the Tasman world. Within nine years, New Zealand and Australia became the first countries where women could vote. Their colonial and national campaigns are well documented but, aside from preliminary gestures at links to British and American foremothers, previous scholarship has largely overlooked the transnational connections that animated colonial suffrage movements. Therefore, focusing on the period between 1885 and 1914, this thesis illuminates the cross-border networks built, sustained, and served by the Australasian suffragists. Examining three emblematic colonies, New South Wales, New Zealand, and South Australia, this study both recovers a forgotten regional history of women’s suffrage activism, and locates Australasia within the emerging international women’s movement. Drawing on the papers of women’s political and religious organisations, correspondence, scrapbooks, photo albums, and specialist newspapers, ‘Antipodean Crossings’ tells the history of a women’s movement, rather than a globetrotting elite. As such, it uses the archives of organisations with local and global layers to explore how the tendrils of internationalism touched ordinary women. Together, these records demonstrate that Tasman suffrage connections abounded in the 1890s.

Despite these promising beginnings, the suffragists’ enthusiasm for the international project, and the apparent goodwill of their Northern Hemisphere counterparts, this thesis argues that enfranchised Australasian women played a minor role in the international struggle for the vote. By the 1910s Australian suffragists’ promises of global leadership fell by the wayside. This thesis contends that they were not hindered by the problem of distance in a shrinking world, but by the difficulties of reconciling their colonial identities with the demands of national and international citizenship, as well as the complicated politics of suffrage and nationhood in international organisations at a moment of flux. These findings trouble the standard, progressive Euro-American narrative of fin-de-siècle feminist internationalism. By centring on Australasian women, at once insiders and outsiders in the first international women’s movement, this thesis not only reveals a more contingent history of women’s international organising, but offers a productive challenge to whiggish tendencies in the writing of transnational history.