Queensland Women’s Suffrage
When and how did settler women get the vote? Three women embody the different strands of colonial feminisms: philanthropic; radical feminist; and egalitarian. The frontier wars, convict origins and limited number of white women, especially ‘ladies’ such as Mary McConnel, shaped the nature of early free settlement and the adoption of the plural property vote. After separation from NSW in 1859, when her selector husband went bankrupt, Leontine Cooper advocated married women’s property rights and economic equality. How can we write ‘history’ not just ‘lives’ where we can both say her name, as well as address issues of empire, and agency? Labour women took over leadership in 1894 after New Zealand women won the vote, and, with Emma Miller former seamstress outworker, were instrumental in introducing white adult suffrage in 1905.
Since the centenary of federation in Queensland in 2001, and through her association with the Women’s Studies Centre at the University of Queensland, Dr Deborah Jordan has explored Queensland women’s history. With John McCulloch, the Queensland Parliament and the Queensland Family History Society, she assisted in the digitalisation of the suffrage petitions. She will talk about her recent book Australian Women’s Justice Settler Colonisation and the Queensland Vote published by Routledge in 2024. Dr Jordan is a Petherick Reader at the National Library of Australia, and Adjunct Fellow in History at Monash University.
