Women's suffrage in Australia

Following the progressive establishment of male suffrage in the Australian colonies from the 1840s to the 1890s, an organised push for women's enfranchisement gathered momentum from the 1880s, and began to be legislated from the 1890s.

South Australian women achieved the right to vote and to stand for office in 1895,[1] following the world first Constitutional Amendment (Adult Suffrage) Act 1894 which gained royal assent the following year.

Grace Benny was elected as the first female local government councillor in 1919,[3] Edith Cowan the first state Parliamentarian in 1921, Dorothy Tangney the first Senator and Enid Lyons the first Member of the House of Representatives in 1943.

The first European-style governments established after 1788 were autocratic and run by appointed governors – although English law was transplanted into the Australian colonies by virtue of the doctrine of reception, thus notions of the rights and processes established by Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights 1689 were brought from Britain by the colonists.

Australia's first parliamentary elections were conducted for the New South Wales Legislative Council in 1843, again with voting rights (for males only) tied to property ownership or financial capacity.

[5] By the mid-19th century, there was a strong desire for representative and responsible government in the colonies of Australia, fed by the democratic spirit of the goldfields evident at the Eureka Stockade and the ideas of the great reform movements sweeping Europe, the United States and the British Empire, such as Chartism.

[3] The first women candidates for the South Australia Assembly ran in the 1918 general election, in Adelaide and Sturt.

[15] In Victoria, one of the first known women to vote was London-born businesswoman Mrs Fanny Finch,[16] on 22 January 1856 in the gold rush town of Castlemaine.

However, the all-male legislature regarded this as a legislative mistake and promptly modified the Act in 1865, in time for the 1866 election, to apply the vote only to male ratepayers.

In 1889, Rose Scott and Mary Windeyer helped to found the Women's Literary Society in Sydney, which grew into the Womanhood Suffrage League of New South Wales in 1891.

Under the Queensland Elections Act (1885), no "aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa, or the Islands of the Pacific" was entitled to vote.

Key figures in the Australian suffrage movement included: from South Australia Mary Lee and Catherine Helen Spence; in Western Australia Edith Cowan; from New South Wales Maybanke Anderson, Louisa Lawson, Dora Montefiore and Rose Scott; from Tasmania Alicia O'Shea Petersen and Jessie Rooke; from Queensland Emma Miller; and from Victoria Annette Bear-Crawford, Henrietta Dugdale, Vida Goldstein, Alice Henry, Annie Lowe and Mary Colton.

[28] This franchise explicitly excluded women (and men) who were "aboriginal natives" of Australia, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific Islands (except New Zealand), unless they were already enrolled to vote in an Australian state.