Our Centenary of Women’s Suffrage
Election issues relating to women: editorial comment
What the newly-enfranchised woman elector would do with her vote was a matter of some concern in editorial commentary. Various papers managed to equate women’s best interests with support for their chosen policies and candidates.
The Advertiser argued that little had been said about ‘the questions of the day’ by the organised political associations for women or by the individual women in the field. However, ‘fiscal peace, industrial progress, and racial purity mean even more to women than to men. And when this fact is fully realised there can be little doubt as to the direction in which the Australian woman’s vote will go.’
Under the heading ‘Feminine Facts and Fancies’ The Age’s view was that ‘the women – and the men – who, by dint of much patience and perseverance have won for us the suffrage, have done so, first and foremost, that the home may be safeguarded, and that domestic legislation may gradually remove many existing evils’. It was noted approvingly that home-making and home keeping women were interesting themselves in the forthcoming election – attending election meetings and taking part in activities promoted by women’s organisations such as the WCTU and the YWCA and clubs. The argument was then developed that for women in paid work the home was also a matter of vital consequence. This was contrary to the conservative argument that such women had little connection with home life – leaving it daily and finding nearly all her interests outside it.
‘Just as long as their homes depend on the conditions under which they earn the money to support them will the wise woman see to it that the right kind of man represents her in Parliament…. Women who feel no need to safeguard their own privileges will do well to remember at this season the disadvantages under which many of their sisters labor. Will they support the cause of Liberalism and make the burdens of those sisters lighter, or will they help the conservative to ‘open doors’ and reduce wages till life for the majority of working women means little more than mere existence.’
In the opinion of The Mercury, ‘Women are apt to be credulous in regard to some matters, but they are, too, frequently endowed with a degree of shrewd commonsense not conferred upon the male creature and not yet blinded by contact with a rude and very untruthful world’. By inference, therefore, women would not be taken in by the statements of ‘a Federal Minister’, who reached the high top-gallant of impudence when he ‘assured the people of the NW coast that Federation, that is, of course, the Federal Tariff, had given them fine prices for their potatoes, though everybody knows that the prices were caused by the drought, and that there never was a duty on potatoes in NSW.’ It seemed therefore to The Mercury that ‘one main duty of the women voters [was] to look to honesty of intellectual character and to vote for those candidates, and those candidates only, who will face the facts and give an honest consideration to them’ (the candidate in question was returned by a very small margin, and also survived a petition to the Court of Disputed Returns, with costs awarded to him).
The Sydney Morning Herald identified the principal issue that the elections would turn on – a very simple issue – ‘that appeals at once to the experience and common sense of the new electors’ – the federal tariff. ‘Probably every woman elector now realises that our Federal Tariff has made the family groceries and the family clothes on the whole at least a quarter dearer than they were before NSW gave up freetrade.’ In addition ‘we are not helping the revenue. We are paying practically all that money to a few firms in South Australia and Victoria’. Every woman voter ‘who understands how to spend her money to the best advantage’ would vote for the three selected freetrade candidates for the Senate and for the selected candidate in her own electorate. ‘Only women who prefer dearness to cheapness will hesitate to act in this way.’
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