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Our Centenary of Women’s Suffrage

‘Your vote is your voice’: Rose Scott and the Women’s Political and Educational League

On 12 June 1902, the Commonwealth Franchise Act came into effect, granting most Australian women the right to vote in Commonwealth elections. The Commonwealth Electoral Act opened the way for women to stand for election. On 16 December 1903, Australian women exercised the right to vote in Commonwealth elections. The question in 1903 was: now that women had won the vote, what would they do with it?

Just how women would use their ‘one day of power’, to quote Free Trade Party leader G.H. Reid, was the topic of considerable public comment. Not all of this commentary was favourable, with some newspaper writers lampooning the female voter as fickle and faddish. It was into this arena that Rose Scott entered when her open letter to women was published in two newspapers prior to and on the day of polling.

‘At the outset I desired women to dissociate themselves from party turmoil, and when they came to vote to do so not at the dictates of a league or party, but according to their conscience.’
Rose Scott, Daily Telegraph, 9 November 1903.

Rose Scott was a key figure in the women’s suffrage campaign, and devoted her entire life to improving the condition of women. In her letter, Scott writes as the President of the Women’s Political and Educational League (WPEL), an organisation she established in 1902 in order to educate women as to how to use their vote and, to use her own words, ‘bring a new element into political life – the woman’s point of view’ (Daily Telegraph, 12 November 1903). WPEL would become the platform from which she would develop policy for women and children, and lobby leading politicians and intellectual figures in order to support legislative and social reform.

In her letter, Scott urges women to eschew party politics – ‘beware of party cries', beware of sectarianism’ – and vote according to their conscience rather than party lines. ‘Your vote is your voice’, Scott writes, ‘and to find it you must consult your own mind and heart.’

‘What is the Australian woman going to do with her vote? …Who is to guide woman? I reply: Certainly not man, in the first place! …The chief guide is always to be found within, not without. We must, in fact, think for ourselves.’ Rose Scott in Table Talk, March 1903

Party politics were viewed by Scott and by other women leaders such as Vida Goldstein and Ada Bromham as something that would steal women’s energies and ignore their specific needs and interests. 1 The majority of post-suffragist women worked in separate organisations setting their own priorities and agendas in order to put pressure for reform on all parties - what we would now refer to as lobby groups or non-government organisations. However, not all suffragists took this stance – conservative women formed their own anti-Labour organisation, the Australian Women’s National League (AWNL), while Labour women also eschewed the feminist label by forming a women’s branch of the Labour party called the Women’s Political and Social Crusade in 1905.

For Scott, it was the erosion of ‘individual conscience’ within political parties and also the masculinity of parties which was a problem. Political parties were dominated by men, many of whom felt that their liberties were threatened by feminist demands. As an alternative, Scott turned her home into a ‘salon’ where she invited influential political, intellectual and artistic figures to debate the issues of the day. Scott used her personal influence and the power of persuasion to build the political alliances necessary to achieve reform.

Scott’s brand of non-party lobbying received criticism from party organisations and in particular their women affiliates. 2 Speculation about how women would vote was the topic of much public debate. It was expected that women would vote as their male relatives voted, and that each party would get its share of the women’s vote.

In contrast to the highly courted women’s vote of contemporary times - which can well decide an election outcome - politicians could easily afford to skirt the issues of relevance to women. As it happened, most women voted for party candidates, and it has been conjectured that women voted as the males of their household did because their own economic interests were bound up those of their husbands and fathers. 3 The significance of women’s franchise cannot be in doubt, and it can be measured by Liberal Victorian Premier Thomas Bent’s reaction to the 1903 election. Bent blocked votes for women in Victoria until 1908, blaming women for Labour’s high polling. 4

Election of women to parliament was an important goal yet this was but one part of women’s campaigns for what Scott termed the ‘public good’. Women had a distinctive agenda, and ‘a special work to do’ (WPEL meeting, 11 June 1903). The work of the ‘woman citizen’ - as she was known - was to establish a more inclusive base for citizenship and to bring new values to public life. While committed to a ‘human basis of citizenship’ 5, the woman citizen embodied the maternal qualities which would represent the needs of women and children and also transform the political landscape. It was thus that in her letter Scott urged women to vote for men who have proved that they are ‘in sympathy with the needs of women and children, or the weak and suffering’.

Voting was not yet compulsory, yet hundreds of thousands of women turned out to exercise their right to vote on December 16, 1903. None of the women candidates put forth in the 1903 election were successful - a limit of the non-party way of doing politics. While women failed to win election to Federal Parliament for another 40 years – in 1943 with Enid (later Dame Enid) Lyons (House of Representatives) and Dorothy Tangney (Senate) – their enfranchisement marked their entry into the political process. Women such as Rose Scott shaped future policy by putting women’s demands on the political agenda of all parties. In hindsight, women’s ‘one day of power’ was to become a century of transformation of the political domain.

Miles Franklin on Scott’s famous salon: ‘The cosy reception-rooms were often crowded. There came everyone of intellectual note or interest, residents or visitors to Sydney, regardless of clique, creed or political colour. There would be men in crumpled “slops”, who did not believe in evening dress, rubbing shoulders with dandies, to whom tails in the evening were a rite. Shy girls in high-necked frocks from the country or outer suburbs felt that they were in the high life as they chatted with some fashionable person exhibiting every bare inch permissible in a gown that was the dernier cri. All were put at their ease, and found interest and companionship under the fusing influence of the hostess.’ Miles Franklin, ‘Rose Scott: Some Aspects of Her Personality and Work’ 1938.

 

 

  1. Allen, J 1994, Rose Scott: Vision and Revision in Feminism, Oxford University Press, Melbourne. p. 170.
  2. Allen, J 1988, ‘“Our deeply degraded sex” and “The animal in man”: Rose Scott, Feminism and Sexuality 1890-1925’, Australian Feminist Studies, vol. 708, Summer, pp. 64-91. p. 82.
  3. Oldfield, A 1992, Woman Suffrage in Australia: A gift or a struggle?, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. p. 221.
  4. ibid.
  5. Lake, M 1999, Getting Equal: The History of Australian Feminism, Allen and Unwin, St. Leonards. p. 143.

Contrary to the ridiculing of women suffragists as ‘old frumps’ and ‘freaks of nature’ by certain parliamentarians, author Miles Franklin recalls Scott as a woman of beauty and charm: ‘She was always sensibly and graciously dressed for time and occasion, and her bonnets were the delight of Sydney’. Miles Franklin, ‘Rose Scott: Some Aspects of Her Personality and Work’ 1938

This material was originally produced in 2003 by the Office for the Status of Women in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet.

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